Chapter I: Chateaubriand (7)

Corinne points out that the beauty of Italian women is not of a moral, but of a plastic and picturesque kind; that to appreciate it we must have an eye susceptible to colour and form, not dulled by too much poring over printed books. She contrasts Italian improvisation with French conversation, and finds it equally admirable.

A sensible people like the English cultivate and appreciate practical business qualities; an emotional people like the Germans cultivate and love music; a witty people like the French cultivate conversation--that is to say, the best in them is brought out in intercourse, in converse with others; an imaginative people like the Italians improvise--that is to say, rise naturally from their ordinary feelings into poetry. Corinne says: "I feel myself a poet whenever my spirit is exalted; when I am conscious of more than usual scorn for selfishness and meanness, and when I feel that a beautiful action would be easy to me--then it is that my verses are best. I am a poet when I admire, when I scorn, when I hate, not from personal motives, but on behalf of the whole of humanity." And she does not rest content with defending the light nightingale-song which was what the Italians at that time understood by lyrical poetry; she also accounts for the exaggerated importance attached to style and rhetorical pomp in Italian prose. She explains it partly by the love of the South for form, partly by the fact that men lived under an ecclesiastical despotism which forbade the serious treatment of any theme; they knew that it was not possible for them to influence the course of events by their books, and so they wrote to show their skill in writing, to excite admiration by the elegance of their composition--and the means became the end.

Another of the things which had shocked Oswald was Michael Angelo's representation of the Divinity and the prophets in the Sistine Chapel. In the mighty human form of Jehovah he does not recognise that invisible, spiritual divinity into which the passionate national God of the old Hebrews has been transformed by the Protestantism of the North; and where among all these proud forms with which Michael Angelo has covered the ceiling in his Promethean desire to create human beings, where among those defiant, enthusiastic, despairing, struggling figures, is to be found the humility, the meekness he expected to see? Corinne reads her countrymen a lesson, a lesson needed in other countries at this day, and especially in one like ours, where so much unintelligent talk is to be heard on the subject of Christian art and Christian æsthetics.

The passionately violent attack made by Sören Kierkegaard towards the end of his life upon so-called Christian art does not surprise us, coming as it did from a man destitute of all artistic culture. He first invests the painters of the Renaissance with his Protestant, nay, his personal, conception of religion, and is then shocked because, with this conception in the background of their consciousness, they could paint as they did. Oswald behaves in much the same way. He does not realise that the painters of the Renaissance stood in a different relation to their subjects from the painters of our day; that whereas the artists of to-day seek to gain a real understanding of their subject, and study it either from the antiquarian, the ethnological, or the psychological point of view, the artist of the Renaissance took his subject as he found it, and made of it what he fancied--that is to say, what harmonised with his character. Herein is to be found the explanation of what surprises and shocks the North--ener in the old masters. For, just as a small selection of themes taken from the Iliad and the Odyssey provided the whole of Greek art--sculpture, painting, and drama--with its subjects (it is always the same story, of Paris and Helen, of Atreus and Thyestes, or of Iphigenia and Orestes), so a score of themes from the Old and New Testament (the Fall, Lot and his Daughters, the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt, the Passion) keep brush and chisel at work in Italy for three centuries. It is such subjects alone which artists are commissioned to paint, and for long it is only for the purpose of painting such subjects that study from the nude is permitted. Men's minds develop, the subjects remain the same. The pious, naïve faith of old days is superseded by the enthusiastic humanism and reviving paganism of the Renaissance; but it is still Madonnas and Magdalens that are painted, with this difference, that the stiff Queen of Heaven of Byzantine art is transformed into an idealised peasant girl of Albano, and the woefully emaciated and remorseful sinner of Andrea del Verocchio into the voluptuous Magdalen of Correggio; the apostles and martyrs too are still depicted, but the stoned and crucified saints of olden times, painted for the purpose of exciting compassion and devotional feeling, are transformed into the St. Sebastians of Titian and Guido Reni, the beautiful young page glowing with health and beauty, the dazzling white of whose flesh is thrown into relief by one or two drops of blood which drip from an arrow-head inserted becomingly between the ribs.

Oswald is taught by Corinne to admire the liberal spirit of Italian Catholicism, which in the days of the Renaissance permitted each artist to develop his talent or genius with perfect independence, even when he only made his Christian or Jewish subject a pretext for the representation of his own personal ideal of man or woman. This brings us to another of Oswald's stumbling-blocks, namely, that blending of the Christian and the pagan which so offended him in the reliefs by Antonio Filarete on the doors of St. Peter's. The same thing is to be observed everywhere; everywhere the pagan material has been preserved and employed. The old basilicas and churches are built with the pillars of antique temples. A simple cross superficially christianises the obelisks, the Colosseum, and the interior of the Pantheon. The statues of Menander and Posidippos were prayed to as saints all through the Middle Ages.

Corinne shows Oswald that it is to this often childish, but always unprejudiced position towards the pagan and the human, that Catholicism owes the artistic glory with which it will always shine in history, a glory which will never be dimmed by the artistic performances of Protestantism. Protestantism tears down from above its altars the beautiful Albano peasant women with smiling babes at their breasts, tinder the pretext that they are Madonnas, whitewashes all the glowing pictures, and glories in bare walls.

