know exactly what to think, and where to think it. My expectations had been so often disappointed, that my pulse was somewhat calmer. Nevertheless, the glowing eulogiums of these celebrated artists could not but stimulate anticipation. We made our way, therefore, first to the _salon_ devoted to the works of Raphael and Correggio, and soon found ourselves before the grand painting. Trembling with eagerness, I looked up. Was that the picture? W. whispered to me, “I think we have mistaken the painting.”
“No, we have not,” said I, struggling to overcome the disappointment which I found creeping over me. The source of this disappointment was the thin and faded appearance of the coloring, which at first suggested to me the idea of a water-colored sketch. It had evidently suffered barbarously in the process of cleaning, a fact of which I had been forewarned. This circumstance has a particularly unfavorable effect on a picture of Raphael’s, because his coloring, at best, is delicate and reserved, and, as compared with, that of Rubens, approaches to poverty; so that he can ill afford to lose any thing in this way.
Then as to conception and arrangement, there was much which annoyed me. The Virgin and Child in the centre are represented as rising in the air; on one side below them is the kneeling figure of Pope Sixtus; and on the other, that of St. Barbara. Now this Pope Sixtus is, in my eyes, a very homely old man, and as I think no better of homely old men for being popes, his presence in the picture is an annoyance. St. Barbara, on the other side, has the most beautiful head and face that could be represented; but then she is kneeling on a cloud with such a judicious and coquettish arrangement of her neck, shoulders, and face, to show every fine point in them, as makes one feel that no saint (unless with a Parisian education) could ever have dropped into such a position in the _abandon_ of holy rapture. In short, she looks like a theatrical actress; without any sympathy with the solemnity of the religious conception, who is there merely because a beautiful woman was wanted to fill up the picture.
Then that old, faded green curtain, which is painted as hanging down on either side of the picture, is, to my eye, a nuisance. The whole interest, therefore, of the piece concentrates in the centre figures, the Madonna and Child, and two angel children gazing up from the foot of the picture. These angel children were the first point on which my mind rested, in its struggle to overcome its disappointment, and bring itself _en rapport_ with the artist. In order fully to appreciate their spiritual beauty, one must have seen an assortment of those things called angels, which occur in the works of the old masters. Generally speaking, I know of nothing more calculated to moderate any undue eagerness to go to heaven than the common run of canvas angels. Far the greater part are roistering, able-bodied fellows with wings, giving indisputable signs of good living, and of a coarseness slightly suggestive of blackguardism. Far otherwise with _these_ fair creatures, with their rainbow-colored wings, and their serene, upturned eyes of thought baptized with emotion. They are the first things I have seen worthy of my ideas of Raphael.
As to the Madonna, I think that, when Wilkie says she is “nearer the perfection of female elegance and grace than any thing in painting,” he does not speak with discrimination. Mere physical beauty and grace are not _the_ characteristics of the figure: many more perfect forms can be found, both on canvas and in marble. But the merits of the figure, to my mind, are, first, its historic accuracy in representing the dark-eyed Jewish maiden; second, the wonderful fulness and depth of expression thrown into the face; and third, the mysterious resemblance and sympathy between the face of the mother and that of the divine child. To my eye, this picture has precisely that which Murillo’s Assumption in the Louvre wants: it has an unfathomable depth of earnestness. The Murillo is its superior in coloring and grace of arrangement. At first sight of the Murillo every one exclaims at once, “Plow beautiful!”–at sight of this they are silent. Many are at first disappointed; but the picture fastens the attention, and grows upon the thoughts; while that of Murillo is dismissed with the words of admiration on the lips.
This picture excited my ponderings and inquiries. There was a conflict of emotion in that mother’s face, and shadowed mysteriously in the child’s, of which I queried, “Was it fear? was it sorrow? was it adoration and faith? was it a presage of the hour when a sword should pierce through her own soul? Yet, with this, was there not a solemn triumph in the thought that she alone, of all women, had been called to that baptism of anguish? And in that infant face there seemed a foreshadowing of the spirit which said, “Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? But for this cause came I unto this hour.”
The deep-feeling soul which conceived this picture has spread over the whole divine group a tender and transparent shadow of sorrow. It is this idea of sorrow in heaven–sorrow, for the lost, in the heart of God himself–which forms the most sacred mystery of Christianity; and into this innermost temple of sorrow had Raphael penetrated. He is a sacred poet, and his poetry has precisely that trait which Milton lacks–tenderness and sympathy. This picture, so unattractive to the fancy in merely physical recommendations, has formed a deeper part of my inner consciousness than any I have yet seen. I can recall it with perfect distinctness, and often return to ponder it in my heart.
In this room there was also the _chef-d’luvre_ of Correggio–his celebrated Notte, or the Nativity of Jesus; and, that you may know what I ought to have thought, I will quote you a sentence from Wilkie. “All the powers of art are here united to make a perfect work. Here the simplicity of the drawing of the Virgin and Child is shown in contrast with the foreshortening of the group of angels–the strongest unity of effect with the most perfect system of intricacy. The emitting the light from the body of the child, though a supernatural illusion, is eminently successful. The matchless beauty of the Virgin and Child, the group of angels overhead, the daybreak in the sky, and the whole arrangement of light and shadow, give it a right to be considered, in conception at least, the greatest of his works.”
I said before that light and shadow were Correggio’s gods–that the great purpose for which he lived, moved, and had his being, was to show up light and shadow. Now, so long as he paints only indifferent objects,–Nymphs, and Fauns, and mythologic divinities,–I had no objection. Light and shadow are beautiful things, capable of a thousand blendings, softenings, and harmonizings, which one loves to have represented: the great Artist of all loves light and shadow; why else does he play such a magical succession of changes upon them through all creation? But for an artist to make the most solemn mystery of religion a mere tributary to the exhibition of a trick of art, is a piece of profanity. What was in this man’s head when he painted this representation of the hour when his Maker was made flesh that he might redeem a world? Nothing but _chiaro-scuro_ and foreshortening. This overwhelming scene would give him a fine chance to do two things: first, to represent a phosphorescent light from the body of the child; and second, to show off some foreshortened angels. Now, as to these angels, I have simply to remark that I should prefer a seraph’s head to his heels; and that a group of archangels, kicking from the canvas with such alarming vigor, however much it may illustrate foreshortening, does not illustrate either glory to God in the highest, or peace on earth and good will to men. Therefore I have quarrelled with Correggio, as I always expected to do if he profaned the divine mysteries. How could any one, who had a soul to understand that most noble creation of Raphael, turn, the next moment, to admire this?
Here also are six others of Correggio’s most celebrated paintings. They are all mere representations of the physical, with little of the moral. His picture of the Virgin and Child represents simply a very graceful, beautiful woman, holding a fine little child. His peculiar excellences in the management of his lights and shades appear in all.
In one of the halls we found a Magdalen by Battoni, which gave me more pleasure, on first sight, than any picture in the gallery. It is a life-sized figure of the Magdalen stretched upon the ground, reading an open Bible. I like it, first, because the figure is every way beautiful and well proportioned; second, on account of an elevated simplicity hi the arrangement and general effect. The dark, rocky background throws out distinctly the beautiful figure, raised on one elbow, her long, golden hair floating loosely down, as she bends forward over her book with parted lips, slightly flushed cheek, and an air of rapt and pleased attention. Though the neck and bosom are exposed, yet there is an angelic seriousness and gravity in the conception of the piece which would check an earthly thought. The woman is of that high class about whom there might seem to be a hovering angelic presence–the perfection of beauty and symmetry, without a tinge of sensual attraction.
All these rooms are full of artists copying different paintings,–some upon slabs of Dresden china,–producing pictures of exquisite, finish, and very pretty as boudoir ornaments.
After exhausting this first room, we walked through the galleries, which I will name, to give you some idea of their extent.
Two rooms, of old German and Dutch masters, are curious,–as exhibiting the upward struggles of art. Many of the pictures are hard as a tavern sign, and as ill drawn; but they mark the era of dawning effort.
Then a long corridor of Dutch paintings, in which Rubens figures conspicuously, displaying, as usual, all manner of scarlet abominations, mixed with most triumphant successes. He has a boar hunt here, which is absolutely terrific. Rubens has a power peculiar to himself of throwing into the eyes of animals the phosphorescent magnetic gleam of life and passion. Here also was a sketch of his for a large picture at Munich of the Last Judgment, in which the idea of physical torture is enlarged upon with a most revolting vigor of imagery.
Then a small room devoted to the Spanish and Italian schools, containing pictures by Murillo and Velasquez. Then the French hall, where were two magnificent Claudes, the finest I had yet seen. They were covered with glass, (a bad arrangement,) which rendered one of them almost entirely _unseeable_. I studied these long, with much interest. The combinations were poetical, the foregrounds minutely finished, even to the painting of flowers, and the fine invisible veil of ether that covers the natural landscape given as I have never before seen it. The peculiarity of these pieces is, that they are painted in _green_–a most common arrangement in God’s landscapes, but very uncommon in those of great masters. Painters give us trees and grounds, brown, yellow, red, chocolate, any color, in short, but green. The reason of this is, that green is an exceedingly difficult color to manage. I have seen, sometimes, in spring, set against a deep-blue sky, an array of greens, from lightest yellow to deepest blue of the pines, tipped and glittering with the afternoon’s sun, yet so swathed in some invisible, harmonizing medium, that the strong contrasts of color jarred upon no sense. All seemed to be bound by the invisible cestus of some celestial Venus. Yet what painter would dare attempt the same? Herein lies the particular triumph of Claude. It is said that he took his brush and canvas into the fields, and there studied, hour after hour, into the mysteries of that airy medium which lies between the eye and the landscape, as also between the foreground and the background. Hence he, more than others, succeeds in giving the green landscape and the blue sky the same effect that God gives them. If, then, other artists would attain a like result, let them not copy Claude, but Claude’s Master. Would that our American artists would remember that God’s pictures are nearer than Italy. To them it might be said, (as to the Christian,) “The word is nigh thee.” When we shall see a New England artist, with his easel, in the fields, seeking, hour after hour, to reproduce on the canvas the magnificent glories of an elm, with its firmament of boughs and branches,–when he has learned that there is in it what is worth a thousand Claudes–then the morning star of art will have risen on our hills. God send us an artist with a heart to reverence his own native mountains and fields, and to veil his face in awe when the great Master walks before his cottage door. When shall arise the artist whose inspiration shall be in prayer and in communion with God?–whose eye, unsealed to behold his beauty in the natural world, shall offer up, on canvas, landscapes which shall be hymns and ascriptions?
By a strange perversity, people seem to think that the Author of nature cannot or will not inspire art; but “He that formed the eye, shall he not see? he that planted the ear, shall he not hear?” Are not God’s works the great models, and is not sympathy of spirit with the Master necessary to the understanding of the models?
But to continue our walk. We entered another Dutch apartment, embellished with works by Dietrich, prettily colored, and laboriously minute; then into a corridor devoted chiefly to the works of Rembrandt and scholars. In this also were a number of those minute culinary paintings, in which cabbages, brass kettles, onions, potatoes, &c., are reproduced with praiseworthy industry. Many people are enraptured with these; but for my part I have but a very little more pleasure in a turnip, onion, or potato in a picture than out, and always wish that the industry and richness of color had been bestowed upon things in themselves beautiful. The great Master, it is true, gives these models, but he gives them not to be looked at, but eaten. If painters could only contrive to paint vegetables (cheaply) so that they could be eaten, I would be willing.
