Mrs. Jameson

“ To me it is amusing, and it cannot but be interesting and instructive to the philosopher and artist, to observe how various people, uninitiated into any of the technicalities of art, unable to appreciate the amount of difficulties overcome, are affected by pictures and sculpture. But in forming our judgment, our taste in art, it is unsafe to listen to opinions springing from this vague kind of enthusiasm; for in painting, as in music—"just as the soul is pitched, the eye is pleased."
I amuse myself in the gallery here with watching the countenances of those who look at the pictures. ”

“ But, Dannecker's Ariadne is the flushed queen of the Bacchante, and, in the clash of the cymbals and the mantling cup, she has already forgotten Theseus. There is a look of life, an individual truth in the beauty of the form, which distinguishes it from the long-limbed vapid pieces of elegance called nymphs and Venuses, which
"Stretch their white arms, and bend their marble necks,"
in the galleries of our modern sculptors. One objection struck me, but not till after a second or third view of the statue. The panther seemed to me rather too bulky and ferocious. ”

“ No where, not even at Munich, one of the most profligate of the German capitals, was I ever shocked by the exhibition of female suffering and depravity in another form, as in the theatres and the streets of London.
I have been asked twenty times since my return to England, whether the German women are not very exaltée—very romantic? I could only answer, that they appeared to me less calculating, less the slaves of artificial manners and modes of thinking; more imaginative, more governed by [203] natural feeling, more enthusiastic in love and religion, than with us. ”

“ Does not even Madame de Staël exalt the fine earnestness of the German feeling towards you, infinitely above the system of French gallantry?—that flimsy veil of conventional good-breeding, under which we seek to disguise the demoralization of one sex, and the virtual slavery of the other? Have I not heard you say, that it is the present fashion among the poets, artists, and writers of Germany, to defer in all things to the middle ages? ”

“ By Paris Bordone, of Trevigi, there is a head of a Venetian lady, in a dress of crimson velvet, with dark splendid eyes which tell a whole history. By Murillo, there are eight pictures—not one in his most elevated style, but all perfect miracles of painting and of nature. There are thirty-three pictures of Vander Werff, a number sufficient to make one's blood run cold. One, a Magdalene, is of the size of life; the only large picture by this elegant, elaborate, soulless painter I ever saw: he is to me detestable. ”

“ I could give no idea in words of the intense nature and expression in some of the heads, of the grand feeling united to the most finished delicacy in the conception and painting of countenance, of the dazzling splendour of colouring in the draperies, and the richness of fancy in the ornaments and accessories.
But I do fear that the just admiration excited by this kind of excellence, and a great deal of national enthusiasm, has misled the modern German artists to a false, at least an exaggerated estimate, and an injudicious imitation, of their favourite models. ”

“ Neither are, or can be, favourites of the women, for the same reasons.
There must have been something analogous in the genius of Rubens and Titian. The distinction was of climate and country. They appear to have looked at nature under the same aspect, but it was a different nature,—the difference between Flanders and Venice. They were both painters of flesh and blood: by nature, poets; by conformation, colourists; by temperament and education, magnificent spirits, scholars, and gentlemen, lovers of pleasure and of fame. ”

“ I have then a page out of the great book of human nature—the portrait of a particular mind; when that is fairly before me I have a standard by which to judge: I can draw my own inferences. Will you not allow that it is possible to visit [84] Heidelberg, and to derive the most intense pleasure from its picturesque beauty, without dreaming over witches and warriors, palatines and princes? Can we not admire and appreciate the sculpture in the palace of Otho-Henry, without losing ourselves in vague, wondering reveries over the destinies of the sculptors? ”

“ If you prefer slaves and playthings to companions and helpmates, is that our fault? In Germany I met with some men who, perhaps out of compliment, descanted with enthusiasm on female talent, and in behalf of female authorship; but the women almost uniformly spoke of the latter with dread, as something formidable, or with contempt, as of something beneath them: what is an unworthy prejudice in your sex, becomes, when transplanted into ours, a feeling;—a mistaken, but a genuine, and even a generous feeling. ”

“ O if there be any thing more terrific, more disgusting, than war and its consequences, it is that perversion of all human intellect—that depravation [75] of all human feeling—that contempt or misconception of every Christian precept, which has permitted the great, and the good, and the tenderhearted, to admire war as a splendid game—a part of the poetry of life—and to defend it as a glorious evil, which the very nature and passions of man have ever rendered, and will ever render, necessary and inevitable. ”

“ Quick in perception, yet femininely confiding, uniting a sort of restless vivacity with an indolent gracefulness, she appeared to me by far the most poetical and genuine being of my own sex I ever knew in highly-cultivated life: one to whom no wrong could teach mistrust; no injury, bitterness; one to whom the common-place realities, the vulgar necessary cares of existence, were but too indifferent;—who was, in reality, all that other women try to appear, and betrayed, with a careless independence, what they most wish to conceal. ”

“ Life, there, appears in a very attractive costume: not in a half-holiday, half-beggarly garb, as at Rome and Naples; nor in a thin undress of superficial decency as at Berlin; nor in a court domino, hiding, we know not what—as at Vienna and Munich; nor half motley, half military, as at Paris; nor in rags and embroidery, as in London; but at Frankfort all the outside at least is fair, substantial, and consistent. The shops vie in splendour with those of London and Paris ”

