visitors a certain amount of artistic, or æsthetic, taste. There are
three ways of looking at everything--the practical, the theoretical,
and the æsthetic. The forest is seen from the practical point of view
by the man who inquires if it conduces to the healthiness of the
district, or the owner who calculates its value as firewood; from
the theoretical, by the botanist who makes a scientific study of its
plant life; from the æsthetic or artistic, by the man who has no
thought but for its appearance, its effect as part of the landscape.
It is this last, the artistic, æsthetic view, that Oswald is unable
to take. He has no eyes; his reasoning power and his morality have
deprived his senses of their freshness. Therefore he cannot lose sight
of the substance in the form, therefore the Colosseum awakens in him
only the remembrance of all the blood so wickedly spilled there. In
Corinne's vindication of the æsthetic view we feel the influence of
Germany, more particularly of A. W. Schlegel, the first exponent of the
awakening romantic spirit in that country. For, however differently
Romanticism may develop in different countries, one thing which it
invariably maintains is, that the beautiful is its own aim and end, or
Selbstzweck, as it was called in Germany; an idea borrowed from Kant's
_Kritik der Urtheilskraft_; the vindication of beauty as the standard
and true aim of art. In France this theory was expressed by the formula
_l'art pour l'art_, and it makes its appearance for the first time in
Denmark in certain of Oehlenschläger's poems.
But it is not only the art, but the people and the life of Italy, that
must be seen with the artist's eye to be understood and appreciated.
Nothing is more common than to meet in Italy, Englishmen, Germans or
Frenchmen, who, seeing everything from their national point of view,
have nothing but blame for everything. In the eyes of the Germans
the women lack that timid modesty, that maidenliness, which is their
ideal; Englishmen are shocked by the want of cleanliness and order;
Frenchmen are dissatisfied with the social intercourse, the absence
of conversational ability, and express contempt for the Italian prose
style.
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.
[Illustration: WINCKELMANN]
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.