Two small saloons are next devoted to the modern Dutch and German school. In these is Denner’s head of an old woman, which Cowper celebrates in a pretty poem–a marvel of faithful reproduction. One would think the old lady must have sat at least a year, till he had daguerreotyped every wrinkle and twinkle. How much better all this labor spent on the head of a good old woman than on the head of a cabbage!
And now come a set of Italian rooms, in which we have some curious specimens of the Romish development in religion; as, for instance, the fathers Gregory, Augustine, and Jerome, meditating on the immaculate conception of the Virgin. Think of a painter employing all his powers in representing such a fog bank!
Next comes a room dedicated to the works of Titian, in which two nude Venuses, of a very different character from the de Milon, are too conspicuous. Titian is sensuous; a Greek, but not of the highest class.
The next room is devoted to Paul Veronese. This Paul has quite a character of his own–a grand old Venetian, with his head full of stateliness, and court ceremony, and gorgeous conventionality, half Oriental in his passion for gold, and gems, and incense. As a specimen of the subjects in which his soul delights, take the following, which he has wrought up into a mammoth picture: Faith, Love, and Hope, presenting to the Virgin Mary a member of the old Venetian family of Concina, who, after having listened to the doctrines of the reformation, had become reconciled to the church. Here is Paul’s piety, naively displayed by giving to the Virgin all the courtly graces of a high-born signorina. He paints, too, the Adoration of the Magi, because it gives such a good opportunity to deal with camels, jewels, turbans, and all the trappings of Oriental royalty. The Virgin and Child are a small part of the affair. I like Paul because he is so innocently unconscious of any thing _deep_ to be expressed; so honestly intent on clothes, jewels, and colors. He is a magnificent master of ceremonies, and ought to have been kept by some king desirous of going down to posterity, to celebrate his royal praise and glory.
Another room is devoted to the works of Guido. One or two of the Ecce Homo are much admired. To me they are, as compared with my conceptions of Jesus, more than inadequate. It seems to me that, if Jesus Christ should come again on earth, and walk through a gallery of paintings, and see the representations of sacred subjects, he would say again, as he did of old in the temple, “Take these things hence!”
How could men who bowed down before art as an idol, and worshipped it as an ultimate end, and thus sensualized it, represent these holy mysteries, into which angels desired to look?
There are many representations of Christ here, set forth in the guide book as full of grace and majesty, which, any soul who has ever felt his infinite beauty would reject as a libel. And as to the Virgin Mother, one’s eye becomes wearied in following the countless catalogue of the effeminate inane representations.
There is more pathos and beauty in those few words of the Scripture, “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother,” than in all these galleries put together. The soul that has learned to know her from the Bible, loving without idolizing, hoping for blest communion with her beyond the veil, seeking to imitate only the devotion which stood by the cross in the deepest hour of desertion, cannot be satisfied with these insipidities.
Only once or twice have I seen any thing like an approach towards the representations of the _scriptural_ idea. One is this painting by Raphael. Another is by him, and is called Madonna Maison d’Alba: of this I have seen only a copy; it might have been painted on the words, “Now Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” The figure is that of a young Jewess, between girl and womanhood, in whose air and eye are expressed at once the princess of the house of David, the poetess, and the thoughtful sequestered maiden. She is sitting on the ground, the book of the prophets in one hand, lying listless at her side; the other hand is placed beneath the chin of her infant son, who looks inquiringly into her face. She does not see him–her eye has a sorrowful, far-darting look, as if beyond this flowery childhood she saw the dim image of a cross and a sepulchre. This was Mary, I have often thought that, in the reaction from the idolatry of Romanism, we Protestants were in danger of forgetting the treasures of religious sweetness, which the Bible has given us in her brief history.
It seems to me the time demands the forming of a new school of art based upon Protestant principles. For whatever vigor and originality there might once be in art, based on Romanism, it has certainly been worn threadbare by repetition.
Apropos to this. During the time I was in Paris, I formed the acquaintance of Schoeffer, whose _Christus Consolator_ and Remumrator and other works, have made him known in America. I went with a lady who has for many years been an intimate friend, and whose head has been introduced into several of his paintings. On the way she gave me some interesting particulars of him and his family. His mother was an artist–a woman of singularly ethereal and religious character. There are three brothers devoted to art; of these Ary is the one best known in America, and the most distinguished. For some time, while they were studying, they were obliged to be separated, and the mother, to keep up the sympathy between them, used to copy the design of the one with whom she resided for the other two. A singular strength of attachment unites the family.
We found Schoeffer in retired lodgings in the outskirts of Paris, and were presented to his very pretty and agreeable English wife. In his studio we saw a picture of his mother, a most lovely and delicate woman, dressed in white, like one of the saints in the Revelation.
Then we saw his celebrated picture, Francisca Rimini, representing a cloudy, dark, infernal region, in which two hapless lovers are whirled round and round in mazes of never-ending wrath and anguish. _His_ face is hid from view; his attitude expresses the extreme of despair. But she clinging to his bosom–what words can tell the depths of love, of an anguish, and of endurance unconquerable, written in her pale sweet face! The picture smote to my heart like a dagger thrust; I felt its mournful, exquisite beauty as a libel on my Father in heaven.
No. It is _not_ God who eternally pursues undying, patient love with storms of vindictive wrath. Alas! well said Jesus, “O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee.” The day will come when it will appear that in earth’s history the sorrowing, invincible tenderness has been all on his part and that the strange word, _long-suffering_, means just what it says.
Nevertheless, the power and pathos of this picture cannot be too much praised. The coloring is beautiful, and though it pained me so much, I felt that it was one of the most striking works of art I had seen.
Schoeffer showed us a large picture, about half finished, in which he represents the gradual rise of the soul through the sorrows of earth to heaven. It consisted of figures grouped together, those nearest earth bowed down and overwhelmed with the most crushing and hopeless sorrow; above them are those who are beginning to look upward, and the sorrow in their faces is subsiding into anxious inquiry; still above them are those who, having caught a gleam of the sources of consolation, express in their faces a solemn calmness; and still higher, rising in the air, figures with clasped hands, and absorbed, upward gaze, to whose eye the mystery has been unveiled, the enigma solved, and sorrow glorified. One among these, higher than the rest, with a face of rapt adoration, seems entering the very gate of heaven.
He also showed us an unfinished picture of the Temptation of Christ. Upon a clear aerial mountain top, Satan, a thunder-scarred, unearthly figure, kneeling, points earnestly to the distant view of the kingdoms of this world. There is a furtive and peculiar expression of eager anxiety betrayed in his face, as if the bitterness of his own blasted eternity could find a momentary consolation in this success. It is the expression of a general, who has staked all his fortune on one die. Of the figure of Jesus I could not judge, in its unfinished state. Whether the artist will solve the problem of uniting energy with sweetness, the Godhead with the manhood, remains to be seen.
The paintings of Jesus are generally unsatisfactory; but Schoefier has approached nearer towards expressing my idea than any artist I have yet seen.
The knowing ones are much divided about Schoeffer. Some say he is no painter. Nothing seems to me so utterly without rule or compass as this world of art Divided into little cliques, each with his shibboleth, artists excommunicate each other as heartily as theologians, and a neophyte who should attempt to make up a judgment by their help would be obliged to shift opinions with every circle.
I therefore look with my own eyes, for if not the best that might be, they are the best that God has given me.
Schoeffer is certainly a poet of a high order. His ideas are beautiful and religious, and his power of expression quite equal to that of many old masters, who had nothing very particular to express.
I should think his chief danger lay in falling into mannerism, and too often repeating the same idea. He has a theory of coloring which is in danger of running out into coldness and poverty of effect. His idea seems to be, that in the representation of spiritual subjects the artist should avoid the sensualism of color, and give only the most chaste and severe tone. Hence he makes much use of white, pale blue, and cloudy grays, avoiding the gorgeousness of the old masters. But it seems probable that in the celestial regions there is more, rather than less, of brilliant coloring than on earth. What can be more brilliant than the rainbow, yet what more perfectly free from earthly grossness? Nevertheless, in looking at the pictures of Schoeffer there is such a serene and spiritual charm spread over them, that one is little inclined to wish them other than they are. No artist that I have ever seen, not even Raphael, has more power of glorifying the human face by an exalted and unearthly expression. His head of Joan of Arc, at Versailles, is a remarkable example. It is a commentary on that scripture–“And they beheld his face, as it were the face of an angel.”
Schoeffer is fully possessed with the idea of which I have spoken, of raising Protestant art above the wearisome imitations of Romanism. The object is noble and important. I feel that he must succeed.
His best award is in the judgments of the unsophisticated heart. A painter who does not burn incense to his palette and worship his brushes, who reverences ideas above mechanism, will have all manner of evil spoken against him by artists, but the human heart will always accept him.
LETTER XLIV.
BERLIN, August 10.
MY DEAR:–
Here we are in Berlin–a beautiful city. These places that kings build, have of course, more general uniformity and consistency of style than those that grow up by chance. The prevalence of the Greek style of architecture, the regularity and breadth of the streets, the fine trees, especially in the Unter den Linden, on which are our rooms, struck me more than any thing I have seen since Paris. Why Paris charms me so much more than other cities of similar recommendations, I cannot say, any more than a man can tell why he is fascinated by a lady love no fairer to his reason than a thousand others. Perhaps it is the reflected charm of the people I knew there, that makes it seem so sunny.
This afternoon we took a guide, and went first through the royal palace. The new chapel, which is being built by the present prince, is circular in form, with a dome one hundred and thirty feet high. The space between the doors is occupied by three circular recesses, with figures of prophets and apostles in fresco. Over one door is the Nativity,–over the other, the Resurrection,–also in fresco. On the walls around were pictures somewhat miscellaneous, I thought; for example, John Huss, St. Cecilia, Melanchthon, Luther, several women, saints, apostles, and evangelists. These paintings are all by the first German artists. The floor is a splendid mosaic, and the top of the dome is richly adorned with frescoes.
Still, though beautiful, the chapel seemed to me deficient in unity of effect. One admires the details too much to appreciate it as a whole. We passed through the palace rooms. Its paintings are far inferior to those of Windsor. The finest royal paintings have gone to adorn the walls of the Museum. There was one magnificent Vandyke, into which he has introduced a large dog–some relief from his eternal horses. There was David’s picture of Bonaparte crossing the Alps, of which Mrs. P. has the engraving, and you can tell her that it is much more impressive than the painting. Opposite to this picture hangs Blucher, looking about as amiable as one might suppose a captain of a regiment of mastiffs. Our guide, pointing to the portrait of Napoleon, with evident pride, said, “Blucher brought that from Paris. He said Napoleon had carried so many pictures from other countries to Paris, that now he should be carried away himself.”
There were portraits of Queen Louisa, very beautiful; of Queen Victoria, a present; one of the Empress of Russia; also a statue of the latter. The ball room contained a statue of Victory, by Ranch, a beautiful female figure, the model of which, we were told, is his own daughter. He had the grace to allow her some clothing, which was fatherly, for an artist. The palace rooms were very magnificent. The walls were covered with a damask of silk and gold, into which was inwrought the Prussian eagle. In the crowning room was an immense quantity of plate, in solid gold and silver. The guide seemed not a little proud of _our_ king, princes, and palace. Men will attach themselves to power and splendor as naturally as moss will grow on a rock. There is, perhaps, a foundation for this in human nature– witness the Israelites of old, who could not rest till they obtained a king. The Guide told us there were nine hundred rooms in the palace, but that he should only take us through the best. We were duly sensible of the mercy.
