Why I Allow My Gustavus Wit and Corrupt Authors and Forbid Him
The Classics, I Mean Greek and Roman.
I must first show, in three words, or pages, that and why the study of
the ancients is declining,[30] and secondly, that it is no great
matter.
We have now, as is well known, come out of the philological centuries,
when nothing but Latin was used at altars, in pulpits, on paper or in
thinking, and when it knit together all learned dressing-gowns and
night-caps from Ireland to Sicily into one confederacy; when it
constituted the state language and often the language of conversation
in the great world, when one could not be a scholar without carrying in
his head an inventory of all Greek and Roman household furniture, and a
bill of fare and washing schedule of those classic people. Now-a-days
our Latin is German to that of a _Camerarius_, who therefore would not
have found it necessary to compose his Smalcaldic war in Greek; at the
present day a sermon is seldom written in Latin, not to say in Greek,
as once, and therefore cannot be translated, as once, into Latin, but
merely into German. In our days no lady squeezes her powdered and
mitred head through the narrow classic collar, unless it be the
daughters of Hermes. This was known to my readers longer ago than to
me, because I am younger--just as the present improved reviewing,
translating and interpreting of the ancients is well known to both of
us. Only the _number_ of their admirers does not keep pace with the
_worth_ of them; all our branches of knowledge share now-a-days among
themselves a universal monarchy over all readers; but the ancients sit
alone with their few philological vassals on a rock-of-San-Marino.
There are now none but Polyhistors who have read everything else, but
not the ancients.
Taste for the _spirit_ of the ancients must grow dull, as well as for
their _speech_. I do not assert that in the classic parrot-centuries
this spirit was more truly felt than now; for Vossius hung upon Lucan,
Lipsius on Seneca, Casaubon on Persius; I do not say that in those days
a Faust, an Iphigenia, a Messiah, a Damocles, were written, as now. But
I speak of the present taste of the people, not of the men of genius.
If the spirit of the ancients consisted in their firm, steady step to
the object, in their hatred of a double, three-fold finery of ruffles,
in a certain childlike sincerity; then it must be growing always easier
for us to feel that spirit and harder for us to breathe it in our work;
with every century our style must betray an inspection, circumspection
and retrospection that increases with the increase of our learning; the
fullness of our composition must hinder its roundness; we refine
finery, bind[31] the binding and draw an overcoat over the overcoat; we
must needs decompose the white sunbeam of truth, as it no longer
strikes us for the first time, into colors, and whereas the ancients
were prodigal of words and thoughts we are penurious with both. Still
it is better to be an instrument of six octaves, whose tones easily
sound impurely and run into each other, than a monochord, whose only
string is harder to get out of tune; and it were just as bad if every
one, as if no one, wrote like Monboddo.
With our unfruitfulness in works after the old style, the taste for
these works proportionately increases. The ancients felt the worth of
the ancients--not at all; and their simplicity is enjoyed by those only
who cannot attain it: by ourselves. For this reason, I think the Greek
simplicity differs from that of the Orientals, savages and children[32]
only in the higher talent by which the serene Greek climate caused that
simplicity to be distinguished. That is the inborn, not the acquired.
The _artificial_, acquired simplicity is an effect of culture and
taste; the men of the 18th century have to wade up to this Alpine
source through marshes and torrents; but one who is up there by its
side never more forsakes it, and only peoples, not individuals, can
degenerate from the taste of a Monboddo to that of a Balzac. This
acquired taste, which the youthful genius always attacks and the elder
mostly acknowledges, must from Fair to Fair by practice upon all that
is beautiful grow in the case of individuals more and more keen and
sensitive; but nations themselves fall away every century farther and
farther from the Graces, who, like the Homeric Gods, hide themselves in
clouds. The ancients therefore could no more feel the natural
simplicity of their productions, than the child or the savage does that
of his. The pure, simple manners of an Alpherd or a Tyrolese are matter
of admiration neither to their own possessor nor to his compatriot, but
only to the refined count which cannot attain to them; and if the great
folk of the Romans enjoyed the sports of naked children, with which
they adorned their chambers, it was the great folk but not the
children, who had the enjoyment and the taste. The ancients, therefore,
wrote with an involuntary taste, without reading with the same--as
authors of genius to-day, _e. g_., Hamann, read with far more taste than
they write--hence these fever-pustules and rash-eruptions on the
otherwise healthy children of a Plato, an AEschylus, even a Cicero;
hence the Athenians clapped no orators more than the turners of
antitheses and the Romans none more than the punsters. For the
immoderate admiration of Shakespeare they wanted nothing but
Shakespeare himself. For that very reason these nations could, like the
child, degenerate from natural simplicity to polished, varnished
witticisms.
Secondly, I promised to affirm on three pages that the neglect of the
ancients does little harm. For of what use, then, is the cultivation of
them? They are, like virtue, far less felt and enjoyed than is
generally professed.[33] The enjoyment of them is the truest
_nine-proof_ of the best taste; but this best taste presupposes such an
intellectual appreciation of all kinds of beauty, such a pure and fair
symmetry of all inner faculties, that not merely Home finds taste
irreconcilable with a bad heart, but I also know nothing--next to
Genius, which always attains it after the discharge of its intellectual
exuberance--more rare than this very perfection of taste. O ye
Conrectors and Gymnasiarchs, you who moan and weep over the
depreciation of the ancients, if you still had eyes, they would weep
over your appreciation! Oh, it requires other hearts and spiritual
wings (not mere lung-wings) than belong to your pedagogic bodies to
discern why the ancients called Plato the divine, why Sophocles is
great and the Anthologists are noble! The ancients were men, not
literati. What are you? And what do you get from them?...
