Pictures at Dresden.—Raphael’s Madonna.—Bayard’s Art
Education.—His Exalted Ideas of Art.—His Enthusiasm.—Visits
Bohemia.—Stay in Prague.—The Curiosities of Vienna.—Tomb of
Beethoven.—Respect for Religion.—Listens to Strauss.—View of
Lintz.—Munich and its Decorations.—The Home of Schiller.—Poetic
Landscapes, and Charming People.—Statue by Thorwaldsen.—Walk to
Heidelberg.
At Dresden, Bayard visited the picture-gallery, for the purpose of seeing
Raphael’s Madonna and Child, known as the _Madonna di San Sisto_. His
description of that painting, so unfortunately abridged in his book, was
one of the finest examples of art criticism to be found in print. His
appreciation of painting and sculpture was remarkable, indeed, for one
who never made them a professional study, and whose rude sketches in
pencil in his note books, contained nearly all of his undertakings as an
amateur. His soul seemed cast in the proper mould for that kind of work,
but his hand was never trained to materialize the pictures that filled
the galleries of his imagination. He had all those finer sensibilities
and acute instincts which fitted him for art in poetry or stone, and he
saw in paintings and statuary, beauties or defects which thousands of
colder but more studious critics failed to notice.
He spoke of that Madonna at Dresden, as a painting that moved his whole
nature in admiration. He enjoyed it. He feasted on it. He read it as one
follows an exciting romance. He felt the power of the picture as Raphael
felt it, and seemed to appreciate it even more keenly than the artist.
How much satisfaction and delight he found in the enormous collections
of art in the Old World, cannot be told or understood by any one whose
natural genius leads them not in such a direction. His mental appetite
for such things grew so keen, as he went on from city to city and gallery
to gallery, that he much preferred to leave his meals untasted, than
pass a great painting without study. Like the true artist, his mind
took in the grand ideals, and his respect and admiration for the divine
handiwork in producing man and beast, caused him often to wince under the
suggestive and degrading obtrusiveness of fig-leaves and rude drapery in
sculpture. The human form in all its heavenly beauty and godlike majesty,
as reproduced in marble by the great artists, was too sacred and pure to
him, to be marred by the suggestions of sin. No man or woman will ever
become an artist, in its highest, noblest sense, until their love for
beauty, simplicity, and purity, lifts them above the impressions that
are born of ignorance, vulgarity, and sin. Bayard, in after years, thus
beautifully wrote of sculpture:—
“In clay the statue stood complete,
As beautiful a form, and fair,
As ever walked a Roman street
Or breathed the blue Athenian air:
The perfect limbs, divinely bare,
Their old, heroic freedom kept,
And in the features, fine and rare,
A calm, immortal sweetness slept.
O’er common men it towered, a god,
And smote their meaner life with shame,
For while its feet the highway trod,
Its lifted brow was crowned with flame
And purified from touch of blame:
Yet wholly human was the face,
And over them who saw it came
The knowledge of their own disgrace.
It stood, regardless of the crowd,
And simply showed what men might be:
Its solemn beauty disavowed
The curse of lost humanity.
Erect and proud, and pure and free,
It overlooked each loathsome law
The life, travels, and literary career of Bayard Taylor
Whereunto others bend the knee,
And only what was noble saw.”
The blameless spirit of a lofty aim
Sees not a line that asks to be concealed
By dextrous evasion; but, revealed
As truth demands, doth Nature smite with shame
Them, who with artifice of ivy-leaf
Unsex the splendid loins, or shrink the frame
From life’s pure honesty, as shrinks a thief,
While stands a hero ignorant of blame!
“Each part expressed its nicely measured share,
In the mysterious being of the whole:
Not from the eye or lip looked forth the soul,
But made her habitation everywhere
Within the bounds of flesh; and Art might steal,
As once, of old, her purest triumphs there.”