Then we drove to Charlottenburg to see the Mausoleum. I know not when I have been more deeply affected than there; and yet, not so much by the sweet, lifelike statue of the queen as by that of the king, her husband, executed by the same hand. Such an expression of long-desired rest, after suffering and toil, is shed over the face!–so sweet, so heavenly! There, where he has prayed year after year,–hoping, yearning, longing,–there, at last, he rests, life’s long anguish over! My heart melted as I looked at these two, so long divided,–he so long a mourner, she so long mourned,–now calmly resting side by side in a sleep so tranquil.
We went through the palace. We saw the present king’s writing desk and table in his study, just as he left them. His writing establishment is about as plain as yours. Men who really mean to do any thing do not use fancy tools. His bed room, also, is in a style of severe simplicity. There were several engravings fastened against the wall; and in the anteroom a bust and medallion of the Empress Eugenie–a thing which I should not exactly have expected in a born king’s palace; but beauty is sacred, and kings cannot call it _parvenu_. Then we went into the queen’s bed room, finished in green, and then through the rooms of Queen Louisa. Those marks of her presence, which you saw during the old king’s lifetime, are now removed: we saw no traces of her dresses, gloves, or books. In one room, draped in white muslin over pink, we were informed the Empress of Russia was born.
In going out to Charlottenburg, we rode through the Thiergarten, the Tuileries of Berlin. In one of the most quiet and sequestered spots is the monument erected by the people of Berlin to their old king. The pedestal is Carrara marble, sculptured with beautiful scenes called garden pleasures–children in all manner of out-door sports, and parents fondly looking on. It is graceful, and peculiarly appropriate to those grounds where parents and children are constantly congregating. The whole is surmounted by a statue of the king, in white marble–the finest representation of him I have ever seen. Thoughtful, yet benign, the old king seems like a good father keeping a grave and affectionate watch over the pleasures of his children in their garden frolics. There was something about these moss-grown gardens that seemed so rural and pastoral, that I at once preferred them to all I had seen in Europe. Choice flowers are planted in knots, here and there, in sheltered nooks, as if they had grown by accident; and an air of sweet, natural wildness is left amid the most careful cultivation. The people seemed to be enjoying themselves less demonstratively and with less vivacity than in France, but with a calm inwardness. Each nation has its own way of being happy, and the style of life in each bears a certain relation of appropriateness to character. The trim, gay, dressy, animated air of the Tuileries suits admirably with the mobile, sprightly vivacity of society there. Both, in their way, are beautiful; but this seems less formal, and more according to nature.
As we were riding home, our guide, who was a full feathered monarchist, told us, with some satisfaction, the number of palaces in Prussia. Suddenly, to my astonishment, “Young America” struck into the conversation in the person of little G.
“We do things more economically in America. Our president don’t have sixty palaces; he has to be satisfied with one White House.”
The guide entered into an animated defence of king and country. These palaces–did not the king keep them for the people? did he not bear all the expense of caring for them, that they might furnish public pleasure grounds and exhibition rooms? Had we not seen the people walking about in them, and enjoying themselves?
This was all true enough, and we assented. The guide continued, Did not the king take the public money to make beautiful museums for the people, where they could study the fine arts?–and did our government do any such thing?
I thought of our surplus revenue, and laid my hand on my mouth. But yet there is a progress of democratic principle indicated by this very understanding that the king is to hold things for the benefit of the people. Times are altered since Louis XIV. was instructed by his tutor, as he looked out on a crowd of people, “These are all yours;” and since he said, “_L’élot, c’est moi_”
Our guide seemed to feel bound, however, to exhaust himself in comparison of our defects with their excellences.
“Some Prussians went over to America to live,” he said, “and had to come back again; they could not live there.”
“Why not?” said I.
“O, they said there was nothing done there but working and going to church!”
“That’s a fact,” said W., with considerable earnestness.
“Yes,” said our guide; “they said we have but one life to live, and we want to have some comfort in it.”
It is a curious fact, that just in proportion as a country is free and self-governed it has fewer public amusements. America and Scotland have the fewest of any, and Italy the most. Nevertheless, I am far from thinking that this is either necessary or desirable: the subject of providing innocent public amusements for the masses is one that we ought seriously to consider. In Berlin, and in all other German cities, there are gardens and public grounds in which there are daily concerts of a high order, and various attractions, to which people can gain admittance for a very trifling sum. These refine the feelings, and cultivate the taste; they would be particularly useful in America in counteracting that tendency to a sordid materialism, which is one of our great national dangers.
We went over the Berlin Museum. In general style Greek–but Greek vitalized by the infusion of the German mind. In its general arrangements one of the most gorgeous and impressive combinations of art which I have seen. Here are the great frescoes of Kaulbach, Cornelius, and other German artists, who have so grafted Grecian ideas into the German stock that the growth has the foliage and coloring of a new plant. One set of frescoes, representing the climate and scenery of Greece, had on me a peculiar and magical effect. Alas! there never has been the Greece that we conceive; we see it under the soft, purple veil of distance, like an Alpine valley embraced by cloudy mountains; but there was the same coarse dust and _débris_ of ordinary life there as with us. The true Arcadia lies beyond the grave. The collection of pictures is rich in historic curiosities–valuable as marking the progress of art. One Claude Lorraine here was a matchless specimen–a perfect victory over all the difficulties of green landscape painting.
LETTER XLV.
WITTENBERG.
MY DEAR:–
I am here in the station house at Wittenberg. I have been seeing and hearing to-day for you, and now sit down to put on paper the results of my morning. “What make you from Wittenberg?” Wittenberg! name of the dreamy past; dimly associated with Hamlet, Denmark, the moonlight terrace, and the Baltic Sea, by one line of Shakspeare; but made more living by those who have thought, loved, and died here; nay, by those who cannot die, and whose life has been life to all coming ages.
How naturally, on reaching a place long heard of and pondered, do we look round for something uncommon, quaint, and striking! Nothing of the kind was here; only the dead flat of this most level scenery, with its dreary prairie-like sameness. Certainly it was not this scenery that stirred up a soul in Luther, and made him nail up his theses on the Wittenberg church door.
“But, at any rate, let us go to Wittenberg,” said I; “get a guide, a carriage, cannot you?” as I walked to one window of the station house and another, and looked out to see something wonderful. Nothing was in sight, however; and after the usual sputter of gutturals which precedes any arrangement in this country, we were mounted in a high, awkward carriage, and rode to the town. Two ancient round tower and a wall first met my eye; then a drawbridge, arched passage, and portcullis. Under this passage we passed, and at our right hand was the church, where once was laid the worn form that had stood so many whirlwinds–where, in short, Luther was buried. But this we did not then know; so we drove by, and went to a hotel. Talked English and got German; talked French with no better success. At last, between W., G., and the dictionary, managed to make it understood that we wanted a guide to the Luther relics. A guide was after a time forthcoming, in the person of a little woman who spoke no English, whom, guide book in hand, we followed.
The church is ancient, and, externally, impressive enough; inside it is wide, cold, whitewashed, prosaic; whoever gets up feeling does it against wind and tide, so far as appearances are concerned. We advance to the spot in the floor where our guide raises a trap door, and shows us underneath the plate inscribed with the name of Luther, and by it the plate recording the resting-place of his well-beloved Philip Melanchthon; then to the grave of the Elector of Saxony, and John the Steadfast; on one side a full length of Luther, by Lucas Cranach; on the other, one of Melanchthon, by the same hand. Well, we have seen; this is all; “He is not here, he is risen.” “Is this all?” “All,” says our guide, and we go out. I look curiously at the old door where Luther nailed up his theses; but even this is not the identical door; that was destroyed by the French. Still, under that arched doorway he stood, hammer and nails in hand; he held up his paper, he fitted it straight; rap, rap,–there, one nail–another–it is up, and he stands looking at it. These very stones were over that head that are now over mine, this very ground beneath his feet. As I turned away I gave an earnest look at the old church. Grass is growing on its buttresses; it has a desolate look, though strong and well kept. The party pass on, and I make haste to overtake them.
Down we go, doing penance over the round paving stones; and our next halt is momentary. In the market-place, before the town house, (a huge, three-gabled building, like a beast of three horns,) stands Luther’s bronze monument; apple women and pear women, onion and beet women, are thickly congregated around, selling as best they may. There stands Luther, looking benignantly, holding and pointing to the open Bible; the women, meanwhile, thinking we want fruit, hold up their wares and talk German. But our conductress has a regular guide’s trot, inexorable as fate; so on we go.
Wittenberg is now a mean little town; all looks poor and low; yet it seems like a place that has seen better days. Houses, now used as paltry shops, have, some of them, carved oaken doors, with antic freaks of architecture, which seem to signify that their former owners were able to make a figure in the world. In fact, the houses seem a sort of phantasmagoria of decayed gentlefolk, in the faded, tarnished, old-fashioned finery of the past. Our guide halts her trot suddenly before a house, which she announces as that of Louis Cranach; then on she goes. Louis is dead, and Magdalen, his wife, also; so there is no one there to welcome us; on we go also. Once Louis was a man of more consequence.
Now we come to Luther’s house–a part of the old convent. Wide yawns the stone doorway of the court; a grinning masque grotesquely looks down from its centre, and odd carvings from the sides. A colony of swallows have established their nests among the queer old carvings and gnome-like faces, and are twittering in and out, superintending their domestic arrangements. We enter a court surrounded with buildings; then ascend, through a strange doorway, a winding staircase, passing small, lozenge-shaped window. Up these stairs _he_ oft trod, in all the moods of that manifold and wonderful nature–gay, joyous, jocose, fervent, defiant, imploring; and up these stairs have trod wondering visitors, thronging from all parts of the world, to see the man of the age. Up these stairs come Philip Melanchthon, Lucas Cranach, and their wives, to see how fares Luther after some short journey, or some new movement. Now, all past, all solitary; the stairs dirty, the windows dim.
[Illustration: _of Luther’s room._]
And this is Luther’s room. It was a fine one in its day, that is plain. The arched recesses of the windows; the roof, divided in squares, and, like the walls and cornice, painted in fresco; the windows, with their quaint, round panes,–all, though now so soiled and dim, speak plainly of a time when life was here, and all things wore a rich and joyous glow. In this room that great heart rejoiced in the blessedness of domestic life, and poured forth some of those exulting strains, glorifying the family state, which yet remain. Here his little Magdalen, his little Jacky, and the rest made joyous uproar.
There stands his writing table, a heavy mass of wood; clumsy as the time and its absurdities, rougher now than ever, in its squalid old age, and partly chipped away by relic seekers. Here he sat; here lay his paper; over this table was bent that head whose brain power was the earthquake of Europe. Here he wrote books which he says were rained, hailed, and snowed from the press in every language and tongue. Kings and emperors could not bind the influence from this writing table; and yet here, doubtless, he wrestled, struggled, prayed, and such tears as only he could shed fell upon it. Nothing of all this says the table. It only stands a poor, ungainly relic of the past; the inspiring angel is gone upward.