The Italy of the Renaissance divested Christianity of its spirit of self-renunciation, of its Jewish-Asiatic character, and transformed it into a mythology, fragrant of incense, wreathed with flowers. Italian Catholicism allied itself with the civic spirit in the cities, and with all the fine arts when art was born again. Thus its interests were quite as often promoted from patriotic as from religious motives. It was in Tuscany that the Renaissance began. There humanity was born again after its fall, its renegation of Nature. There the first Italian republics were founded. There men once more willed; houses congregated and formed small, proud, indomitably liberal states, each a town with its surrounding district. Towers and spires rose into the air, erect and proud as the bearing of a free man; fortified palaces were begun, churches were completed; but the church was far more a state treasure-house, a witness to wealth, perseverance, and artistic taste, a valuable item in the rivalry between state and state, between Siena and Florence, than a dwelling-place of "Our Most Blessed Lady." Much more was done in honour of Siena than in honour of God. A Tuscan church, such as that of Orvieto, with its mosaics inlaid in gold, or that of Siena, with its façade of sculptured marble resembling the lace robe of some youthful beauty, is to us much more of a jewel-casket than a church.

Or think of the Church of St. Mark in Venice. The first time one sees it, one feels momentarily surprised by its oriental façade, its bright cupolas, its peculiar arches resting on pile upon pile of short, clustered pillars of red and green marble. After casting a glance from the piazza at the mosaics of the outside walls, rich colours on a golden ground, one enters, and one's first thought is: Why, this is all gold, golden vaulting, golden walls! The minute gilt tesseræ composing the mosaic background of all the pictures form one great plane of gold. A sunbeam falling upon it produces sparkling flecks upon the darker ground, and the whole church seems aflame. The floor, undulating with age, is composed of a mosaic of red, green, white, and black marble. The pillars, which are of reddish marble, have capitals of gilded bronze. The small arched windows are of white, not stained glass; coloured windows would be unsuitable with all this magnificence; they are for less gorgeous churches. The pillars are alternated with enormous square columns of greenish marble, at least six yards in diameter, which support gilded half-arches; each cupola rests upon four such half-arches. The smaller pillars which support altars, &c., are, some of green and red speckled marble, some of transparent alabaster. All the lower-lying marble, that, for instance, of the seats and benches running along the sides of the church and surrounding the columns, is of a bright red colour. The whole church, as seems only natural in a town whose school of painting so entirely subordinated form to colour, impresses by its picturesqueness, not by its architectural grandeur. With its gilded ornaments, its inlaid stalls, its lovely bronzes, its golden statues, candelabra, and capitals, San Marco lies there like some luxurious Byzantine beauty, heavily laden with gold and pearls and sparkling diamonds, the richest brocade covering her oriental couch.

Such a church as this was undoubtedly originally an expression of religious enthusiasm, but in the palmy days of the Renaissance, as the building became ever more and more richly ornamented, religious feeling was entirely supplanted by love of art. Very significant of this is the one inscription in the church, which is to be found above the principal entrance: "_Ubi diligenter inspexeris artemque ac laborem Francisci et Valerii Zucati Venetorum fratrum agnoveris tum tandem judicato_." (When you have diligently studied and considered all the art and all the labour which we two Venetian brothers, Francesco and Valerio Zucati, have expended here, then judge us.) A caution by the artists against hasty criticism.

The brothers Zucati were the masters in their art who in the sixteenth century executed most of the mosaics in the church, entirely, or principally, after designs by Titian. Such an inscription, which, instead of being an invitation to worship, a greeting to the faithful, a benediction, or a text of Scripture, is an appeal to the beholder to examine carefully and seriously the artistic work executed in the service of religion, would be an impossibility in or on a Protestant church.

When the Catholic faith disappears, as it is doing to-day in Italy, from the Catholic Church, when Inquisition and fanaticism become a legend, when the ugly animal in the snail-shell dies, the beautifully whorled shell will still remain. There will still remain the magnificent churches, statues, and paintings; there will still remain Michael Angelo's Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Sistine Madonna, St. Peter's at Rome, the cathedrals of Milan, Siena, and Pisa. Protestantism has shown itself incapable of producing any great religious architecture; and, though iconoclasm has long been a thing of the past, Rembrandt remains the one great master in whose pictures it has shown capacity to give artistic expression to its religious sentiments.

It has been necessary to dwell a little upon the fact that Corinne, the art-loving poetess, always takes the part of Catholicism against Protestant Oswald, because here again the influence upon Mme. de Staël of her intercourse with Germans may be clearly traced. Here again we feel, and this time more forcibly, the approach of Romanticism, with its loathing of Protestantism, as unimaginative, uncultured, dry, and cold, and its steadily increasing affection for Catholicism, a faith whose æsthetic proclivities, and close and warm relations with imagination and art, gave it an unexpected new lease of life and power in the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the prosaic reasonableness of the "enlightenment" period. We have here a most distinct attack upon the France of the eighteenth century, which, with Voltaire at its head, had persecuted and scorned Catholicism, and which, without any love for Protestant dogma, had yet expressed a distinct preference for Protestantism, with its independence of Papal authority, its married clergy, and its hatred of the real or pretended renunciations of conventual life.

[1] Corinne. 1807. I. 291; II. 21.

XII

NEW CONCEPTION OF THE ANTIQUE

There is another part of this book on Italy where the influence of Germany makes itself profoundly felt, and where we are also sensible of the transition from the creative mood which produced _Corinne_ to that which produced the book on Germany. I refer to Corinne's conception of the antique and of the position in which modern art stands towards it. Reflections on this subject naturally suggested themselves when she was acting as Oswald's guide in Rome.