This appreciation of the inner feelings of the sculptor and painter,
is the more astonishing, because of the unusual disadvantages under
which he first studied the works of the ancient masters. Aching limbs,
bruised feet, and an empty stomach are not usually aids to the critic in
forming a judgment of the symmetry or grace of any work of art. But his
enthusiastic recitals of his visits to the celebrated paintings, show no
less rapture when he saw them in fatigue and hunger, than when he looked
upon them in rest and bodily satiety. Thus, most naturally, he became the
companion and intimate friend of a large number of the European artists,
and was sought and highly esteemed by all the American painters and
sculptors whom he met in Europe. He understood them. He sympathized with
their enthusiasm and sacrifices; while a great, cold world went by them
without a comforting word or a smile of recognition.
Dresden was like a door to his higher art life, and its collection of
paintings is worthy of such a place. There were, besides the Sistine
Madonna, the “Ascension,” by Raphael Mengs, the “Notte,” by Correggio,
and galleries of master-pieces by Titian, Da Vinci, Veronese, Del Sarto,
Rubens, Vandyck, Lorraine and Teniers; with sculpture in marble, ivory,
bronze and jewels, from Michael Angelo and his cotemporaries. Being the
widest and most diversified collection in Germany, it was eagerly sought
by Bayard, and more reluctantly left behind. More grand than the battle
of Napoleon before its gates, and more lasting in their effects, were the
historic works of art which Dresden is so proud to possess.
[Illustration: THE DANUBE AT LINTZ.]
From Dresden, Bayard walked to Prague, leaving behind him, as he
then thought forever, the cheerful, hospitable, kind-hearted people,
with whose kin he afterwards became so intimately and advantageously
connected. In Prague, he ascended the heights where the Bohemian kings
and Amazon queens used to reside, heard the solemn mass in one of
Europe’s most solemn Cathedrals, visited the bridge under which the Saint
Johannes floated with the miraculous stars about his corpse, lost himself
in the bedlam of Jewish clothing-shops, and then, staff in hand, hastened
on over the monotonous plains, and through the highways almost fenced
with wretchedly painted shrines, to the Paris of the west, Vienna.
There again were rare, treasures of art on which he might study, and in
study, increase in that dignity and expansion of soul which only such
contemplation can give. He was delighted to hear the composer Strauss,
and his orchestra, and amusingly describes the queer antics of that
nervous little musician. He gazed with awe at the stained banners of the
Crusaders, and, with uncovered head, listened to the grand chants in St.
Stephen’s Cathedral; but his pathetic mention of his visit to the tomb of
Beethoven is the most characteristic.
There was a most lovable trait in Bayard’s character, which became even
more prominent in his after years of travel, which deserves mention
in this connection. He never railed upon the dead, nor ridiculed the
religious belief or acts of devotion of any people, however ignorant or
heathenish. He often mentioned, with emotion, the efforts of the darkened
human mind to find its Creator and Ruler. He treated with sincerest
respect every act of devotion performed in his presence, whether by
Protestant, Catholic, or Mahomedan. There was that in his nature, and his
early Quaker education, that not only kept him in the paths of morality
and on the side of virtue, but through all his writings there runs a
thread of faith in God, which cannot be better expressed than by quoting
one of his own sweet hymns.
“In the peace of hearts at rest,
In the child at mother’s breast,
In the lives that now surround us,
In the deaths that sorely wound us,
Though we may not understand,
Father, we behold Thy hand!”
After leaving Vienna, he went, by the way of Enns to Lintz, which is
situated in one of the most picturesque landscapes of the Danube. The
city is surrounded by towers unconnected by walls and has a very romantic
history. Bayard in his letters speaks of the rural scenes about Lintz
in terms of the highest admiration. It was in these Austrian landscapes
that he composed that poem entitled “The Wayside Dream,” and in which we
find the following descriptive lines:
“The deep and lordly Danube
Goes winding far below;
I see the white-walled hamlets
Amid his vineyards glow,
And southward, through the ether, shine
The Styrian hills of snow.