Catharine’s nicely-carved cabinet, with its huge bunches of oaken flowers hanging down between its glass panels, shows Luther’s drinking cup. There is also his embroidered portrait, on which, doubtless, she expended much thought, as she evidently has much gold thread. I seem to see her conceiving the bold design–she will work the doctor’s likeness. She asks Magdalen Cranach’s opinion, and Magdalen asks Lucas’s, and there is a deal of discussion, and Lucas makes wise suggestions. In the course of many fireside chats, the thing grows. Philip and his Kate, dropping in, are shown it. Little Jacky and Magdalen, looking shyly over their mother’s shoulder, are wonderfully impressed with the likeness, and think their mother a great woman. Luther takes it in hand, and passes some jests upon it, which make them laugh all round, and so at last it grows to be a veritable likeness. Poor, faded, tarnished thing! it looks like a ghost now.
In one corner is a work of art by Luther–no less than a stove planned after his own pattern. It is a high, black, iron pyramid, panelled, each panel presenting in relief some Scripture subject. Considering the remote times, this stove is quite an affair; the figures are, some of them, spirited and well conceived, though now its lustre, like all else here, is obscured by dust and dirt. Why do the Germans leave this place so dirty? The rooms of Shakspeare are kept clean and in repair; the Catholics enshrine in gold and silver the relics of their saints, but this Protestant Mecca is left literally to the moles and the bats.
I slipped aside a panel in the curious old windows, and looked down into the court surrounded by the university buildings. I fancied the old times when students, with their scholastic caps and books, were momently passing and repassing. I thought of the stir there was here when the pope’s bull against Luther came out, and of the pattering of feet and commotion there were in this court, when Luther sallied out to burn the pope’s bull under the oak, just beyond the city wall near by. The students thought it good fun; students are always progressive; they admired the old boy for his spirit; they threw up caps and shouted, and went out to see the ceremony with a will. Philip Melanchthon wondered if brother Martin was not going a little too fast, but hoped it would be overruled, and that all would be for the best! So, coming out, I looked longingly beyond the city gate, and wanted to go to the place of the oak tree, where the ceremony was performed, but the party had gone on.
[Illustration: _of Melanchthon’s house._]
Coming back, I made a pause opposite the house on which is seen the inscription, “Here Melanchthon lived, labored, and died.” A very good house it was, too, in its day; in architecture it was not unlike this. I went across the street to take a good look at it; then I came over, and as the great arched door stood open, I took the liberty of walking in. Like other continental houses, this had an arched passage running through to a back court and a side door. A stone stairway led up from this into the house, and a small square window, with little round panes, looked through into the passage. A young child was toddling about there, and I spoke to it; a man came out, and looked as if he rather wondered what I might be about; so I retreated. Then I threaded my way past queer peaked-roofed buildings to a paved court, where stood the old church–something like that in Halle, a great Gothic structure, with two high towers connected by a gallery. I entered. Like the other church it has been whitewashed, and has few architectural attractions. It is very large, with two galleries, one over the other, and might hold, I should think, five thousand people.
Here Luther preached. These walls, now so silent, rung to the rare melody of that voice, to which the Roman Catholic writers attributed some unearthly enchantment, so did it sway all who listened. Here, clustering round these pillars, standing on these flags, were myriads of human beings; and what heart-beatings, what surgings of thought, what tempests of feeling, what aspirations, what strivings, what conflicts shook that multitude, and possessed them as he spoke! “I preach,” he said, “not for professor this or that, nor for the elector or prince, but for poor Jack behind the door;” and so, striking only on the chords common to all hearts, he bowed all, for he who can inspire the illiterate and poor, callous with ignorance and toil, can move also the better informed. Here, also, that voice of his, which rose above the choir and organ, sang the alto in those chorals which he gave to the world. Monmouth, sung in this great church by five thousand voices, must needs have a magnificent sound.
The altar-piece is a Lord’s Supper, by Louis Cranach, who appears in the foreground as a servant. On each side are the pictures of the Sacraments. In baptism, Melanchthon stands by a laver, holding a dripping baby, whom he has just immersed, one of Luther’s children, I suppose, for he is standing by; a venerable personage in a long beard holds the towel to receive the little neophyte. From all I know of babies, I should think this form of baptism liable to inconvenient accessories and consequences. On the other side, Luther is preaching, and opposite, foremost of his audience are, Catharine and her little son. Every thing shows how strictly intimate were Luther, Melanchthon, and Cranach; good sociable times they had together. A slab elaborately carved, in the side of the church, marks the last rest of Lucas and Magdalen Cranach.
I passed out of the church, and walked slowly down to the hotel, purchasing by the way, at a mean little shop, some tolerable engravings of Luther’s room, the church, &c. To show how immutable every thing has been in Wittenberg since Luther died, let me mention that on coming back through the market-place, we found spread out for sale upon a cloth about a dozen pairs of shoes of the precise pattern of those belonging to Luther, which we had seen in Frankfort–clumsy, rude, and heelless. I have heard that Swedenborg said, that in his visit to the invisible world, he encountered a class of spirits who had been there fifty years, and had not yet found out that they were dead. These Wittenbergers, I think, must be of the same conservative turn of mind.
Failing to get a carriage to the station, we started to walk. I paused a moment before the church, to make some little corrections and emendations in my engravings, and thought, as I was doing so, of that quite other scene years ago, when the body of Luther was borne through this gate by a concourse of weeping thousands. These stones, on which I was standing, then echoed all night to the tread of a closely-packed multitude–a muffled sound, like the patter of rain among leaves. There rose through the long, dark hours, alternately, the unrestrained sobbings of the throng, and the grand choral of Luther’s psalms, words and music of his own. Never since the world began was so strange a scene as that. I felt a kind of shadow from it, as I walked homeward gazing on the flat, dreamy distance. A great windmill was creaking its sombre, lazy vanes round and round,–strange, goblin things, these windmills,–and I thought of one of Luther’s sayings. “The heart of a human creature is like the millstones: if corn be shaken thereon, it grindeth the corn, and maketh good meal; but if no corn be there, then it grindeth away itself.” Luther tried the latter process all the first part of his life; but he got the corn at last, and a magnificent grist he made.
Arrived at the station, we found we must wait till half past five in the afternoon for the train. This would have been an intolerable doom in the disconsolate precincts of an English or American station, but not in a German one. As usual, this had a charming garden, laid out with exquisite taste, and all glowing and fragrant with plats of verbena, fuschias, heliotropes, mignonette, pansies, while rows of hothouse flowers, set under the shelter of neatly trimmed hedges, gave brightness to the scene. Among all these pretty grounds were seats and walks, and a gardener, with his dear pipe in his mouth, was moving about, watering his dear flowers, thus combining the two delights of a German, flowers and smoke. These Germans seem an odd race, a mixture of clay and spirit–what with their beer drinking and smoking, and their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earthly; but an ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursting out in most unexpected little jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus.
The station room was an agreeable one, painted prettily in frescoes, with two sofas. So we arranged ourselves in a party. S. and I betook ourselves to our embroidery, and C. read aloud to us, or tried the Amati, and when we were tired of reading and music we strolled in the garden, and I wrote to you.
I wonder why we Anglo-Saxons cannot imitate the liberality of the continent in the matter of railroad stations, and give the traveller something more agreeable than the grim, bare, forbidding places, which now obtain in England and America. This Wittenberg is but a paltry town; and yet how much care is spent to make the station house comfortable and comely! I may here say that nowhere in Europe is railway travelling so entirely convenient as in Germany, particularly in Prussia. All is systematic and orderly; no hurrying or shoving, or disagreeable fuss at stations. The second class cars are, in most points, as good as the first class in England; the conductors are dignified and gentlemanly; you roll on at a most agreeable pace from one handsome station house to another, finding yourself disposed to be pleased with every thing.
There is but one drawback to all this, and that is the smoking. Mythologically represented, these Germans might be considered as a race born of chimneys, with a necessity for smoking in their very nature. A German walking without his pipe is only a dormant volcano; it is in him to smoke all the while; you may be sure the crater will begin to fume before long. Smoking is such an acknowledged attribute of manhood, that the gentler sex seem to have given in to it as one of the immutable things of nature; consequently all the public places where both sexes meet are redolent of tobacco! You see a gentleman doing the agreeable to a lady, cigar in mouth, treating her alternately to an observation and a whiff, both of which seem to her equally matters of course. In the cars some attempt at regulation subsists; there are cars marked “_Nich rauchen_” into which _we_ were always very careful to get; but even in these it is not always possible to make a German suspend an operation which is to him about the same as breathing.
On our way from Frankfort to Halle, in a “_nich rauchen_” car, too, a jolly old gentleman, whose joyous and abundant German sounded to me like the clatter of a thousand of brick, wound up a kind of promiscuous avalanche of declamation by pulling a matchbox from his pocket, and proceeding deliberately to light his pipe. The tobacco was detestable. Now, if a man _must_ smoke, I think he is under moral obligation to have decent tobacco. I began to turn ill, and C. attacked the offender in French; not a word did he understand, and puffed on tranquil and happy. The idea that any body did not like smoke was probably the last that could ever be made to enter his head, even in a language that he did understand. C. then enlisted the next neighbor, who understood French, and got him to interpret that smoke made the lady ill. The chimney-descended man now took his pipe out, and gazed at it and me alternately, with an air of wondering incredulity, and seemed trying to realize some vast conception, but failing in the effort, put his pipe back, and smoked as before! Some old ladies now amiably offered to change places with me, evidently regarding me as the victim of some singular idiosyncrasy. As I changed, a light seemed to dawn on the old chimney’s mind–a good-natured one he was; he looked hard at me, and his whiffs became fainter till at last they ceased, and he never smoked more till I was safe out of the cars.
LETTER XLVI.
ERFURT, Saturday Evening.
MY DEAR:–
I have just been to Luther’s cell in the old Augustine Convent, and if my pilgrimage at Wittenberg was less interesting by the dirt and discomfort of the actual present, here were surroundings less calculated to jar on the frame the scene should inspire. It was about sunset,–a very golden and beautiful one, and C. and I drove through various streets of this old town. I believe I am peculiarly alive to architectural excitements, for these old houses, with their strange windows, odd chimneys, and quaint carvings, delight me wonderfully. Many of them are almost gnome-like in their uncouthness; they please me none the less for that.
We drove first to the cathedral, which, with an old deserted church, seemingly part of itself, forms a pile of Gothic architecture, a wilderness of spires, minarets, arches, and what not, more picturesque than any cathedral I have seen. It stands high on a sort of platform overlooking a military parade ground, and reached by a long flight of steps.
The choir is very beautiful. I cannot describe how these lofty arches, with their stained glass windows, touch my heart. Architecture never can, and never will, produce their like again. They give us aspiration in its highest form and noblest symbol, and wonderful was that mind which conceived them. This choir so darkly bright, its stalls and seats carved in black oak, its flame-like arches, gorgeous with evening light, were a preparation and excitement of mind. Yet it’s remarkable about these old-time cathedrals, that while their is every grand and solemn effect of architecture, there is also always an abundance of subordinate parts, mean, tawdry, revolting, just like the whole system they represent. Out of this beautiful choir I wanted to tear all the tinsel fixtures on its altar, except two very good pictures, and leave it in it noble simplicity.
I remarked here a black oak chandelier, which the guide said was taken from the cathedral of Cologne. It was the very perfection of Gothic carving, and resembled frostwork in its lightness. The floor of the cathedral was covered with effigies in stone, trod smooth by the feet of worshippers; so we living ones are ever walking above the dead, though we do not always, as here, see the outward sign thereof.
From the cathedral we passed out, and stopped a moment to examine the adjoining church, now deserted, but whose three graceful spires have a peculiar beauty. After a turn upon the platform we descended, and drove to the Augustine Convent, now used as an orphan asylum. We ascended through a court yard, full of little children, by some steps into a gallery, where a woman came out with her keys. We passed first into a great hall, the walls of which were adorned with Holbein’s Dance of Death.
