Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad with Tales and Miscellanies Now First Collected Volume I Part 3

Of these two pictures, each exhibits two scenes. A certain n.o.bleman, a favourite of the Emperor Otho, is condemned to death by his master on the false testimony of the Empress (a sort of Potiphar's wife), who has accused him of having tempted her to break her marriage vow. In the back-ground we see the unfortunate man led to judgment; he is in his s.h.i.+rt, bare-footed and bare-headed. His wife walks at his side, to whom he appears to be speaking earnestly, and endeavouring to persuade her of his innocence. A friar precedes them, and a crowd of people follow after. On the walls of the city stand the Emperor and his wicked Empress, looking down on the melancholy procession. In the foreground, we have the dead body of the victim, stretched upon the earth, and the executioner is in the act of delivering the head to his wife, who looks grim with despair. The severed head and flowing blood are painted with such a horrid and literal fidelity to nature, that it has been found advisable to cover this portion of the picture.

In the foreground of the second picture, the Emperor Otho is represented on his throne surrounded by his counsellors and courtiers. Before him kneels the widow of the Count: she has the ghastly head of her husband in her lap, and in her left-hand she holds firmly and unhurt the red-hot iron, the fiery ordeal by which she proves to the satisfaction of all present the innocence of her murdered lord. The Emperor looks thunderstruck; the Empress stands convicted, and is condemned to death; and in the back-ground, we have the catastrophe. She is bound to a stake, the fire is kindled, and she suffers the terrible penalty of her crime. These pictures, in subject and execution, might be termed tragico-comico-historical; but in spite of the harshness of the drawing, and the thousand defects of style and taste, they fix the attention by the vigour of the colouring and the expression of the heads, many of which are evidently from the life. The story is told in a very complete though very inartificial manner. The painter, Derick Steuerbout, was one of the very earliest of the Flemish masters, and lived about 1468, many years before Albert Durer and Holbein. I have heard that they were painted for the city of Lorraine, and until the invasion of the French, they remained undisturbed, and almost unnoticed, in the Hotel-de-Ville.

MEDON.

Does this collection of the Prince of Orange still exist at Brussels?

ALDA.

I am told that it does--that the whole palace, the furniture, the pictures, remain precisely as the prince and his family left them: that even down to the princess's work-box, and the portraits of her children which hang in her boudoir, nothing has been touched. This does not speak well for king Leopold's gallantry; and, in his place, I think I would have sent the private property of my rival after him.

MEDON.

So would not I, for this is not the age of chivalry, but of common sense. As to the pictures, the Belgians might plead that they were purchased with the public money, therefore justly public property. No, no; he should not have a picture of them--"If a Vand.y.k.e would save his soul, he should not; I'd keep them, by this hand!" that is, as long as I had a plausible excuse for keeping them; but the princess should have had her work-box and her children by the first courier. What more at Brussels?

ALDA.

I can recollect no more. The weather was sultry: we dressed, and dined, and ate ices, and drove up and down the Allee Verte, and saw I believe all that is to be seen--churches, palaces, hospitals, and so forth. We went from thence to Aix-la-Chapelle and Spa. As it was the height of the season, and both places were crowded with gay invalids, perhaps I ought to have been very much amused, but I confess I was _ennuyee_ to death.

MEDON.

This I can hardly conceive; for though there might have been little to amuse one of your turn of mind, there should have been much to observe.

ALDA.

There might have been matter for observation, or ridicule, or reflexion, at the moment, but nothing that I remember with pleasure. Spa I disliked particularly. I believe I am not in my nature cold or stern; but there was something in the shallow, tawdry, vicious gaiety of this place, which disgusted me. In all watering-places extremes meet; sickness and suffering, youth and dissipation, beggary and riches, collect together; but Spa being a very small town, a mere village, the approximation is brought immediately under the eye at every hour, every moment; and the beauty of the scenery around only rendered it more disagreeable: to me, even the hill of Annette and Lubin was polluted. Our Chef de voyage, who had visited Spa fifty years before, when on his _grand tour_, walked about with great complacency, recalling his youthful pleasures, and the days when he used to gallant his beautiful cousin, the d.u.c.h.ess of Rutland, of divine memory. While the rest of the party were amused, I fell into my old, habit of thinking and observing, and my contemplations were not agreeable. But instead of dealing in these general remarks, I will sketch you one or two pictures which have dwelt upon my memory.