“O’er many a league of landscape
Sleeps the warm haze of noon;
The wooing winds come freighted
With messages of June,
And down among the corn and flowers
I hear the water’s tune.
“The meadow-lark is singing,
As if it still were morn;
Within the dark pine-forest
The hunter winds his horn,
And the cuckoo’s shy, complaining note
Mocks the maidens in the corn.”
From Lintz, over hills and by meadows, among the merry farmers and their
light-hearted children, they walked on, through Salzburg and Hohenlinden,
to Munich, where another magnificent display of paintings, sculpture,
palaces, parks, and historic localities, rewarded him for his long walk
and limited supply of food. He had so little money that he was compelled
to live on twenty cents a day. There he found the great works of
Thorwaldsen, Cornelius, and Schwanthaler, and copies in marble of almost
every celebrated piece of antique sculpture. There were the gorgeous
palaces of kings and dukes, the beautifully wrought halls and churches,
with the spacious avenues and charming parks. No city in the world
contains such rich decorations, such unique and profuse ornamentation, or
such harmony of design and arrangement, as is shown in the palace halls
and public edifices of Munich. How a visit to them sweetens everything
else in after life, and how the memory of them ever lightens the burden
of care! What American could walk those pavements and floors and not
yearn for the power to give to his own country something to match those
marvellous structures! Bayard must have felt that impulse in common with
others; but, unlike many others, he kept his promise, which was to awaken
a love in every American heart for art in its grand and stable forms; and
many are the promptings and rebukes which we, as a people, have received
from his pen as writer, and from his lips as a lecturer.
From Munich, the route chosen by Bayard lay through Augsburg, Ulm, and
Wurtemberg, and when he entered the latter country, at Esslingen, he said
the very atmosphere was permeated with poetry. He was delighted with the
green vales, lofty hills, lovely vineyards, waving forests, and feudal
ruins. He was grateful to the kind people, and was made happy by their
universal cheerfulness and good-nature. It was the home of Schiller!
There the first nine years of the poet’s life were spent, and scarce a
nook is there about the interesting old cities which that boy did not
explore. It was toward Wurtemberg, as his childhood’s home, Schiller
exhibited the greatest regard; alas, it was there, too, in Stuttgart,
that the tyrannical Duke imprisoned him for publishing his first play.
There, too, the patriotic Uhland sat in the halls of legislation, and
wrote those poems which fired the hearts of his countrymen to a brave
defence of fatherland.
Bayard’s happy stay in Esslingen, and his word-pictures of its
attractions, show the progress which he had already made in his love for
that German poetry, of which he was to become so popular an expounder. He
praises the river Neckar and its flowery banks, he lauds the people, he
portrays the landscapes in the brightest colors which poetry may lend to
prose. Bright day! one he never recalled without exclamations of pleasure!
After such interest as he exhibited in the country of Schiller, it is no
surprise, the next day after leaving Esslingen, to find him in Stuttgart,
looking up into the pensive face of Thorwaldsen’s colossal statue of
Schiller. So attracted and entranced was he by the interpretation of
Schiller, made by the natives, the scenery, and the old home, that when
beautiful Stuttgart opens its avenues, parks, cathedrals, palaces, and
galleries to him, he forsakes and neglects them all for this huge but
faithfully wrought counterfeit in stone of the persecuted singer. To
his naturally sentimental and sensitive character, the German poet was
revealed in ideals more fascinating than any realities. He studied the
face of his brother poet, praised his beauty, repeated a broken stanza of
“William Tell,” and left the other attractions of Stuttgart unseen.
Passing the castle of Ludwigsburg, and skirting the village of Marbach,
the birthplace of Schiller, a village then about the size of Kennett now,
but obliged to push on for fear of starvation, he walked to Betigheim,
and thence the next day to his first German home, Heidelberg.