From this hall we passed into Luther’s room–a little cell, ten feet square; the walls covered with inscriptions from his writings. There we saw his inkstand, his pocket Testament, a copy of the Bible that was presented to him, (by whom I could not understand,) splendidly bound and illuminated. But it was the cell itself which affected me, the windows looking out into what were the cloisters of the monastery. Here was that struggle–that mortal agony–that giant soul convulsing and wearing down that strong frame. These walls! to what groans, to what prayers had they listened! Could we suppose a living human form imperishable, capable of struggling and suffering, but not of dying, buried beneath the whole weight of one of these gloomy cathedrals, suffocating in mortal agony, hearing above the tramp of footsteps, the peal of organs, the triumphant surge of chants, and vainly striving to send up its cries under all this load,–such, it would seem, was the suffering of this mighty soul. The whole pomp and splendor of this gorgeous prison house was piled up on his breast, and _his_ struggles rent the prison for the world!
On a piece of parchment which is here kept framed is inscribed in Luther’s handwriting, in Latin, “Death is swallowed up in Victory!” Nothing better could be written on the walls of this cell.
This afternoon I walked out a little to observe the German Sabbath. Not like the buoyant, voluble, social Sunday of Paris, though still consecrated to leisure and family enjoyment more than to religious exercises. As I walked down the streets, the doors were standing open, men smoking their pipes, women knitting, and children playing. One place of resort was the graveyard of an antiquated church. A graveyard here is quite different from the solitary, dismal place where we lay our friends, as if to signify that all intercourse with them is at an end. Each grave was trimmed and garlanded with flowers, fastened with long strings of black or white ribbon. Around and among the graves men, women, and children were walking, the men smoking and chatting, not noisily, but in a cheerful, earnest way. It seems to me that this way of treating the dead might lessen the sense of separation. I believe it is generally customary to attend some religious exercise once on Sunday, and after that the rest of the day is devoted to this sort of enjoyment.
[Illustration: _of the Wartburg._]
The morning we started for Eisenach was foggy and rainy. This was unfortunate, as we were changing from a dead level country to one of extreme beauty. The Thuringian Forest, with its high, wooded points crowned here and there with many a castle and many a ruin, loomed up finely through the mist, and several times I exclaimed, “There is the Wartburg,” or “That must be the Wartburg,” long before we were near it. It was raining hard when we reached Eisenach station, and engaged a carriage to take us to the Wartburg. The mist, which wreathed thickly around, showed us only glimpses as we wound slowly up the castle hill–enough, however, to pique the imagination, and show how beautiful it might be in fair weather.
The grounds are finely kept: winding paths invite to many a charming stroll. When about half way up, as the rain had partially subsided, I left the carriage, and toiled up the laborious steep on foot, that I might observe better. You approach the castle by a path cut through the rock for about thirty or forty feet. At last I stood under a low archway of solid stone masonry, about twenty feet thick. There had evidently been three successive doors; the outer one was gone, and the two inner were wonderfully massive, braced with iron, and having each a smaller wicket door swung back on its hinges.
As my party were a little behind, I had time to stop and meditate. I fancied a dark, misty night, and the tramp of a party of horsemen coming up the rocky path to the gateway; the parley at the wicket; the unbarred doors, creaking on their rusty hinges,–one, two, three,–are opened; in clatters the cavalcade. In the midst of armed men with visors down, a monk in cowl and gown, and with that firm look about the lips which is so characteristic in Luther’s portraits. But here our party came up, and the vision was dispelled. As none of us knew a word of German, we stood rather irresolutely looking at the buildings which, in all shapes and varieties, surround the court. I went into one room–it was a pantry; into another–it was a wash room; into a third–it was a sitting room, garnished with antlers, and hung round with hard old portraits of princes and electors, and occupied by Germans smoking and drinking beer. One is sure that in this respect one cannot fail of seeing the place as it was in Luther’s time. If they were Germans, of course they drank beer out of tall, narrow beer glasses; that is as immutable a fact as the old stones of the battlement.
“H.,” said C., “did the Germans use to smoke in Luther’s day?”
“No. Why?”
“0, nothing. Only, what could they do with themselves?”
“I do not know, unless they drank the more beer.”
“But what could they do with their chimney-hood?”
So saying, the saucy fellow prowled about promiscuously a while, assailing one and another in French, to about as much purpose as one might have tried to storm the walls with discharges of thistle down; all smoked and drank as before. But as several other visitors arrived, and it became evident that if we did not come to see the castle, it was not likely we came for any thing else, a man was fished up from some depths unknown, with a promising bunch of keys. He sallied forth to that part of the castle which is undergoing repairs.
Passing through bricks and mortar, under scaffolds, &c., we came to the armory, full of old knights and steeds in complete armor; that is to say, the armor was there, and, without peeping between the crevices, one could hardly tell that their owners were not at home in their iron houses. There sat the Elector of Saxony, in full armor, on his horse, which was likewise cased in steel. There was the suit of armor in which Constable Bourbon fell under the walls of Rome, and other celebrated suits, some covered with fine engraved work, and some gilded. A quantity of banners literally hung in tatters, dropping to pieces with age. Here were the middle ages all standing.
Then we passed up to a grand hall, which is now being restored with great taste after the style of that day–a long, lofty room, with an arched roof, and a gallery on one side, and beyond, a row of Romanesque arched windows, commanding a view of the country around. Having finished the tour of this part, we went back, ascended an old, rude staircase, and were ushered into Luther’s Patmos, about ten or twelve feet square. The window looked down the rocky sides into an ocean of seething mist. I opened it, but could see nothing of all those scenes he describes so graphically from this spot. I thought of his playful letter on the “Diet of the Rooks,” but there was not a rook at hand to illustrate antiquity. There was his bedstead and footstool, a mammoth vertebra, and his writing table. A sculptured chair, the back of which is carved into a cherub’s head, bending forward and shadowing with its wings the head of the sitter, was said to be of the time of Luther, but not _his_ chair. There were some of his books, and a rude, iron-studded clothes press.
Thus ended for me the Lutheran pilgrimage. I had now been perseveringly to all the shrines, and often inquired of myself whether our conceptions are helped by such visitations. I decided the question in the affirmative; that they are, if from the dust of the present we can recreate the past, and bring again before us the forms as they then lived, moved, and had their being. For me, I seem to have seen Luther, Cranach, Melanchthon, and all the rest of them–to have talked with them. By the by, I forgot to mention the portraits of Luther’s father and mother, which are in his cell. They show that his _mother_ was no common woman. She puts me in mind of the mother of Samuel J. Mills–a strong, shrewd, bright, New England character.
I must not forget to notice, too, a little glitter of effect–a little, shadowy, fanciful phase of feeling–that came over me when in Luther’s cell at Erfurt. The time, as I told you, was golden twilight, and little birds were twittering and chirping around the casement, and I thought how he might have sat there, in some golden evening, sad and dreamy, hearing the birds chirp, and wondering why he alone of all creation should be so sad. I have not a doubt he has done that very thing in this very spot.
JOURNAL–(CONTINUED.)
Monday, August 15. From Eisenach, where we dined cozily in the railroad station house, we took the cars for Cassel. After we had established ourselves comfortably in a _nich rauchen_ car, a gentleman, followed by a friend, came to the door with a cigar in his mouth. Seeing ladies, he inquired if he could smoke. Comprehending his look and gesture, we said, “No.” But as we spoke very gently, he misunderstood us, and entered. Seeing by our looks that something was amiss, he repeated the question more emphatically in German: “Can I smoke? Yes, or no.” “No,” we answered in full chorus. Discomfited, he retired with rather a flushed cheek. We saw him prospecting up and down the train, hunting for a seat, followed by his _fidus Achates_. Finally, a guard took him in tow, and after navigating a while brought him to our door; but the gentleman recoiled, said something in German, and passed on. Again they made the whole circuit of the train, and then we saw the guard coming, with rather a fierce, determined air, straight to our door. He opened it very decidedly, and ordered the gentleman to enter. He entered, cigar and all. His friend followed.
“Well,” said H., in English, “I suppose he must either smoke or die.”
“Ah, yes,” I replied, “for the sake of saving his life we will even let him smoke.”
“Hope the tobacco is good,” added H.; and we went on reading our “Villette,” which was very amusing just then. The gentleman had his match already lighted, and was just in the act of puffing preliminarily when H. first spoke. I thought I saw a peculiar expression on his friend’s face. He dropped a word or two in German, as if quite incidentally, and I soon observed that the smoking made small progress. Pie kept the cigar in his mouth, it is true, for a while, just to show he would smoke if he chose; but his whiffs were fewer and fainter every minute; and after reading several chapters, happening to cast my eye that way, the cigar had disappeared. Not long after the friend, sitting opposite me, addressed W. in _good English_, and they were soon well agoing in a friendly discussion of our route. The winged word had hit the mark that time.
We passed the night in an agreeable hotel, Roi de Prusse, at Cassel. By the way, it occurred to us that this was where the Hessians came from in the old revolutionary times.
Tuesday, August 16. A long, dull ride from Cassel to Dusseldorf.
Wednesday, August 17. Whittridge came at breakfast. The same mellow, friendly, good-humored voice, and genial soul, I had loved years ago in the heart of Indiana. We had a brief festival of talk about old times, art, artists, and friends, and the tide of time rolled in and swept us asunder. Success to his pencil in the enchanted glades of Germany! America will yet be proud of his landscapes, as Italy of Claude, or England of Turner.
Ho for Anvers! (Antwerp.) Through Aix-la-Chapelle, Liége, Malines, till nine at night.
Thursday, August 18. What gnome’s cave is this Antwerp, where I have been hearing such strange harmonies in the air all night? We drive to the cathedral, whose tower reminded Napoleon of Mechlin lace. What a shower of sprinkling music drops comes from the sky above us! We must go up and see about this. We spiralize through a tubular stairway to an immense height–a tube of stone, like a Titanic organ pipe, filled with waves of sound pouring down like a deluge. Undulations tremendous, yet not intolerable: we soon learned their origin. Reaching a small door, I turned aside, and came where the great bell was hung, which twenty men were engaged in ringing. It was a _fête_ day. I crept inside the frame, and stood actually under the colossal mass, as it swung like a world in its spheric chime. A new sense was developed, such as I had heard of the deaf possessing. I seemed existing in a new medium. I _felt_ the sound in my lungs, in my bones, on all my nerves to the minutest fibre, and yet it did not stupefy nor stun me with a harsh clangor. It was _deep_, DEEP. It was an abyss, gorgeously illuminated of velvet softness, in which I floated. The sound was fluid like water about me. I closed my eyes. Where was I? Had some prodigious monster swallowed me, and, like another Jonah, had I “gone down beneath the bottoms of the mountains”? I escaped from that perilous womb of sound, and ascended still higher. There was the mystery of that nocturnal minstrelsy. Seventy-three bells in chromatic diapason–with their tinkling, ringing, tolling, knolling peal! Was not that a chime? a chime of chimes? And all these goblin hammers, like hands and feet of sprites, rising and falling, by magic, by hidden mechanism.
Of all German cactus blossoms this is the most ethereal. What head conceived those harmonies, so ghostlike? Every ten minutes, if you lie wakeful, they wind you up in a net of silver wirework, and swing you in the clouds; and the next time they swing you higher, and the next higher, and when the round hour is full the giant bell strikes at the gate of heaven to bring you home!