We had a well-dressed laquais-de-place, whose honesty and good-humour rendered him an especial favourite. His wife being ill, I went to see her; to my great surprise he conducted me to a little mud hovel, worse than the worst Irish cabin I ever heard described, where his wife lay stretched upon some straw, covered with a rug, and a little neglected ragged child was crawling about the floor, and about her bed. It seems then, that, this poor man, who every day waited at our luxurious table, dressed in smiles, and must habitually have witnessed the wasteful expenditure of the rich, returned every night to his miserable home, if home it could be called, to feel the stings of want with double bitterness. He told me that he and his wife lived the greater part of the year upon water-gruel, and that the row of wretched cabins, of which his own formed one, was inhabited by those who, like himself, were dependent upon the rich, extravagant, and dissipated strangers for the little pittance which was to support them for a twelvemonth. Was not this a fearful contrast? I should tell you that the benevolence of our Chef rendered this poor couple independent of change or chance for the next year. My other picture is in a different style. You know that at Spa the theatre immediately joins the ball-room. As soon as the performances are over, the parterre is laid down with boards, and in a few minutes metamorphosed into a gambling saloon. One night curiosity led me to be a spectator at one of the _rouge et noir_ tables. While I was there, a Flemish lady of rank, the Baroness B----, came in, hanging on the arm of a gentleman; she was not young, but still handsome. I had often met her in our walks, and had been struck by her fine eyes, and the amiable expression of her countenance. After one or two turns up and down the room, laughing and talking, she carelessly, and as if from a sudden thought, seated herself at the table. By degrees she became interested in the game, her stakes became deeper, her countenance became agitated, and her brow clouded. I left her playing. The next evening when I entered, I found her already seated at the table, as indeed I had antic.i.p.ated. I watched her for some time with a painful interest. It was evident that she was not an habitual gambler, like several others at the same table, whose hard impa.s.sive features never varied with the variations of the game. There was one little old withered skeleton of a woman, like a death's head in artificial flowers, who stretched out her harpy claws upon the rouleaus of gold and silver, without moving a muscle or a wrinkle of her face,--with hardly an additional twinkle in her dull grey eye. Not so my poor baroness, who became every moment more agitated and more eager: her eyes sparkled with an unnatural keenness, her teeth became set, and her lips drawn away from them, wore, instead of the sweet smile which had at first attracted my attention, a grin of desperation. Gradually, as I looked at her, her countenance a.s.sumed so hideous, and, I may add, so vile an expression, that I could no longer endure the spectacle. I hastened from the room--more moved, more shocked than I can express; and often, since that time, her face has risen upon my day and night dreams like a horrid supernatural mask. Her husband, for this wretched woman was a wife and a mother, came to meet her a few days afterwards, and accompany her home; but I heard that in the interval she had attempted self-destruction, and failed.

MEDON.

The case is but too common; and even you, who are always seeking reasons and excuses for the delinquencies of your s.e.x, would hardly find them here.

ALDA.

And unless I could know what were the previous habits and education of the victim, through what influences, blest or unblest, her mind had been trained, her moral existence built up--should I condemn? Who had taught this woman self-knowledge?--who had instructed her in the elements of her own being, and guarded her against her own excitable temperament?--what friendly voice had warned her ignorance?--what secret burden of misery--what joyless emptiness of heart--what fever of the nerves--what weariness of spirit--what "thankless husband or faithless lover" had driven her to the edge of the precipice? In this particular case I know that the husband bore the character of being both negligent and dissipated; and where was _he_,--what were his haunts and his amus.e.m.e.nts, while his wife staked with her gold, her honour, her reason, and her life? Tell me all this before we dare to pa.s.s judgment. O it is easy to compute what is done! and yet, who but the Being above us all, can know what is resisted?

MEDON.

You would plead then for a _female_ gambler?

ALDA.

Why do you lay such an emphasis upon _female_ gambler? In what respect is a female gambler worse than one of your s.e.x? The case is more pitiable;--more rare--therefore, perhaps, more shocking; but why more hateful?

MEDON.

You pose me.

ALDA.

Then I will leave you to think;--or shall I go on? for at this rate we shall never arrive at the end of our journey. I was at Aix-la-Chapelle, was I not? Well, I spare you the relics of Charlemagne, and if you have any dear or splendid a.s.sociations with that great name, spare your imagination the shock it may receive in the cathedral at Aix, and leave "Yarrow unvisited."[3] Luckily the theatre at Aix is beautiful, and there was a fine opera, and a very perfect orchestra; the singers tolerable. It was here I first heard the Don Juan and the Freyschutz performed in the German fas.h.i.+on, and with German words. The Freyschutz gave me unmixed pleasure. In the Don Juan I missed the recitative, and the soft Italian flow of syllables, from which the music had been divorced; so that the ear, long habituated to that marriage of sweet sounds, was disappointed; but to listen without pleasure and excitement was impossible. I remember that on looking round, after Donna Anna's song, I was surprised to see our Chef de voyage bathed in tears; but, no whit disconcerted, he merely wiped them away, saying, with a smile, "It is the very prettiest, softest thing to cry to one's self!"