For Rome is the one place in the world where history is, as it were, visible. There successive ages have deposited their records in distinct layers. One sometimes comes upon a single building (one of the houses in the vicinity of the Temple of Vesta for example) in which the foundation belongs to one period of history, and each of the three superimposed stories to another--ancient Rome, imperial Rome, the Renaissance, and our own day. It is to the most ancient period that Corinne first introduces her friend. It must be confessed that while she looks at the ruins, he looks at her. But the significance of this part of the book lies in the fact that it introduces a new view of the antique into French literature.

Of the two great classic peoples, it was really only the Romans that were understood in France. Some Roman blood flows in Frenchmen's veins. A true Roman spirit breathes in Corneille's tragedies. It was, thus, not surprising that the great Revolution revived Roman customs, names, and costumes. Charlotte Corday, of the race of the great Corneille, is penetrated by the Roman spirit. Madame Roland moulded her mind by the study of Tacitus; and David, the painter of the Revolution, reproduced ancient Rome in his art--Brutus and Manlius are his heroes.

But the Greeks had never been rightly understood. The French, indeed, still flattered themselves that their classical literature continued the tradition of Greek literature, and actually surpassed it; but since Lessing had written his _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ it had been no secret to the rest of Europe that Racine's Greeks were neither more nor less than so many Frenchmen; it had been discovered that Agamemnon's immortal family consisted of disguised marquises and marchionesses. It was of no avail that the costume had been altered in the Théâtre Français, that since Talma's day its Greeks had appeared in classic draperies instead of with perukes, powder, and small-swords; from the moment that the critical spirit awoke in Germany, the French conception of the antique became the jest of Europe.

It is Mme. de Staël who has the honour of being the first to introduce her fellow-countrymen, in her book on Germany, to the bold scoffer, Lessing, who had dared to make the arch-mocker himself, his own teacher and master, Voltaire, the butt of his wit, in this case sharpened by a personal grudge. She paves the way for doing so in _Corinne_, by making her heroine's conversation with Oswald a _résumé_ of all the results produced in the mind of Germany by the new study of the antique, and by the doctrines propounded in _Laokoon_ on the subject of the relation between poetry and sculpture.

In Germany too, a thoroughly French conception of Hellenism had prevailed, the conception apparent in Wieland's clever, frivolous romances, _Agathon_ and _Aristippos_, and in his poems, _Endymion, Musarion, &c_., which are severely handled by Mme. de Staël in her book on Germany. But a new era had dawned. A poor German school-master, Winckelmann, inspired by genuine, pure enthusiasm, succeeded, after encountering innumerable difficulties, in making his way to Rome to study the antique. Against his convictions, and in spite of the opposition of his friends, he adopted the Catholic religion to facilitate his stay there. He eventually fell a victim to his love of art, for he was foully murdered by a scoundrel who wished to obtain possession of his collection of valuable coins and precious stones. It was this Winckelmann who, in a long series of writings, beginning with the appeal to the German nobility and ending with the great history of art, opened the eyes of his fellow-countrymen to the harmony of Greek art. His whole work as an author is one great hymn to the re-discovered, the recovered antique. All who are acquainted with his writings are aware that the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus of Medici, and the Laocoon group represented to him the supreme glory of Greek art; nor could it be otherwise, seeing that no work of art of the great style had as yet been discovered. The Teutonic neo-Hellenic development took place prior to the discovery of the Venus of Milo. Even Thorwaldsen was an old man when he first saw this statue. But in spite of this one great deficiency and of his many historical inaccuracies, it was from Winckelmann that the mighty influence went forth which inspired Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. Lessing's work is a continuation of Winckelmann's. Endowed with an unrivalled critical faculty, he sketched the first plan of a science of art and poetry with Winckelmann's theory of art as a foundation. All who are familiar with Goethe's life know how great an influence these twin spirits, Winckelmann and Lessing, had upon his artistic development. The new, grand, genial conception of the antique finds its first expression in Goethe's sparkling little masterpiece, _Götter, Helden und Wieland_. I give a few specimen speeches. Wieland's ghost stands, nightcap on head, and is being utterly crushed in an argument with Admetus and Alcestis when Hercules appears.

H. Where is Wieland?

A. There he stands.

H. That he? He is small enough, certainly. Just what I had pictured him to myself. Are you the man that is always prating about Hercules?

W. (_shrinking away_). I have nothing to do with you, Colossus I

H. Eh! What? Don't go away.

W. I imagined Hercules to be a fine man of middle height.

H. Of middle height! I?

W. If you are Hercules, it was not you I meant.

H. That is my name and I am proud of it. I know very well that when a blockhead cannot find a suitable bear or griffin or boar to hold his scutcheon, he takes a Hercules. It is plain that my godhead has never revealed itself to you in a vision.

W. I confess this is the first vision of the kind that I have ever had.

H. Then take thought, and ask pardon of the gods for your notes to Homer, who makes us too tall for you.

W. In truth you are enormous; I never imagined anything like it.

H. Is it my fault, man, that you have such a narrow-chested imagination? What sort of a Hercules is the one you are for ever prating about, and what is it he fights for? For virtue? What's the motto again? Have you ever seen virtue, Wieland? I have been a good deal about in the world too, and I never yet met such a thing.