_Copiam vocabulorum_.--In the Middle Ages every least benefit derived
from the ancients was great; but now, in the eighteenth century, when
all nations have hewn a _gradus ad Parnassum_ in the granite of the
Muses, two or three steps more or less make very little difference.
Have, then, modern nations not written in the ancient taste? Were it
so, then, at any rate, models, which have not multiplied themselves at
all in copies, might easily be spared. But it is not even so, and an
Omar-like conflagration of all the ancients could only snatch from us a
little more than if the still extant autumnal-flora of a few Greek
temples and other ruins were swept away; we should still possess houses
in the Greek taste. The models themselves surely wrote without models,
and the statue of Polycletes was fashioned after the statue of a
Polycletes. Despite the study of the ancient writings, the poetic and
creative power once lay in Germany, and still lies in Italy, on the
sick bed.
Whoever, like Heyne, will make the ancients necessary to the _formal_
cultivation of the soul, such a one forgets that any language is equal
to that, and that a more unlike language, as the Oriental, can do it
still better, and that this cultivation sometimes costs us as dear as
many a Baron finds his French. The Greeks and Romans became Greeks and
Romans without the formal cultivation of Greek and Latin authors--they
became so through government and climate.
It is unfortunate for the finest productions of the human mind that
their fineness is rubbed off under the hands of the pupils of the
First, Second and Third Classes; that the Heads of Schools can imagine
that a better edition or better nominal and scientific explanations
should put the young gynmasiasts into a better position to appreciate
the sublime classic ruins than an improved and corrected edition of
Shakespeare and the appended romances with notes would enable a
schoolman or a Frenchman to open his eyes before this English
Genius--that these same Heads accordingly imagine that nothing keeps a
eunuch or infant cold to the charms of a Cleopatra except the wrappages
of these charms, and that the Heads are nowise behind me and
nature.[34]
For Nature trains our taste through prominent beauties for finer ones.
The youth prefers wit to sentiment, bombast to sense, Lucan to Virgil,
the French to the ancients. At bottom this taste of the minor is in one
respect not far out of the way, namely, that it feels certain minor
beauties more strongly than we, but the flaws bound up with them and
the higher charms more feebly than any of us; for we should only be so
much the more perfect, if at the same time with our present feeling for
the Greek epigram we could combine our lost youthful enthusiasm for the
French. One should therefore let the youth satisfy himself with these
dainties, as the confectioner does his apprentice with the other kind,
so long, till he shall become sated with them and hungry for higher
food. But now-a-days, inversely, he translates himself to satiety from
the ancients, and forms and spices with them his taste for the moderns.
In our authorial world we see the sad result; that teachers begin at
the end and undertake, by means of writers who properly only give the
tenderest, best taste the last finish, to carve that of the gymnasiast
out of the rough, and so follow neither nature nor me.
The Head Masters are apprehensive, to be sure, that "the young people
might thereby get more wit into their heads than is proper, if one
should read Seneca, epigrams and corrupt authors." My first answer is
that the constitution of the German is robust and healthy enough to be
less exposed to the spotted fever of wit than other peoples: _e. g_.,
the witty book "On Marriage" or the writings of Hamann, we compensate
for by a thousand pure works which have no wit in them. I have of often
thought, therefore, just as the German knows little of his superior
merit, so, too, he knows nothing of this one, that he has no
superfluous wit, although the reviewers often enough reproach me and
the romancers with this superfluity. But I and these authors demand
impartial judges on the subject. Even these otherwise insignificant
reviewers themselves are, to their honor, so little like a Seneca or a
Rousseau, both of whom condemned, combatted, and yet affected the witty
style, that they strictly rebuke the fault of wit in others, and
happily avoid it themselves.
My second answer goes deeper: before the body of man is developed,
every artificial development of the soul is injurious to him;
philosophical straining of the understanding, poetic exertion of the
fancy, unsettle the youthful powers themselves, and others too. Only
the development of wit, which, in the case of children, is so little
thought of, is the most harmless--because it works only in light,
fugitive effects;--the most beneficial--because it sets the new
wheel-work of ideas into quicker and quicker motion--because, through
invention, it imparts interest and control over one's ideas--because
that of others and one's own (wit) in these early years charms us most
with its brilliancy. Why have we so few inventions, and so many
scholars in whose heads lie mere _immovable_ goods, and the ideas of
every science dwell secluded from each other club-wise in convents, so
that, when a man writes on one science, he never thinks of anything
that he knows in another? Merely because children are taught ideas more
than the handling of ideas, and because in school their thoughts have
to be fixed as immovably as their fundaments.
One should imitate Schloetzer's hand in history and other sciences. I
accustomed my Gustavus to hear, to understand and thereby to invent for
himself, analogies from different sciences, _e. g_., All things great
or weighty move slowly; hence the Oriental Princes do not walk at
all--nor the Dalai Lama; the Sun--the Sea-crab--wise Greeks (according
to Winkelmann) walked slowly--so does the hour-hand--the ocean--the
clouds in fair weather--move slowly. Or; In winter, men, the earth, the
pendulum, go slower. Or; The following were kept secret,--the name of
Jehovah--of Oriental Princes--of Rome and its patron Deity--the
Sybilline books--the first early Christian Bible, the Catholic, the
Veda, etc. It is indescribable what pliability of all ideas is thereby
communicated to children's minds. Of course the various kinds of
knowledge must be there first, which one would thus associate. But
enough! the pedant neither approves nor understands me; and the better
teacher says himself: enough!