Afterwards, when we were in the carriage, he expressed his surprise that any man should be ashamed of tears. "For my own part," he added, "when I wish to enjoy the very high sublime of luxury, I dine alone, order a mutton cutlet, _cuite a point_, with a bottle of Burgundy on one side, and Ovid's epistle of Penelope to Ulysses on the other; and so I read, and eat, and cry to myself. And then he repeated with enthusiasm--

"Hanc tua Penelope lento tibi mitt.i.t Ulysse: Nil mihi rescribas attamen ipse veni;"

his eyes glistening as he recited the lines; he made me feel their beauty without understanding a word of their sense. "Strangest, and happiest of men!" I thought as I looked at him, "that after living seventy years in this world, can still have tears to spare for the sorrows of Penelope!" Well, our next resting place was Cologne.

MEDON.

You pause?--you have nothing to say of Cologne? No English traveller, except your professed tourists and guide-book makers, ever has; of the crowds who pa.s.s through the place, on their way up or down the Rhine, how few spend more than a night or a day there! their walk is between the Rheinberg and the cathedral; they look, perhaps, with a sneering curiosity at the shrine of the Three Kings; cut the usual jests on the Leda and the Cupid and Psyche;[4] glance at the St. Peter of Rubens; lounge on the bridge of boats; stock themselves with eau-de-Cologne, and then away! And yet this strange old city, which a bigoted priesthood, a jealous magistracy, and a variety of historical causes, have so long kept isolated in the midst of Europe, with its Roman origin, its cla.s.sical a.s.sociations, the wild gothic superst.i.tions of which it has been the theatre; its legion of martyrs, its three kings and eleven thousand virgins, and the peculiar manners and physiognomy of the people, strangely take the fancy. What has become of its three hundred and fifty churches, and its thirty thousand beggars?--Thirty thousand beggars!

Was there ever such a splendid establishment of licensed laziness, and consecrated rags and wallets! What a magnificent idea does it give one of the inexhaustible charity, and the incalculable riches of the inhabitants! but the French came with their besom of purification and destruction; and lo! the churches were turned into a.r.s.enals, the convents into barracks; and from its old-accustomed haunts, "the genius of beggary was with sighing sent." I really believe, that were I again to visit Cologne, I would not be content with a mere superficial glance, as heretofore.

ALDA.

And you would do well. To confess the truth, our first impressions of the place were exceedingly disagreeable; it appeared a huge, rambling, gloomy old city, whose endless narrow dirty streets, and dull dingy-looking edifices, were any thing but inviting. Nor on a second and a third visit were we tempted to prolong our stay. Yet Cologne has since become most interesting to me from a friends.h.i.+p I formed with a Colonese, a descendant of one of the oldest families of the place.

How she loved her old city!--how she wors.h.i.+pped every relic with the most poetical, if not the most pious veneration!--how she looked down upon Berlin with scorn, as an upstart city, "_une ville ma chere, qui n'a ni histoire, ni antiquite_." The cathedral she used to call "_mon Berceau_," and the three kings "_mes trois peres_." Her profound knowledge of general history, her minute acquaintance with the local antiquities, the peculiar customs, the wild legends, the solemn superst.i.tions of her birth-place, added to the most lively imagination and admirable descriptive powers, were to me an inexhaustible source of delight and information. It appears that the people of Cologne have a distinct character, but little modified by intercourse with the surrounding country, and preserved by continual intermarriages among themselves. They have a dialect, and songs, and ballads, and music, peculiar to their city; and are remarkable for an original vein of racy humour, a revengeful spirit, an exceeding superst.i.tion, a blind attachment to their native customs, a very decided contempt for other people, and a surpa.s.sing hatred of all innovations. They never admitted the jurisdiction of the electors of Cologne, and, although the most bigoted people in the world, were generally at war with their archbishops. Even Napoleon could not make them comformable.