But this is dreaming. Fie, fie! Let us come down to pictures, masses, and common sense. We came down. We entered the room, and sat before the Descent from the Cross, where the dead body of Jesus seems an actual reality before you. The waves of the high mass came rolling in, muffled by intervening walls, columns, corridors, in a low, mysterious murmur. Then organ, orchestra, and choir, with rising voices urged the mighty acclaim, till the waves seemed beating down the barriers upon us. The combined excitement of the chimes, the painting, the music, was too much. I seemed to breathe ether. Treading on clouds, as it were, I entered the cathedral, and the illusion vanished.
Friday, August 19. Antwerp to Paris.
Saturday, August 20. H. and I take up our abode at the house of M. Belloc, where we find every thing so pleasant, that we sigh to think how soon we must leave these dear friends. The rest of our party are at the Hotel Bedford.
LETTER XLVII.
Antwerp.
MY DEAR:–
Of all quaint places this is one of the most charming. I have been rather troubled that antiquity has fled before me where I have gone. It is a fatality of travelling that the sense of novelty dies away, so that we do not realize that we are seeing any thing extraordinary. I wanted to see something as quaint as Nuremberg in Longfellow’s poem, and have but just found it. These high-gabled old Flemish houses, nine steps to each gable! The cathedral, too, affects me more in externals than any yet. And the spire looks as I expected that of Strasbourg would. As to the grammarye of bells and chimes, I deliver that over to Charlie. But–I have seen Rubens’s painting! Before I came to Europe, Longfellow said to me, “You must go to Antwerp, to see Rubens.”
“I do not think I shall like Rubens,” was my reply.
“But you will, though. Yet never judge till you have been to Antwerp.”
So, during our various meanders, I kept my eye with a steady resolve on this place. I confess I went out to see the painting without much enthusiasm. My experience with Correggio’s Notte, and some of the celebrities of Dresden, was not encouraging. I was weary, too, with sightseeing. I expected to find an old, dim picture, half spoiled by cleaning, which I should be required to look into shape, by an exercise of my jaded imagination.
Alter coming down from hearing the chimes, we went into a side room, and sat down before the painting. My first sensation was of astonishment, blank, absolute, overwhelming. After all that I had seen, I had no idea of a painting like this. I was lifted off my feet, as much as by Cologne cathedral, or Niagara Falls, so that I could neither reason nor think whether I was pleased or not. It is difficult, even now, to analyze the sources of this wonderful power. The excellence of this picture does not lie, like Raphael’s, in a certain ideal spirituality, by which the scene is raised above earth to the heavenly sphere; but rather in a power, strong, human, almost homely, by which, not an ideal, but the real scene is forced home upon the heart.
_Christ is dead_,–dead to your eye as he was to the eye of Mary and of John. Death absolute, hopeless, is written in the faded majesty of that face, peaceful and weary; death in every relaxed muscle. And, surely, in painting this form, some sentiment of reverence and devotion softened into awestruck tenderness that hand commonly so vigorous; for, instead of the almost coarse vitality which usually pervades his manly figures, there is shed over this a spiritualized refinement, not less, but more than human, as if some heavenly voice whispered, “This is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world!” The figures of the disciples are real and individual in expression. The sorrow is homely, earnest, unpicturesque, and grievously heart broken. The cheek of the kneeling Mary at his feet is wet with tears. You cannot ask yourself whether she is beautiful or not. You only see and sympathize with her sorrow. But the apostle John, who receives into his arms the descending form, is the most wonderful of all. Painters that I have seen represent him too effeminately. They forget the ardent soul whom Jesus rebuked for wishing to bring down fire from heaven on his enemies; they forget that it was John who was called the son of thunder, and that his emblem in the early church was the eagle. From the spiritualized softness of his writings we have formed another picture, forgetting that these are the writings of an aged man, in whom the ardor of existence has been softened by long experience of suffering, and habits of friendship with a suffering Lord.
Rubens’s conception of John is that of a vigorous and plenary manhood, whose rush is like that of a torrent, in the very moment when his great heart is breaking. He had loved his Master with a love like an eternity; he had believed him; heart and soul, mind and strength–all had he given to that kingdom which he was to set up; and he had seen him die–die by lingering torture. And at this moment he feels it all. There is no Christ, no kingdom–nothing! All is over. “We _trusted_ it had been he who should have redeemed Israel.” With that miraculous, lifelike power that only Rubens has, he shows him to us in this moment of suppressed agony; the blood choking his heart, the veins swollen, and every muscle quivering with the grief to which he will not give way. O, for this wonderful and deep conception, this almost divine insight into the mysteries of that hour, one might love Rubens. This picture cannot be engraved. No engraving is more than a diagram, to show the places of the figures. For, besides its mesmeric life, which no artist can reproduce, there is a balancing of colors, a gorgeousness about it, as if he had learned coloring from the great Master himself. Even in the overpowering human effect of this piece, it is impossible not to perceive that every difficulty which artists vaunt themselves on vanquishing has in this piece been conquered with apparently instinctive ease, simply because it was habitual to do so, and without in the least distracting the attention from the great moral. Magical foreshortenings and wonderful effects of color appear to be purely incidental to the expression of a great idea. I left this painting as one should leave the work of a great religious master– thinking more of Jesus and of John than of Rubens.
After this we went through many galleries and churches devoted to his works; for Antwerp is Rubens’s shrine. None of them impressed me, as compared with this. One of his Madonnas, however, I must not forget to describe, it was a conceit so just like him. Instead of the pale, downcast, or upturned faces, which form the general types of Madonna, he gives her to us, in one painting, as a gorgeous Oriental sultana, leaning over a balcony, with full, dark eye and jewelled turban, and rounded outlines, sustaining on her hand a brilliant paroquet. Ludicrous as this conception appears in a scriptural point of view, I liked it because there was life in it; because he had painted it from an internal sympathy, not from a chalky, second-hand tradition.
And now, farewell to Antwerp. Art has satisfied me at last. I have been conquered, and that is enough.
To-morrow for Paris. Adieu.
LETTER XLVIII.
PARIS, Saturday, August 20.
MY DEAR:–
I am seated in my snug little room at M. Belloc’s. The weather is overpoweringly hot, but these Parisian houses seem to have seized and imprisoned coolness. French household ways are delightful. I like their seclusion from the street, by these deep-paved quadrangles. I like these cool, smooth, waxed floors so much that I one day queried with my friends, the C.’s, whether we could not introduce them into America. L., who is a Yankee housekeeper, answered, with spirit, “No, indeed; not while the mistress of the house has every thing to do, as in America; I think I see myself, in addition to all my cares, on my knees, waxing up one of these floors.”
“Ah,” says Caroline, “the thing is managed better in Paris; the _frotteur_ comes in before we are up in the morning, shod with great brushes, and dances over the floors till they shine.”
“I am sure,” said I, “here is Fourrier’s system in one particular. We enjoy the floors, and the man enjoys the dancing.”
Madame Belloc had fitted up my room with the most thoughtful care. A large bouquet adorns the table; fancy writing materials are displayed; and a waiter, with sirups and an extempore soda fount, one of Parisian household refinements, stands just at my elbow. Above all, my walls are hung with beautiful engravings from Claude and Zuccarelli.
This house pertains to the government, and is held by M. Belloc in virtue of his situation as director of the Imperial School of Design, to which institution about one half of it is devoted. A public examination is at hand, in preparing for which M. Belloc is heart and soul engaged. This school is a government provision for the gratuitous instruction of the working classes in art. I went into the rooms where the works of the scholars are arranged for the inspection of the judges. The course of instruction is excellent–commencing with the study of nature. Around the room various plants are growing, which serve for models, interspersed with imitations in drawing or modelling, by the pupils. I noticed a hollyhock and thistle, modelled with singular accuracy. As some pupils can come only at evening, M. Belloc has prepared a set of casts of plants, which he says are plaster daguerreotypes. By pouring warm gelatine upon a leaf, a delicate mould is made, from which these casts are taken. He showed me bunches of leaves, and branches of the vine, executed by them, which were beautiful. In like manner the pupil commences the study of the human figure, with the skeleton, which he copies bone by bone. Gutta percha muscles are added in succession, till finally he has the whole form. Besides, each student has particular objects given him to study for a certain period, after which he copies them from memory. The same course is pursued with prints and engravings.
When an accurate knowledge of forms is gained, the pupil receives lessons in combination. Such subjects as these are given: a vase of flowers, a mediæval or classic vase, shields, Helmets, escutcheons, &c., of different styles. The first prize composition was a hunting frieze, modelled, in which were introduced fanciful combinations of leaf and scroll work, dogs, hunters, and children. Figures of almost every animal and plant were modelled; the drawings and modellings from memory were wonderful, and showed, in their combination, great richness of fancy. Scattered about the room were casts of the best classic figures of the Louvre, placed there, as M. Belloc gracefully remarked, not as models, but as inspirations, to cultivate the sense of beauty.
I was shown, moreover, their books of mathematical studies, which looked intricate and learned, but of which I appreciated only the delicate chirography. “And where,” said I, “are these young mechanics taught to read and write?” “In the brothers’ schools,” he said. Paris is divided into regular parishes, centring round different churches, and connected with each church is a parochial school, for boys and girls, taught by ecclesiastics and nuns.
With such thorough training of the sense of beauty, it may be easily seen that the facility of French enthusiasm in aesthetics is not, as often imagined, superficial pretence. The nerves of beauty are so exquisitely tuned and strung that they must thrill at every touch.
One sees this, in French life, to the very foundation of society. A poor family will give, cheerfully, a part of their bread money to buy a flower. The idea of artistic symmetry pervades every thing, from the arrangement of the simplest room to the composition of a picture. At the chateau of Madame V. the whiteheaded butler begged madame to apologize for the central flower basket on the table. He “had not had time to study the composition.”
The English and Americans, seeing the French so serious and intent on matters of beauty, fancy it to be mere affectation. To be serious on a barrel of flour, or a bushel of potatoes, we can well understand; but to be equally earnest in the adorning of a room or the “composition” of a bouquet seems ridiculous. But did not He who made the appetite for food make also that for beauty? and while the former will perish with the body, is not the latter immortal? With all New England’s earnestness and practical efficiency, there is a long withering of the soul’s more ethereal part,–a crushing out of the beautiful,–which is horrible. Children are born there with a sense of beauty equally delicate with any in the world, in whom it dies a lingering death of smothered desire and pining, weary starvation. I know, because I have felt it.–One in whom this sense has long been repressed, in coming into Paris, feels a rustling and a waking within him, as if the soul were trying to unfold her wings, long unused and mildewed. Instead of scorning, then, the lighthearted, _mobile_, beauty-loving French, would that we might exchange instructions with them–imparting our severer discipline in religious lore, accepting their thorough methods in art; and, teaching and taught, study together under the great Master of all.
I went with M. Belloc into the gallery of antique sculpture. How wonderful these old Greeks I What set them out on such a course, I wonder–anymore, for instance, than the Sandwich Islanders? This reminds me to tell you that in the Berlin Museum, which the King of Prussia is now finishing in high style, I saw what is said to be the most complete Egyptian collection in the world; a whole Egyptian temple, word for word–pillars, paintings, and all; numberless sarcophagi, and mummies _ad nauseam!_ They are no more fragrant than the eleven thousand virgins, these mummies! and my stomach revolts equally from the odor of sanctity and of science.