W. What! You do not know that virtue for which my Hercules does everything, ventures all?

H. Virtue! I heard the word for the first time down here from a couple of silly fellows who couldn't tell me what they meant by it.

W. No more could I. But don't let us waste words upon that I wish you had read my poems; if you had, you would see that at bottom I don't care so very much about virtue myself--it is an ambiguous sort of thing.

H. It is a monstrosity, like every other phantasy which cannot exist in the world as we know it. Your virtue reminds me of a centaur. So long as it prances about in your imagination, how splendid it is, how strong! and when the sculptor represents it for you, what a superhuman form! But anatomise it, and you find four lungs, two hearts, and two stomachs. It dies at the moment of birth like any other monstrosity, or, to be more correct, it never existed anywhere but in your brain.[1]

W. But virtue must be something, must be somewhere.

By the eternal beard of my father, who doubted it? Meseems it dwelt with us, in demigods and heroes. Do you suppose we lived like brute beasts? We had splendid fellows among us.

W. What do you call splendid fellows?

H. Those who share what they have with others. And the richest was the best If he had more muscular strength than he needed, he gave another man a good thrashing; and of course no good man and true will have anything to do with a weaker man than himself, only with his equals, or his superiors. If he had a superfluity of sap and vigour, he provided the women with as many children as they might wish for--I myself begot fifty men-children in a single night. And if Heaven had given him goods and gold enough for a thousand, he opened his doors and bade a thousand welcome to enjoy it with him.

W. Most of this would be considered vice in our day.

H. Vice? that is another of your fine words I The very reason why everything is so poor and small with you is, that you represent virtue and vice as two extremes between which you oscillate, instead of thinking the middle course the ordained and best, as do your peasants and your men-servants and maid-servants.

W. Let me tell you that in my century you would be stoned for such opinions. See how they have denounced me for my little attack on virtue and religion.

H. And what had you to do attacking them? I have fought with horses, cannibals, and dragons, to the best of my ability, but never with clouds, what shape soever it pleased them to take. A sensible man leaves it to the winds that have blown them together to sweep them away again.

W. You are a monster, a blasphemer.

H. And you can't understand. Your Hercules stands like a beardless simpleton, hesitating between virtue and vice. If the two jades had met _me_ on the way--see! one under this arm, one under that, off I'd have gone with them both.

Here we have Goethe's early and vigorous new conception of the antique contrasted with Wieland's Frenchified one; and we have at the same time the poetical confession of faith of the man whom his contemporaries called the Great Pagan. This is the philosophy of Spinoza in the form of a daring jest. But Goethe did not retain this bold, naturalistic view of the antique. When his youthful ardour had exhausted itself in _Werther_, in _Götz_, and in his enthusiastic treatise on Gothic architecture, he abruptly turned his back upon the Gothic and upon enthusiasm; and when he returns to the Greeks, it is their serenity and their lucidity, their simple harmonies and their sound common sense which captivate him. All that was passionate, full of colour, and realistic, he put aside and ignored; what was popular, burlesque, sensational, he only admitted in his allegorical farces, such as _Die klassische Walpurgisnacht_ in Faust; and for what was wildly bacchantic or darkly mystical his eyes were closed.

With an increasing aversion for Christianity, which finds its chief expression in the Venetian Epigrams, was associated such a repugnance for the Gothic and all Christian art, that when he was at Assisi, a place so rich in famous Christian mementoes, Goethe did not even visit the beautiful Church of St. Francis, but devoted his attention exclusively to the insignificant ruins of the Temple of Minerva. It was in this frame of mind that he wrote his Iphigenia, a work which may be looked upon as typical of the whole Germanic-Gothic renaissance of the antique, and which played an important part in the formation of the art theories of the nineteenth century. It was regarded by German æstheticism under the leadership of Hegel, and by French æstheticism under the leadership of Taine, as a species of model work of art. Hegel considered that only the _Antigone_ of Sophocles was worthy to be compared with it. The spirit by which it is inspired is the same spirit which inspired all Schiller's neo-Hellenic poems, _Die Götter Griechenlands, Die Künstler, Die Ideale, Das Ideal und das Leben_. Men were actually inclined at that time to accept, as representative of the life of the Greeks, Schiller's description of the life of the gods:

"Ewig klar und spiegelrein und eben
Fliesst das zephyrleichte Leben
Im Olymp den Seligen dahin."

It is this entirely one-sided conception of the antique which is gradually evolved from that expressed in _Götter, Helden und Wieland_, and which finally leads Goethe to write Homeric poems like _Achilleïs_. Thorvaldsen's position to the antique is influenced by the same ideas and presents a succession of almost parallel movements. In some of his earliest bas-reliefs--Achilles and Briseïs, for example--we observe that greater daring in the rendering of the antique with which Goethe started; but all his later representations of Greek subjects have been inspired by the ideal of peaceful, subdued harmony which superseded the vigorous tendency.

This new, Germanic-Gothic conception of Hellas is that with which all my (Danish) readers have been brought up, which they have imbibed from conversation, from newspapers, from German and Danish poetry, and from the Thorvaldsen sculptures. It is the conception which with us is not only regarded as the Danish and German, but as the only, the absolutely correct one.