“ All, however, have not lovers to lose, or husbands to displease, or friends to affront; and if the women, in compliance with our self-revolving egotism, affect to prostrate themselves, and undervalue one another—do the men allow it to this extent? Do not the Germans most justly boast, that in their land arose the first feeling of veneration for women, the result of the Christian dispensation, grafted on the old German manners? Do they not point to their literature and their institutions, as more favourable to your sex than any other? ”

“ I think of those who have overcome them. "Great men have been among us," though they be rare. Have we not had a Flaxman? But the artist must choose where he will worship. He cannot serve God and Mammon. That man of genius who thinks he can tamper with his glorious gifts, and for a season indulge in social excesses, stoop from his high calling to the dregs of earth, abandon himself to the stream of common life, and trust to his native powers to bring him up again;—O believe it, he plays a desperate game!—one that in nearly ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is fatal. ”

“ I can bring before my fancy at this moment, the Helen Forman of Rubens, and Titian's "La Manto;" the "man with a hawk" of Rubens, and Titian's "Falconer;" can any thing in heaven or earth be more opposed? Yet in all alike, is it not the intense feeling of life and individual nature which charms, which fixes us? I know not which I admire most; but I adore Titian—his men are all made for power, and his women for love. ”

“ The description of Werther's Charlotte, cutting bread and butter, has been an eternal subject of laughter among the English, among whom fine sentiment must be garnished out with something finer than itself; and no princess can be suffered to go mad, or even be in love, except in white satin. To any one who has lived in Germany, the union of sentiment and bread and butter, or of poetry with household cares, excites no laughter. ”

“ It is her part to soften the intercourse between rougher and stronger natures; to aid in the interfusion of the gentler sympathies; to speed the interchange of art and literature from pole to pole: not to pervert wit, and talent, and eloquence, and abuse the privileges of her sex, to sow the seeds of hatred where she might plant those of love—to embitter national discord and aversion, and disseminate individual prejudice and error. ”

“ Would you send a young artist—more particularly a young sculptor—to study the human nature of London or Paris?—to seek the ideal among shop-girls and opera-dancers? Or the sublime and beautiful among the frivolous and degraded of one sex, the money-making or the brutalized of the other? ”

“ You will say—I have heard you say—that Heidelberg wants no beauty unborrowed of the eye; but if history had not clothed it in recollections, fancy must have invested it in its own dreams. It is true, that it is a mere modern edifice compared with all the classic, and most of the gothic ruins; yet over Heidelberg there hangs a terror and a mystery peculiar to itself: for the mind which acquiesces in decay, recoils from destruction. ”

“ In the highest circles a stranger finds society much alike every where. A court-ball—the soirée of an ambassadress—a minister's dinner—present nearly the same physiognomy. It is in the second class of society, which is also every where, and in every sense, the best, that we behold the stamp of national character. I was not condemned to see my German friends always en grande toilette; I had better opportunities of judging and appreciating their domestic habits and manners, than most travellers enjoy.
I thought the German women, of a certain rank, more natural than we are. ”

“ Art is the priestess of her divine mysteries, and Criticism, the door-keeper of her temple, should be Janus-headed, looking forward as well as backward. Reason estimates what has been done; Imagination alone divines what may be done. But I am losing myself in these reveries. To attempt something new,—perfectly new in style and conception—and spend, like Dannecker, eight years in working out that conception—and then perhaps eight years more waiting for a purchaser, and this in a country where one must eat and pay taxes—truly, it is not easy. ”

“ To gratify her, Frederic added to the castle of Heidelberg the theatre and banqueting-room, and all that beautiful group of buildings at the western angle, the ruins of which are still called the English palace. She had inherited from her grandmother, or had early imbibed from education, a love of nature and of amusements in the open air, and a passion for gardening; and it was to please her, and under her auspices, that Frederic planned those magnificent gardens, which were intended to unite within their bounds, all that nature could contribute or art devise ”

“ The word fashion does not express the national enthusiasm on this subject which prevails in Germany. I can understand that these pictures are often most interesting as historic documents, and often admirable for their literal transcripts of nature and expression, but they can only possess comparative excellence and relative value; and where the feeling of ideal beauty and classic grace has been highly cultivated, the eye shrinks involuntarily from these hard, grotesque, and glaring productions of an age when genius was blindly groping amid the darkness of ignorance. ”

“ A woman's heart may overflow inwardly for long, long years, till at last the accumulated sorrow bursts the bounds of reason, and then all at once [182] we see the result of causes to which none gave heed, and of secret agonies to which none gave comfort—in folly, madness, destruction. Whatever might have been the cause,—thus she died. Her works in prose and verse may be found in every bookseller's shop in Germany. There is also a life of this unhappy and gifted woman by professor Schutz.
Fanny Tarnow is one of the most remarkable and most fertile of all the modern German authoresses. ”

“ If we want information as to mere facts—the situation of a town, the measurement of a church, the date of a ruin, the catalogue of a gallery—we can go to our dictionaries and our guides des voyageurs. But if, besides form and outline, we must have colouring too, we should remember that every individual mind will paint the scene with its own proper hues; and if we judge of the mind and the objects it represents relatively to each other, we may come at the truth, not otherwise. I would ask nothing of a traveller, but accuracy and sincerity in the expression of his opinions and feelings. ”

“ If you allude to the sculpture of the middle ages, that has not become a school of art, like their architecture and their painting: yet can it be true [153] that there is something in our modern institutions, our northern descent, our christian faith, inimical to the spirit of sculpture?—and, while poetry in every other form is regenerate around us, that in sculpture alone we are doomed to imitate, never to create?—doomed to the servile reproduction of the same ideas? ”