I saw there a mummy of a little baby; and though it was black as my shoe, and a disgusting, dry thing, nevertheless the little head was covered with fine, soft, auburn hair. Four thousand years ago, some mother thought the poor little thing a beauty. Also I saw mummies of cats, crocodiles, the ibis, and all the other religious _bijouterie_ of Egypt, with many cases of their domestic utensils, ornaments, &c.
The whole view impressed me with quite an idea of barbarism; much more so than the Assyrian collection. About the winged bulls there is a solemn and imposing grandeur; they have a mountainous and majestic nature. These Egyptian things give one an idea of inexpressible ungainliness. They had a clumsy, elephantine character of mind, these Egyptians. There was not wanting grace, but they seemed to pick it up accidentally; because among all possible forms some must be graceful. They had a kind of grand, mammoth civilization, gloomy and goblin. They seem to have floundered up out of Nile mud, like that old, slimy, pre-Adamite brood, the what’s-their-name–_megalosaurus, ichthyosaurus, pterodactyle, iguanodon_, and other misshapen abominations, with now and then wreaths of lotus and water lilies round their tusks.
The human face, as represented in Assyrian sculptures, is a higher type of face than even the Greek: it is noble and princely; the Egyptian faces are broad, flat, and clumsy. If Egypt gave birth to Greece, with her beautiful arts, then truly this immense, clumsy roc’s egg hatched a miraculous nest of loves and graces.
Among the antiques here, my two favorites are Venus de Milon, which I have described to you, and the Diane Chasseresse: this goddess is represented by the side of a stag; and so completely is the marble made alive, that one seems to perceive that a tread so airy would not bend a flower. Every side of the statue is almost equally graceful. The small, proud head is thrown back with the freedom of a stag; there is a gay, haughty self-reliance, an airy defiance, a rejoicing fulness of health and immortal youth in the whole figure. You see before you the whole Greek conception of an immortal–a creature full of intellect, full of the sparkle and elixir of existence, in whom the principle of life seems to be crystallized and concentrated with a dazzling abundance; light, airy, incapable alike of love and of sympathy; living for self, and self only. Alas for poor souls, who, in the heavy anguish of life, had only such goddesses to go to! How far in advance is even the idolatry of Christianity! how different the idea of Mary from the Diana!
Yet, as I walked up and down among these remains of Greek art, I could not but wonder at the spectacle of their civilization: no modern development reproduces it, nor ever can or will. It is well to cherish and make much of that ethereal past, as a specimen of one phase of humanity, for it is past _forever_. Those isles of Greece, with their gold and purple haze of light and shadow, their exquisite, half-spiritual, half-bodily formation–islands where flesh and blood became semi-spiritual, and where the sense of beauty was an existence–have passed as a vision of glory, never to return. One scarcely realizes how full of poetry was their mythology; all successive ages have drawn on it for images of beauty without exhausting it; and painters and artists, to this day, are fettered and repressed by vain efforts to reproduce it. But as a religion for the soul and the heart, all this is vain and void; all powerless to give repose or comfort. One who should seek repose on the bosom of such a mythology is as one who seeks to pillow himself on the many-tinted clouds of evening; soft and beautiful as they are, there is nothing real to them but their dampness and coldness.
Here M. and Madame Belloc entered, and as he wanted my opinion of the Diane, I let her read this part of the letter to him in French. You ought to have seen M. Belloc, with tears in his eyes, defending the old Greeks, and expounding to me, with all manner of rainbow illustrations, the religious meanings of Greek mythology, and the _morale_ of Greek tragedy. Such a whole souled devotion to a nation dead and gone could never be found but in France.
Madame Belloc was the translator of Maria Edgeworth by that lady’s desire; corresponded with her for years, and still has many of her letters. Her translation of Uncle Tom has to me all the merit and all the interest of an original composition. In perusing it I enjoy the pleasure of reading the story with scarce any consciousness of its ever having been mine. In the evening Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall called. They are admirably matched–he artist, she author. The one writes stories, the other illustrates them. Madame M. also called. English by birth, she is a true _Parisienne,_ or, rather, seems to have both minds, as she speaks both languages, perfectly. Her husband being a learned Oriental scholar, she, like some other women enjoying similar privileges, has picked up a deal of information, which she tosses about in conversation, in a gay, piquant manner, much as a kitten plays with a pin ball.
Madame remembers Mesdames Recamier and De Stael, and told me several funny anecdotes of the former. Madame R., she said, was always coquetting with her own funeral; conversed with different artists on the arrangements of its details, and tempting now one, now another, with the brilliant hope of the “composition” of the scene. Madame M. offered me her services as _cicerone_ to Paris, and so to-day out we went–first to the Pantheon, of which, in her gay and piquant style, she gave me the history.
Begun first in the time of Louis XVI. as a church, in the revolution its destination was altered, and it was to be a temple to the manes of great men, and accordingly Rousseau, Voltaire, and many more are buried here. Well, after the revolution, the Bourbons said it should not be a temple for great men, it should be a church. The next popular upset tipped it back to the great men again; and it staid under their jurisdiction until Louis Napoleon, who is very pious, restored it to the church. It is not possible to say how much further this very characteristic rivalry between great men and their Creator is going to extend. All I have to say is, that I should not think the church much of an acquisition to either party. He that sitteth in the heavens must laugh sometimes at what man calls worship. This Pantheon is, as one might suppose from its history, a hybrid between a church and a theatre, and of course good for neither–purposeless and aimless. The Madeleine is another of these hybrid churches, begun by D’Ivry as a church, completed as a temple to victory by Napoleon, and on second thoughts, re-dedicated to God.
After strolling about a while, the sexton, or some official of the church, asked us if we did not want to go down into the vaults below. As a large party seemed to be going to do the same, I said, “0, yes, by all means; let us see it out.” Our guide, with his cocked hat and lantern, walked ahead, apparently in a now of excellent spirits. These caverns and tombs appeared to be his particular forte, and he magnified his office in showing them. Down stairs we went, none of us knowing what we wanted to see, or why. Our guide steps forth, unlocks the gate? of Hades, and we enter a dark vault with a particularly earthy smell. Bang! he shuts the door after him. Clash! he locks it; now we are in for it! and elevating his lantern, he commences a deafening proclamation of some general fact concerning the very unsavory place in which we find ourselves. Of said proclamation I hear only the thundering _”Voilà”_ at the commencement. Next he proceeds to open the doors of certain stone vaulted chambers, where the great men are buried, between whose claims and their Creator’s there seems to be such an uncertainty in France. Well, here they were, sure enough, maintaining their claim by right of possession.
_”Voilà le tombeau de Rousseau!”_ says the guide. All walked in piously, and stood to see a wooden tomb painted red. At one end the tomb is made in the likeness of little doors, which stand half open, and a hand is coming out of them holding a flambeau, by which it is intimated, I suppose, that Rousseau in his grave is enlightening the world. After a short proclamation here, we were shown into another stone chamber with _”Voilà le tombeau de Voltaire!”_ This was of wood also, very nicely speckled and painted to resemble some kind of marble. Each corner of the tomb had a tragic mask on it, with that captivating expression of countenance which belongs to the tragic masks generally. There was in the room a marble statue of Voltaire, with that wiry, sharp, keen, yet somewhat spiteful expression which his busts commonly have.
But our guide has finished his prelection here, and is striding off in the plenitude of his wisdom. Now we are shown a long set of stone apartments, provided for future great men. Considering the general scarcity of the article in most countries, these sleeping accommodations are remarkably ample. Nobody need be discouraged in his attempts at greatness in Paris, for fear at last there won’t be room to bury him. After this we were marched to a place where our guide made a long speech about a stone in the floor–very instructive, doubtless, if I had known what it was: my Parisian friend said he spoke with such a German accent she could not understand; so we humbly took the stone _on trust,_ though it looked to the eye of sense quite like any other.
Then we were marched into a part of the vault celebrated for its echo. Our guide here outdid himself; first we were commanded to form a line _en militaire_ with our backs to the wall. Well, we did form _en militaire._ I did it in the innocence of my heart, entirely ignorant of what was to come next. Our guide, departing from that heroic grandeur of manner which had hitherto distinguished him, suddenly commenced screaming and hooting in a most unparalleled style. The echo was enough to deafen one, to be sure, and the first blast of it made us all jump. I could think of nothing but Apollyon amusing himself at the expense of the poor pilgrims in the valley of the shadow of death; for the exhibition was persisted in with a pertinacity inscrutable to any wisdom except his own. It ended by a brace of thumps on the wall, each of which produced a report equal to a cannon; and with this salvo of artillery the exhibition finished.
This worthy guide is truly a sublime character. Long may he live to show the Pantheon; and when he dies, if so disagreeable an event must be contemplated, may he have the whole of one of these stone chambers to himself; for nothing less could possibly contain him. He regretted exceedingly that we could not go up into the dome; but I had had enough of stair climbing at Strasbourg, Antwerp, and Cologne, and not even the prospect of enjoying his instructions could tempt me.
Now this Pantheon seems to me a monument of the faults and the weakness of this very agreeable nation. Its history shows their enthusiasm, their hero worship, and the want of stable religious convictions. Nowhere has there been such a want of reverence for the Creator, unless in the American Congress. The great men of France have always seemed to be in confusion as to whether they made God or he made them. There is a great resemblance in some points between the French and the ancient Athenians: there was the same excitability; the same keen outward life; the same passion for ideas; the same spending of life in hearing or telling some new thing; the same acuteness of philosophical research. The old Athenians first worshipped, and then banished their great men,–buried them and pulled them up, and did generally a variety of things which we Anglo-Saxons should call fantastic. There is this difference, that the Athenians had the advantage of coming first. The French nation, born after this development, are exposed by their very similarity of conformation, and their consequent sympathy with the old classic style of feeling, to become imitators. This betrays itself in their painters and sculptors, and it is a constant impulse to a kind of idolatry, which is not in keeping with this age, and necessarily seems absurd. When the Greeks built altars to Force, Beauty, Victory, and other abstract ideas, they were doing an original thing. When the French do it, they imitate the Greeks. Apotheosis and hero worship in the old times had a freshness to it; it was one of the picturesque effects of the dim and purple shadows of an early dawning, when objects imperfectly seen are magnified in their dimensions; but the apotheosis, in modern times, of a man who has worn a dress coat, wig, and shoes is quite another affair.
I do not mean either to say, as some do, that the French mind has very little of the religious element. The very sweetest and softest, as well as the most austere and rigid type of piety has been given by the French mind; witness Fénélon and John Calvin–Fénélon standing as the type of the mystic, and Calvin of the rationalistic style of religion. Fénélon, with his heart so sweet, so childlike, so simple and tender, was yet essentially French in his nature, and represented one part of French mind; and what English devotional writer is at all like him? John Newton had his simplicity and lovingness, but wanted that element of gracefulness and classic sweetness which gave so high a tone to the writings of Fénélon. As to Calvin, his crystalline clearness of mind, his calm, cold logic, his severe vehemence are French, also. To this day, a French system of theology is the strongest and most coercive over the strongest of countries–Scotland and America; and yet shallow thinkers flippantly say the French are incapable of religious ideas.
After Madame M. and I had finished the Pantheon we drove to the Conciergerie; for I wanted to see the prison of the hapless Marie Antoinette. That restless architectural mania, which never lets any thing alone here, is rapidly modernizing it; the scaffoldings are up, and workmen busy in making it as little historical as possible. Nevertheless, the old, gloomy arched gateway, and the characteristic peaked Norman towers, still remain; and we stopped our carriage the other side of the Seine, to get a good look at it. We drove to the door, and tried to go in, but were told that we could not without an order from somebody or other. (I forget who;) so we were obliged to content ourselves with an outside view.