The view which I venture to express here for the first time is, that the Greece of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Thorvaldsen is _almost_ as un-Greek as that of Racine and that of Barthélemy in _Le Jeune Anacharse_. Racine's style has too strong a flavour of the drawing-room and the court to be Greek; Goethe's and Thorvaldsen's (framed on Winckelmann's theories) is, in spite of the surpassing genius of these two great men, too chastened, too limpid, and too cold to be Greek.

I believe that the time will come when Goethe's Iphigenia will not be considered appreciably more Greek than Racine's, when it will be discovered that the German Iphigenia's dignified morality is as German as the French Iphigenia's graceful refinement is French. The only question that remains is, whether one is more Greek when one is German or when one is French. I am perfectly aware that I am dashing my head against a wall of Germanic-Gothic prejudice when I declare myself on the side of the French. I am not ignorant of the firmly-rooted conviction that of the two European streams of culture one is Latin, Spanish, French, the other Greek, German, Northern. I know of the plausible arguments, that German poetry with Goethe at its head has an antique bias, and is more or less Hellenic; that Germany has produced Winckelmann, the re-discoverer of the antique, and the philologists who have interpreted Greece to us; while France has only produced Racine, who turned the Greek demigods and heroes into French courtiers, and Voltaire, who considered Aristophanes a charlatan.

And yet, when in comparing the two Iphigenias I asked myself the question: Which of the two, the Frenchman's or the German's, more resembles the Greek? the answer I gave myself was--The Frenchman's.

The spirit of the French people resembles the Greek spirit in its absolute freedom from awkwardness, its love of lightness, elegance, form and colour, passion and dramatic life. No reasonable person would dream of ranking the French with the Greeks. The distance between them is so great as to be practically immeasurable. Still one must maintain their right to the place of honour against those who assert that the Germans stand nearer to the Greeks.

The Germans who more immediately influenced Mme. de Staël, the leaders of the Romantic School, cherished a firm conviction of the vanity of literary and artistic attempts to reproduce the antique. A. W. Schlegel perpetuated Lessing's antagonism to the so-called classical poetry of France, exalting at its expense the poetry of the Troubadours, which did not depend for support on Greek or Latin literature; and he was very much colder in his criticism of Goethe's neo-Hellenic poems than of those which dealt with more home-like and more varied themes. To such influence is to be ascribed Corinne's dictum (i. 321) that, since we cannot make our own either the religious feelings of the Greeks and Romans or their intellectual tendencies, it is impossible for us to produce anything in their spirit, to invent, so to speak, anything in their domain. We do not need the footnote referring to an essay by Fr. Schlegel to tell us whose suggestion the authoress has here followed. And we almost feel as if we were reading the work of one of the Romantic critics when, in _De l'Allemagne_, we come upon the following development of the same thought: "Even if the artists of our day were restricted to the simplicity of the ancients, it would be impossible for us to attain to the original vigour which distinguishes them, and we should lose that intensity and complexity of emotion which is only found with us. Simplicity in art is apt with us moderns to become coldness and unreality, whereas with the ancients it was full of life."[2]

I believe that this utterance hits the mark. And just as the German reproduction of the antique is German, so the Danish renaissance of the antique is Danish and not Greek; that is to say, it is too Danish to be properly Greek, and too Greek to be genuinely Danish and really modern. One is never more conscious of this than when one sees a work of Thorvaldsen's side by side with an antique bas-relief; when, for instance, one compares the Christiansborg medallions with the metopes of the Parthenon, or, as in the Naples Museum, sees a bas-relief of the most vigorous Greek period beside Thorvaldsen's most beautiful bas-relief, his "Night."

Thorvaldsen's "Night" is only the stillness of night, the night in which men sleep. Night, as a Greek would conceive of it, the night in which men love, in which they murder, the night which hides under its mantle voluptuousness and crime, it certainly is not. It is a mild summer night in the country. And it is this idyllic spirit and sweet serenity which is the specially Danish characteristic of this production of the Northern renaissance of the antique. The peculiar rustic beauty of the charming figure is as essentially Danish as the severe grandeur and nobility of Goethe's Iphigenia are German.

Like Goethe's, Thorvaldsen's revival of the antique is the expression of a reaction against the French-Italian rococo style, which, in spite of its justifiableness, was not a successful reaction. For, even where the rococo style is most ridiculous, there is always this to be said for it, that it has the strongest objection to repeat the old, to do over again what has already been done, and that, though its attempts frequently result in ugliness and distortion, they nevertheless evince a passionate, personal endeavour to find something new, something that shall be its own. Hence Bernini, in spite of his sins against truth and beauty, is really great in his best works, such as his St. Theresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, and his St. Benedict at Subiaco--so great that we understand the enthusiasm he aroused, and feel that he far excels many modern sculptors, who never produce anything distorted, but also never produce anything original.

By his abrupt return to the antique, Thorvaldsen as it were ignored the whole development of art since the days of the Greeks. It would be impossible to divine from his work that such a sculptor as Michael Angelo had ever lived. He was drawn to the antique by precisely the same qualities which attracted Goethe--its serenity and quiet grandeur.

It is possible to share Mme. de Staël's and the Romanticists' view that the neo-Hellenic style in modern art (that offspring of a disinclination to be one's self, i.e. modern, and an attempt to be the impossible, i.e. antique) is in itself an abortion--exactly as the Romanticists' own medieval hieratic style was one--and at the same time, without any self-contradiction, warmly to admire Goethe's _Iphigenia_ and Thorvaldsen's finest works. This is, indeed, only what the German Romanticists and Mme. de Staël herself did. But Mme. de Staël has failed to observe, that in every case in which a work that is the result of the study of the antique is a work of real, lasting importance, it is so because the artist's or poet's national character and personal peculiarities show distinctly through the more refined, but less robust, classicism which is the result of his endeavour.