The city is now attached to Prussia, but still retains most of its ancient privileges, and all its ancient spirit of insubordination and independence. When, in 1828, the king of Prussia wished to force upon them an unpopular magistrate, the whole city rose, and obliged the obnoxious president to resign; the government, armed with all its legal and military terrors, could do nothing against the determined spirit of this half-civilized, fearless, reckless, yet merry, good-humoured populace. A history of this grotesque revolution, which had the same duration as the celebrated _trois jours de Paris_, and exhibited in its progress and issue some of the most striking, most characteristic, most farcical scenes you can imagine, were worthy of a Colonese Walter Scott. How I wish I could give you some of my friend's rich graphic sketches and humorous pictures of popular manner! but I feel that their peculiar spirit would evaporate in my hands. The event is celebrated in their local history as "_la Revolution du Carnaval_:" and this reminds me of another peculiarity of Cologne. The carnival is still celebrated there with a degree of splendour and fantastic humour, exceeding even the festivities of Rome and Naples in the present day; but as the season of the carnival is not the season for flight with our English birds of pa.s.sage, few have ever witnessed these extraordinary Saturnalia. Such is the general ignorance or indifference relative to Cologne, that I met the other day with a very accomplished man, and a lover of art, who had frequently visited the place, and yet he had never seen the Medusa.

MEDON.

Nor I, by this good light!--I never even heard of it!

ALDA.

And how shall I attempt to describe it? Unless I had the "large utterance of the early G.o.ds," or could pour forth a string of Greek or German compounds, I know not in what words I could do justice to the effect it produced upon me. This wondrous mask measures about two feet and a half in height;[5] the colossal features, and I may add, the colossal expression, grand without exaggeration--so awfully vast, and yet so gloriously beautiful; the full rich lips curled with disdain--the mighty wings overshadowing the knit and tortured brow--the madness in the large dilated eyes--the wreathing and recoiling snakes, came upon me like something supernatural, and impressed me at once with astonishment, horror, and admiration. I was quite unprepared for what I beheld. As I stood before it my mind seemed to elevate and enlarge itself to admit this new vision of grandeur. Nothing but the two Fates in the Elgin marbles, and the Torso of the Vatican, ever affected me with the same inexpressible sense of the sublime: and this is not a fragment of some grand mystery, of which the remainder has been "to night and chaos hurled;" it is entire, in admirable preservation, and the workmans.h.i.+p as perfect as the conception is magnificent. I know not if it would have affected another in the same manner. For me, the ghastly allegory of the Medusa has a peculiar fascination. I confess that I have never wholly understood it, nor have any of the usual explanations satisfied me; it appears to me, that the Greeks, in thus blending the extremes of loveliness and terror, had a meaning, a purpose, more than is dreamt of by our philosophy.

MEDON.

But, how came this wonderful relic to Cologne, of all places in the world?

ALDA.

It stopped there on its road to England.

MEDON.

By what perverse destiny?--was it avarice on our part, or force or fraud on that of others?

ALDA.

It was, as Desdemona says, "our wretched fortune:" but the story, with all its circ.u.mstances, does so much honour to human nature, that it has half reconciled me to our loss. You must have heard of Professor Wallraf of Cologne, one of the canons of the cathedral, who, with his professors.h.i.+p and his canons.h.i.+p together, may have possessed from five to seven hundred francs a year. He was one of those wonderful and universal scholars, of whom we read in former times--men who concentrated all their powers and pa.s.sions, and intellectual faculties, in the acquirement and advancement of knowledge, without any selfish aim or object, and from the mere abstract love of science. Early in life this man formed the resolution to remove from his native city the reproach of self-satisfied ignorance and monastic prejudices, which had hitherto characterized it; and in the course of a long existence of labour and privation, as professor and teacher, he contrived to collect together books, ma.n.u.scripts, pictures, gems, works of art, and objects of natural history, to an immense amount. In the year 1818, on recovering from a dangerous illness, he presented his whole collection to his native city; and the magistracy, in return, bestowed on him a pension of three thousand francs for the remainder of his life. He was then more than seventy. About the same time a dealer in antiquities arrived from Rome, bringing with him this divine Medusa, with various other busts and fragments: he was on his way to England, where he hoped to dispose of them. He asked for his whole collection twelve thousand francs, and refused to sell any part of it separately. The city refused to make the purchase, thinking it too dear, and Wallraf, in despair at the idea of this glorious relic being consigned to other lands, mortgaged his yearly pension in order to raise the money, purchased the Medusa, presented it to the city, and then cheerfully resumed his accustomed life of self-denial and frugality. His only dread was lest he should die before the period was expired. He lived, however, to pay off his debt, and in three months afterwards he died.[6] Was not this admirable? The first time I saw the Medusa I did not know this anecdote; the second time, as I looked at it, I thought of Wallraf, and felt how much a moral interest can add to the charm of what is in itself most perfect.

MEDON.

I will certainly make a pilgrimage to this Medusa. She must be worth all the eleven thousand virgins together. What next?

ALDA.