So we went to take another view of Notre Dame; the very same Notre Dame whose bells in the good old days could be rung by the waving of Michael Scott’s wand:–
“Him listed but his wand to wave
The bells should ring in Notre Dame.”
I had been over it once before with Mrs. C., and sitting in a dark corner, with my head against a cold, stone pillar, had heard vespers, all in the most approved style of the poetic. I went back to it now to see how it looked after the cathedrals of Germany. The churches of France have suffered dreadfully by the whirlwind spirit of its revolutions. At different times the painted glass of this church has been shattered, and replaced by common, till now there is too much light in it, though there are exquisite windows yet remaining. These cathedrals _must_ have painted glass; it is essential; the want of it is terrible; the dim, religious light is necessary to keep you from seeing the dirty floors, hanging cobwebs, stacks of little, old rush-bottomed chairs, and the prints where dirty heads and hands have approached too near the stone pillars. As I sat hearing vespers in Notre Dame the first time, seeing these all too plainly, may I be forgiven, but I could not help thinking of Lucifer’s soliloquy in a cathedral in the Golden Legend:–
“What a darksome and dismal place!
I wonder that any man has the face To call such a hole the house of the Lord And the gate of heaven–yet such is the word. Ceiling, and walls, and windows old,
Covered with cobwebs, blackened with mould; Dust on the pulpit, dust on the stairs, Dust on the benches, and stalls, and chairs.”
* * * * *
However, Notre Dame is a beautiful church; but I wish it was under as good care as Cologne Cathedral, and that instead of building Madeleines and Pantheons, France would restore and preserve her cathedrals–those grand memorials of the past. I consider the King of Prussia as not only a national benefactor, but the benefactor of the world. Cologne, when finished, will be the great epic of architecture, and belong, like all great epics, to all mankind.
Well, Madame M. and I wandered up and down the vast aisles, she with her lively, fanciful remarks, to which there was never wanting a vein both of shrewdness and good sense.
When we came out of Notre Dame, she chattered about the place. “There used to be an archbishop’s palace back of the church in that garden, but one day the people took it into their heads to pull it down. I saw the silk-bottomed chairs floating down the Seine. They say that somebody came and told Thiers, ‘Do you know the people are rummaging the archbishop’s palace?’ and he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Let ’em work.’ That’s the say, you know; mind, I don’t say it is true! Well, he got enough of it at last. The fact is, that with, the French, destructiveness is as much developed as constructiveness, and they are as good at one as the other.”
As we were passing over one of the bridges, we saw a flower market, a gay show of flowers of all hues, and a very brisk trade going on about them. Madame told me that there was a flower market every day in the week, in different parts of the city. The flower trade was more than usually animated to-day, because it is a saint’s _fête,_ the _fête_ of St. Louis, the patron of Paris.
The streets every where showed men, women, and children, carrying their pots of blooming flowers. Every person in Paris named Louis or Louise, after this saint, has received this day little tokens of affection from their friends, generally bouquets or flowers. Madame Belloc is named Louise, and her different friends and children called and brought flowers, and a beautiful India China vase.
The life of Paris, indeed of the continent, is floral, to an extent of which the people in the United States can form no conception. Flowers are a part of all their lives. The churches are dressed with flowers, and on _fête_ days are fragrant with them. A _jardinière_ forms a part of the furniture of every parlor; a _jardinière_ is a receptacle made in various fanciful forms for holding pots of flowers. These pots are bought at the daily flower market for a trifle, in full bloom and high condition; they are placed in the _jardinière,_ the spaces around them filled with sand and covered with moss.
Again, there are little hanging baskets suspended from the ceilings, and filled with flowers. These things give a graceful and festive air to apartments. When the plants are out of bloom, the porter of the house takes them, waters, prunes, and tends them, then sells them again: meanwhile the parlor is ornamented with fresh ones. Along the streets on saints’ days are little booths, where small vases of artificial flowers are sold to dress the altars. I stopped to look at one of these stalls, all brilliant with cheaply-made, showy vases of flowers, that sell for one or two sous.
We went also to the National Academy of Fine Arts, a government school for the gratuitous instruction of artists, a Grecian building, with a row of all the distinguished painters in front.
In the doorway, as we came in, was an antique, headless statue of Minerva; literally it was Minerva’s _gown_ standing up–a pillar of drapery, nothing more, and drapery soiled, tattered, and battered; but then it was an antique, and that is enough. Now, when antique things are ugly, I do not like them any better for being antique, and I should rather have a modern statue than Minerva’s old gown. We went through all the galleries in this school, in one of which the prize pieces of scholars are placed. Whoever gets one of these prizes is sent to study in Rome at the expense of the government. We passed through the hall where the judges sit to decide upon pictures, and through various others that I cannot remember. I was particularly interested in the apartment devoted to the casts from the statuary in the Louvre and in other palaces. These casts are taken with mathematical exactness, and subjected to the inspection of a committee, who order any that are defective to be broken. Proof casts of all the best works, ancient and modern, are thus furnished at a small price, and so brought within the reach of the most moderate means.
This morning M. and Madame Belloc took me with them to call on Béranger, the poet. He is a charming old man, very animated, with a face full of feeling and benevolence, and with that agreeable simplicity and vivacity of manner which is peculiarly French. It was eleven o’clock, but he had not yet breakfasted; we entreated him to waive ceremony, and so his maid brought in his chop and coffee, and we all plunged into an animated conversation. Béranger went on conversing with shrewdness mingled with childlike simplicity, a blending of the comic, the earnest, and the complimentary. Conversation in a French circle seems to me like the gambols of a thistle down, or the rainbow changes in soap bubbles. One laughs with tears in one’s eyes. One moment confounded with the absolute childhood of the simplicity, in the next one is a little afraid of the keen edge of the shrewdness. This call gave me an insight into a French circle which both amused and delighted me. Coming home, M. Belloc enlarged upon Beranger’s benevolence and kindness of heart. “No man,” he said, “is more universally popular with the common people. He has exerted himself much for the families of the unfortunate deportes to Cayenne.” Then he added, laughing, “A mechanic, one of my model sitters, was dilating upon his goodness–‘What a man! what sublime virtue! how is he beloved! Could I live to see his funeral! _Quelle spectacle! Quelle grande emotion!'”_
At tea, Madame M. commented on the manners of a certain English lady of our acquaintance.
“She’s an actress; she’s too affected!”
Madame Belloc and I defended her.
“Ah,” said M. Belloc, “you cannot judge; the French are never natural in England, nor the English in France. Frenchmen in England are stupid and cross, trying to be dignified; and when the English come to France, it’s all guitar playing and capering, in trying to have _esprit._”
But it is hard to give a conversation in which the salient points are made by a rapid pantomime, which effervesces like champagne.
Madame Belloc and Madame M. agree that the old French _salon_ is no more; that none in the present iron age can give the faintest idea of the brilliancy of the institution in its palmiest days. The horrors and reverses of successive revolutions, have thrown a pall over the French heart.
I have been now, in all, about a month in this gay and flowery city, seeing the French people, not in hotels and _cafes,_ but in the seclusion of domestic life; received, when introduced, not with ceremonious distance, as a stranger, but with confidence and affection, as a friend.
Though, according to the showing of my friends, Paris is empty of many of her most brilliant ornaments, yet I have been so fortunate as to make the acquaintance of many noble and justly celebrated people, and to feel as if I had gained a real insight into the French heart.
I liked the English and the Scotch as well as I could like any thing. And now, I equally like the French. Exact opposites, you will say. For that reason all the more charming. The goodness and beauty of the divine mind is no less shown in the traits of different races than of different tribes of fruits and flowers. And because things are exact opposites, is no reason why we should not like both. The eye is not like the hand, nor the ear like the foot; yet who condemns any of them for the difference? So I regard nations as parts of a great common body, and national differences as necessary to a common humanity.
I thought, when in English society, that it was as perfect and delightful as it could be. There was worth of character, strength of principle, true sincerity, and friendship, charmingly expressed. I have found all these, too, among the French, and besides them, something which charms me the more, because it is peculiar to the French, and of a kind wholly different from any I have ever had an experience of before. There is an iris-like variety and versatility of nature, a quickness in catching and reflecting the various shades of emotion or fancy, a readiness in seizing upon one’s own half-expressed thoughts, and running them out in a thousand graceful little tendrils, which is very captivating.
I know a general prejudice has gone forth, that the French are all mere outside, without any deep reflection or emotion. This may be true of many. No doubt that the strength of that outward life, that acuteness of the mere perceptive organization, and that tendency to social exhilaration, which prevail, will incline to such a fault in many cases. An English reserve inclines to moroseness, and Scotch perseverance to obstinacy; so this aerial French nature may become levity and insincerity; but then it is neither the sullen Englishman, the dogged Scotchman, nor the shallow Frenchman that we are to take as the national ideal. In each country we are to take the very best as the specimen.
Now, it is true that, here in France, one can find people as judicious, quiet, discreet, and religious, as any where in the world; with views of life as serious, and as earnest, not living for pretence or show, but for the most rational and religious ends. Now, when all this goodness is silvered over, as it were, reflecting like mother-of-pearl or opal, a thousand fanciful shades and changes, is not the result beautiful? Some families into which I have entered, some persons with whom I have talked, have left a most delightful impression upon my mind; and I have talked, by means of imperfect English, French, and interpretations, with a good many. They have made my heart bleed over the history of this most beautiful country. It is truly mournful that a people with so many fine impulses, so much genius, appreciation, and effective power, should, by the influence of historical events quite beyond the control of the masses, so often have been thrown into a false position before the world, and been subjected to such a series of agonizing revulsions and revolutions.
“O, the French are half tiger, half monkey!” said a cultivated American to me the other day. Such remarks cut me to the heart, as if they had been spoken of a brother. And when they come from the mouth of an American, the very shade of Lafayette, it would seem, might rise and say, “_Et tu, Brute!_”
It is true, it is a sarcasm of Voltaire’s; but Voltaire, though born a Frenchman, neither imbodied nor was capable of understanding the true French ideal. The French _head_ he had, but not the French heart. And from his bitter judgment we might appeal to a thousand noble names. The generous Henri IV., the noble Sully, and Bayard the knight _sans peur et sans reproche_, were these half tiger and half monkey? Were John Calvin and Fénélon half tiger and half monkey? Laplace, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Cuvier, Des Cartes, Malebranche, Arago–what were they? The tree of history is enriched with no nobler and fairer boughs and blossoms than have grown from the French stock.
It seems a most mysterious providence that some nations, without being wickeder than others, should have a more unfortunate and disastrous history.
The woes of France have sprung from the fact that a Jezebel de Medici succeeded in exterminating from the nation that portion of the people corresponding to the Puritans of Scotland, England, and Germany. The series of persecutions which culminated in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and ended with the dragonades under Louis XIV., drained France of her lifeblood. Other nations have profited by the treasures then cast out of her, and she has remained poor for want of them. Some of the best blood in America is of the old Huguenot stock. Huguenots carried arts and manufactures into England. An expelled French refugee became the theological leader of Puritanism in England, Scotland, and America; and wherever John Calvin’s system of theology has gone, civil liberty has gone with it; so that we might almost say of France, as the apostle said of Israel, “If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness!”