The attacks made in _Corinne_ and _De l'Allemagne_ upon spurious classicism were an expression, in the first instance, of the reaction against the eighteenth century; but, so far as France was concerned, they applied also to an earlier period, were attacks upon the great names of the seventeenth century, of the classic period of Louis XIV., which A. W. Schlegel, following in Lessing's steps, had so severely criticised. Here, where Mme. de Staël was running the risk of wounding French national pride, she shows all possible circumspection, only repeats the remarks of others, and qualifies where she can. She justly maintains, however, that the spirit of this criticism is not un-French, since it is the same as that which inspires Rousseau's Letter on French Music, the same accusation of having supplanted natural expression of the emotions by a certain pompous affectation.

When the Germans of those days desired to give a tangible example of the French conception of the antique, they pointed to the portraits of Louis XIV., in which he is represented now as Jupiter, now as Hercules, naked or with a lion's hide thrown over his shoulders, but never without his great wig. But when Madame de Staël, following their example, praises German Hellenism at the expense of French, she scarcely does her countrymen justice. The art of David had already proved that Frenchmen were capable of discarding the periwig without foreign suggestion. Besides, she over-estimates German neo-Hellenism. There is no doubt that the Germans, whose literature is so critical, whose modern poetry is actually an offspring of criticism and æstheticism, have understood the Greeks far better than the French have done, and that this understanding has been of value in their imitation of them. But one never resembles an original nature less than when one imitates it. The Germans favour restriction and moderation in all practical matters, but are opposed to the restriction of either thought or imagination. Therefore they triumph where plastic form vanishes--in metaphysics, in lyrical poetry, and in music; but therefore also there are conjectures in their science, their art is formless, colour is their weak point in painting, and the drama in poetry. In other words, they lack exactly that plastic talent which the Greeks possessed in the highest degree. If France is far from being a Greece in art, Germany is still farther. Of all the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece, the Germans have only succeeded in acclimatising one--Pallas Athene, and in Germany she wears spectacles. Mme. de Staël might have observed to Schlegel that an Athene with spectacles is not much more beautiful than a Jupiter with a wig.

[1] It cannot be denied that this scientific, anti-mythological simile does not come well from Hercules. But the rest atones for it.

[2] Madame de Staël: _Oeuvres complètes_, x. 273.

XIII

DE L'ALLEMAGNE

The strongly opposed and long suppressed book on Germany is the most mature production of Mme. de Staël's culture and intellect. It is the first of her longer works in which she so entirely loses herself in her subject as to have apparently forgotten her own personality. In it she gives up describing herself, and only appears to the extent that she gives an account of her travels in Germany and reproduces her conversations with the most remarkable men of that country. In place of self-defence and self-exaltation, she offers her countrymen a comprehensive view of a whole new world. The last information Frenchmen had received regarding the intellectual life of Germany was, that there was a king in Berlin who dined every day in the company of French savants and poets, who sent, his indifferent French verse to be corrected by Voltaire, and who refused to acknowledge the existence of a German literature. And now, not so many years later, they learned that this same country, which their conquering armies were in the act of treading under foot, had, in the course of a single generation, produced, as if by magic, a great and instructive literature, which some had the audacity to rank with the French, if not above it. The book gave a complete, comprehensive picture of this foreign intellectual life and literary production. It began with a description of the appearance of the country and its towns; it noted the contrasts between the character of Northern and of Southern Germany, between the tone and morals of Berlin and of Vienna; it gave information on the subject of German university education, and of the new life which Pestalozzi had imparted to the training of children. From this it passed on to a general survey of contemporary German poetry, made doubly intelligible by many translations of poems and fragments of drama; and the authoress did not even flinch from putting the climax to her work by giving a sketch of the evolution of German philosophy from Kant to Schelling.

The impressions of German naïveté, good-nature, and straightforwardness which prevailed in France until 1870 were due to Mme. de Staël's book. She made the acquaintance of the people who had caused Europe to resound with the clash of their arms throughout the Thirty Years' War and during the reign of Frederick the Great, at the moment of its deepest political and military degradation, and this led her to conclude that the national character was peaceful and idyllic. It seemed to her that the warmth of the stoves and the fumes of ale and tobacco gave the atmosphere in which this people moved a peculiar, heavy, dull quality; and it was her opinion that their strength lay exclusively in their earnest morality and their intellectual independence.

She never wearies of praising the integrity and truthfulness of the German men, and only very occasionally does she hint at a pretty general lack of refinement and tact. We feel that their conversation often wearied her, but for this she blames the social customs and the language. It is impossible, she says, to express one's self neatly in a language in which one's meaning as a rule only becomes intelligible at the end of the sentence, in which, consequently, the interruptions which give life to a conversation are almost impossible, it being also impossible always to reserve the pith of the sentence for the end. It is natural, she thinks, that a foreigner should sometimes be bored by the conversation in a society where the listeners are so unexacting and so patient; where no one consequently has that dread of boring which prevents circumlocution and repetitions. Even the custom of perpetually repeating insignificant and lengthy titles necessarily makes conversation formal and cumbersome.

The German women she describes with warm sympathy, but not without a touch of sarcasm, as follows:--

"They have an attraction peculiarly their own, touching voices, fair hair, dazzling complexions; they are modest, but less timid than Englishwomen; one can see that they less frequently meet men who are their superiors. They seek to please by their sensibility, to interest by their imagination, and are familiar with the language of poetry and of the fine arts. They play the coquette with their enthusiasms as Frenchwomen do with their _esprit_ and merry wit. The perfect loyalty distinctive of the German character makes love less dangerous to women's happiness, and possibly they approach the feeling with more confidence because it has been invested for them with romantic colours, and because slights and infidelity are less to be dreaded here than elsewhere. Love is a religion in Germany, but a poetic religion, which only too readily permits all that the heart can find excuse for.

"One may fairly laugh at the ridiculous airs of some German women, who are so habitually enthusiastic that enthusiasm has with them become mere affectation, their mawkish utterances effacing any piquancy or originality of character they may possess. They are not frankly straightforward like Frenchwomen, which by no means implies that they are false; but they are not capable of seeing and judging things as they really are; actual events pass like a phantasmagoria before their eyes. Even when, as occasionally happens, they are frivolous, they still preserve a touch of that sentimentality which in their country is held in high esteem. A German lady said to me one day with a melancholy expression: 'I do not know how it is, but the absent pass out of my soul.' A Frenchwoman would have expressed the idea more gaily, but the meaning would have been the same.

"Their careful education and their natural purity of soul render the dominion they exercise gentle and abiding. But that intellectual agility which animates conversation and sets ideas in motion is rare among German women."

Mme. de Staël was necessarily much impressed by the intellectual life of Germany. In her own country everything had stiffened into rule and custom. There, a decrepit poetry and philosophy were at the point of death; here, everything was in a state of fermentation, full of new movement, life, and hope.

The first difference between the French and the German spirit which struck her was their different attitude to society. In France the dominion exercised by society was absolute; the French people were by nature so social that every individual at all times felt bound to act, to think, to write like every one else. The Revolution of 1789 was spread from district to district merely by sending couriers with the intelligence that the nearest town or village had taken up arms. In Germany, on the contrary, there was no society; there existed no universally accepted rules of conduct, no desire to resemble every one else, no tyrannical laws of language or poetry. Each author wrote as he pleased, for his own satisfaction, paying little heed to that reading world around which all the thoughts of the French writer revolved. In Germany the author created his public, whereas in France the public, the fashion of the moment, moulded the author. In Germany it was possible for the thought of the individual to exercise that power over men's minds which in France is exercised exclusively by public opinion. At the time when the French philosopher was a society man, whose great aim was to present his ideas in clear and attractive language, a German thinker, living isolated from the culture of his time at far-away Königsberg, revolutionised contemporary thought by a couple of thick volumes written in a language saturated with the most difficult technical terms. A woman who had suffered all her life from the oppression of a narrow-minded social spirit could not but feel enthusiasm for such conditions as these.

The next great contrast with French intellectual life that struck Mme. de Staël was the prevailing idealism of German literature. The philosophy which had reigned in France during the last half of the eighteenth century was one which derived all human ideas and thoughts from the impressions of the senses, which, consequently, asserted the human mind to be dependent upon and conditioned by its material surroundings. It was certainly not in Mme. de Staël's power to estimate the nature and the bearing of this philosophy, but, like a genuine child of the new century, she loathed it. She judged it like a woman, with her heart rather than her head, and ascribed to it all the materialism she objected to in French morals, and all the servile submission to authority she objected to in French men. Taking Condillac's sensationalism in combination with the utilitarianism of Helvetius, she pronounced the opinion that no doctrine was more adapted to paralyse the soul in its ardent, upward endeavour than this, which derived all good from properly understood self-interest. With genuine delight she saw the opposite doctrine universally accepted in Germany. The ethics of Kant and Fichte and the poetry of Schiller proclaimed exactly that sovereignty of the spirit in which she had believed all her life. These great thinkers demonstrated, that inspired poet in each of his poems proved, the spirit's independence of the world of matter, its power to rise above it, to rule it, to remould it. They expressed the most cherished convictions of her heart; and it was in her enthusiasm for these doctrines, for German high-mindedness and loftiness of aspiration, that she set to work to write her book _De l'Allemagne_ (as Tacitus in his day had written _De Germania_), for the purpose of placing before her fellow-countrymen a great example of moral purity and intellectual vigour.

Mme. de Staël had always looked upon enthusiasm as a saving power. She had said in _Corinne_ that she only recognised two really distinct classes of men--those who are capable of enthusiasm and those who despise enthusiasts. It seemed to her that in the Germany of that day she had found the native land of enthusiasm, the country in which it was a religion, where it was more highly honoured than anywhere else on earth. Hence it is that she ends her book with a dissertation on enthusiasm. But this belief in enthusiasm, in the power of imagination and the purely spiritual faculties, led her to many rash and narrow conclusions. In her delight in the philosophic idealism of Germany, she treats experimental natural science with the most naïve superiority--is of opinion that it leads to nothing but a mechanical accumulation of facts. Naturphilosophie, on the other hand, which has made the discovery that the human mind can derive all knowledge from itself by the conclusions of reason--which, in other words, regards all things as formed after the pattern of the human mind--seems to her the wisdom of Solomon. "It is a beautiful conception," she says, "that which finds a resemblance between the laws of the human mind and the laws of nature, and which looks upon the material world as an image of the spiritual." In her pleasure in the beauty of this idea she fails to perceive how untruthful it is, to foresee how barren of all result it is soon to prove. She extols Franz Baader and Steffens at the expense of the great English scientists, and, following the example of her Romantic friends, has a good word to say for clairvoyance and astrology--for every phenomenon, in short, which seems to prove the prevailing power of the spirit.

Many years before this a French pamphlet written against Mme. de Staël had been entitled _L'Antiromantique_. Her Romantic tendency had in the interval become more and more marked. Spiritualism, as such, seemed to her the good, the beautiful, the true, both in art and in philosophy. This explains both her over-indulgence towards the abortions of the Romantic school, especially the dramas of her friend Zacharias Werner, and her misunderstanding of Goethe, whose greatness rather alarms than delights her, and whom she now excuses, now quotes with the remark that she cannot defend the spirit of his works. She prefaces her prose translation of _Die Braut von Corinth_ with the words: "I can certainly neither defend the aim of the poem nor the poem itself, but it seems to me that no one can fail to be impressed by its fantastic power;" and she concludes her otherwise excellent criticism of the first part of Faust with these words: "This drama of 'Faust' is certainly not a model work. Whether we look upon it as the outcome of a poetic frenzy or of the life-weariness of the worshipper of reason, _our hope is that such productions will not repeat themselves_;" adding only by way of compensation a remark on Goethe's genius and the wealth of thought displayed in the work. Thus irresistibly was even such a mind as hers affected by the spirit of the day in her native country, with its tendency to religious reaction. In the intellectual life of Germany she had perception and sympathy for Romanticism alone; German pantheism she neither sympathised with nor understood; it alarmed her; the daring spirit which had sounded so many abysses, recoiled tremblingly from the verge of this one.

And yet here lay the key to the whole new intellectual development in Germany. Behind Lessing's brilliant attack upon ecclesiastical dogma there had lain, unperceived by his contemporaries, the philosophy of Spinoza. Immediately after the great critic's death the literary world received a double surprise. The controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi elicited the appalling fact that Lessing had lived and died a Spinozist, and also showed that even Jacobi himself was of the opinion that all philosophy logically carried out must inevitably lead to Spinozism and pantheism. He endeavoured to extricate himself from the difficulty by pointing out that there is another way of arriving at knowledge of the truth than by conclusive argument, namely, the way of direct intuitive perception. But from this time onwards pantheism was in the air, and from the moment that Goethe, enraptured by his first reading of Spinoza, declares himself a Spinozist (a faith from which he never wavered to the end of his long life), it reigns in German literature; and this spirit of the new age, with its rich dower of poetry and philosophic thought, weds that antique beauty which has been brought to life again; as Faust, in the most famous poetical work of the period, weds Helen of Troy, who symbolises ancient Greece.

The great pagan renaissance which had been inaugurated in Italy by such men as Leonardo and Giordano Bruno, and in England by such men as Shakespeare and Bacon, now finds its way to Germany, and the new intellectual tendency is strengthened by the enthusiasm for pagan-Greek antiquity awakened by Winckelmann and Lessing. Schiller writes _Die Götter Griechenlands_, Goethe, _Die Diana der Epheser_ and _Die Braut von Corinth_. After the glory of Greece had departed, a mariner, voyaging along her coast by night, heard from the woods the cry: "Great Pan is dead!" But Pan was not dead; he had only fallen asleep. He awoke again in Italy at the time of the Renaissance; he was acknowledged and worshipped as a living god in the Germany of Schelling, Goethe, and Hegel.

The new German spirit was even more pantheistic than the antique spirit. When the ancient Greek stood by some beautiful waterfall, like that of Tibur near Rome, he endowed what he saw with personality. His eye traced the contours of beautiful naked women, the nymphs of the place, in the falling waters of the cascade; the wreathing spray was their waving hair; he heard their merry splashing and laughter in the rush of the stream and the dashing of the foam against the rocks. In other words, impersonal nature became personal to the antique mind. The poet of old did not understand nature; his own personality stood in the way; he saw it reflected everywhere, saw _persons_ wherever he looked.

Precisely the opposite is the case with a great modern poet like Goethe or Tieck, whose whole emotional life is pantheistic. He, as it were, strips himself of his personality in order to understand nature. When he in his turn stands by the waterfall, he bursts the narrow bonds of _self_. He feels himself glide and fall and spin round with the whirling waters. His whole being streams out of the narrow confines of the Ego and flows away with the stream he is gazing on. His elastic consciousness widens, he absorbs unconscious nature into his being; he forgets himself in what he sees, as those who listen to a symphony are lost in what they hear. It is the same with everything. As his being flows with the waves, so it flies and moans with the winds, sails with the moon through the heavens, feels itself one with the formless universal life.

This was the pantheism which Goethe indicated in the biting epigram:--

"Was soll mir euer Hohn
Ueber das All und Eine?
Der Professor ist eine Person,
Gott ist keine."

This was the pantheism to which he gave expression in _Faust_, and which lies so deeply rooted in the German nature that even the Romantic school, with its antagonism to the revival of the antique and its secret leaning to Catholicism, is as pantheistic as Hölderlin and Goethe. The worship of the universe is the unchecked undercurrent which forces its way through all the embankments and between all the stones with which an attempt is made to stay it.