Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad with Tales and Miscellanies Now First Collected Volume I Part 6

And does this prohibition avail much in a population of sixty thousand persons?

ALDA.

It does generally. A short time before we arrived some mischievous wretch had shot a nightingale, and was caught in the fact. His punishment was characteristic; his hands were tied behind him, and a label setting forth his crime was fixed on his breast: in this guise, with a police officer on each side, he was marched all round the gardens, and made the circuit of the city, pursued by the hisses of the populace and the abhorrent looks of the upper cla.s.ses; he was not otherwise punished, but he never again made his appearance within the walls of the city. This was the only instance which I could learn of the infraction of a law which might seem at least nugatory.

Of the s.p.a.cious, magnificent, well-arranged cemetery, its admirable apparatus for restoring suspended animation, and all its beautiful accompaniments and memorials of the dead, there was a long account published in London, at the time that a cemetery was planned for this great overgrown city; and in truth I know not where we could find a better model than the one at Frankfort; it appeared to me perfection.

The inst.i.tutions at Frankfort, both for charity and education, are numerous as becomes a rich and free city; and those I had an opportunity of examining appeared to me admirably managed. Besides the orphan schools, and the Burger schule, and the school for female education, established and maintained by the wives of the citizens, there are several infant schools, where children of a year old and upwards are nursed, and fed, and kept out of mischief and harm, while their parents are at work.

These are also maintained by subscription among the ladies, who take upon them in turns the task of daily superintendence; and I shall not easily forget the gentle-looking, elegant, well-dressed girl, who, defended from the encroachments of dirty little paws by a large ap.r.o.n, sat in the midst of a swarm of thirty or forty babies, (the eldest not four years old,) the very personification of feminine charity! But the hospital for the infirm poor--Das Versorgung Haus--pleased me particularly; 'tis true, that the cost was not a third--what do I say?

not a sixth of the expense of some of our inst.i.tutions for the same purpose. There was no luxury of architecture, nor huge gates shutting in wretchedness, and shutting out hope; nor grated windows; nor were the arrangements on so large a scale as in that splendid edifice, the Hopital des Vieillards, at Brussels;--a house for the poor need not be either a prison or a palace. But here, I recollect, the door opened with a latch; we entered unannounced, as unexpected. Here there was perfect neatness, abundance of s.p.a.ce, of air, of light, of water, and also of occupation.

I found that, besides the inmates of the place, many poor old creatures, who could not have the facilities or materials for work in their own dwellings, or whose relatives were busied in the daytime, might find here employment of any kind suited to their strength or capacity,--for which, observe, they were paid; thus leaving them to the last possible moment the feeling of independence and usefulness. I observed that many of those who seemed in the last stage of decrepitude had hung round their beds sundry little prints and pictures, and slips of paper, on which were written legibly, texts from scripture, moral sentences, and sc.r.a.ps of poetry. The ward of the superannuated and the sick was at a distance from the working and eating rooms; and all breathed around that peace and quiet which should accompany old age, instead of that "life-consuming din" I _have_ heard in such places. On the pillow of one bed, there was laid by some chance a bouquet of flowers.

In this ward there was an old man nearly blind and lethargic; another old man was reading to him. I remarked a poor bed-ridden woman, utterly helpless, but not old, and with good and even refined features; and another poor woman, seated by her, was employed in keeping the flies from settling on her face. To one old woman, whose countenance struck me, I said a few words in English--I could speak no German, unluckily.

She took my hand, kissed it, and turning away, burst into tears. No one asked for any thing even by a look, nor apparently wanted any thing; and I felt that from the unaffected good-nature of the lady who accompanied us, we had not so much the appearance of coming to look at the poor inmates as of paying them a kind visit;--and this was as it should be. The mild, open countenances of the two persons who managed the establishment, pleased me particularly; and the manner of the matron superintendent, as she led us over the rooms, was so simple and kind, that I was quite at ease: I experienced none of that awkward shyness and reluctance I have felt when ostentatiously led over such places in England--feeling ashamed to stare upon the misery I could not cure. In such cases I have probably attributed to the sufferers a delicacy or a sensibility, long blunted, if ever possessed; but I was in pain for them and for myself.

One thing more: there was a neat chapel; and we were shown with some pride the only piece of splendour in the establishment. The communion plate of ma.s.sy silver was the gift of two brothers, who had married on the same day two sisters; and these two sisters had died nearly at the same time--I believe it was actually on the same day. The widowed husbands presented this plate in memory of their loss and the virtues of their wives; and I am sorry I did not copy the simple and affecting inscription in which this is attested. There was also a silver vase, which had been presented as an offering by a poor miller whom an unexpected legacy had raised to independence.

I might give you similar sketches of other inst.i.tutions, here and elsewhere, but I did not bestow sufficient attention on the practical details, and the comparative merits of the different methods adopted, to render my observations useful. Though deeply interested, as any feeling, thinking being must be on such subjects, I have not studied them sufficiently. There are others, however, who are doing this better than I could:--blessings be on them, and eternal praise!--My general impression was, pleasure from the benevolence and simplicity of heart with which these inst.i.tutions were conducted and superintended, and wonder, not to be expressed, at their extreme cheapness.

The day preceding my visit to the Versorgung Haus, I had been in a fever of indignation at the fate of poor R----, one of the conspirators, who had become insane from the severity of his confinement. I had descanted with great complacency on our open tribunals and our trials by jury, and yet I could not help thinking to myself, "Well, if _we_ have not their state-prisons, neither have _they_ our poor-houses!"

MEDON.

It is plain that the rich, charitable, worldly prosperous, self-seeking, Frankfort, would be your chosen residence after all!

ALDA.

No--as a fixed residence I should not prefer Frankfort. There is a little too much of the pride of purse--too much of the aristocracy of wealth--too much dressing and dinnering--and society is too much broken up into sets and circles to please me: besides, it must be confessed, that the arts do not flourish in this free imperial city.

The Stadel Museum was opened just before our last visit to Frankfort.

A rich banker of that name bequeathed, in 1816, his collection of prints and pictures, and nearly a million and a half of florins, for the commencement and maintenance of this inst.i.tution, and they have certainly begun on a splendid scale. The edifice in which the collection is arranged is s.p.a.cious, fitted up with great cost, and generally with great taste, except the ceilings, which, being the glory and admiration of the good people of Frankfort, I must endeavour to describe to you particularly. The elaborate beauty of the arabesque ornaments, their endless variety, and the vivid colouring and gilding, reminded me of some of the illuminated ma.n.u.scripts; but I was rather amused than pleased, and rather surprised to see art and ornament so misplaced--invention, labour, money, time, lavished to so little purpose. No effect was aimed at--none produced. The strained and wearied eye wandered amid a profusion of unmeaning forms, and of gorgeous colours, which never harmonized into a whole: and after I had half broken my neck by looking up at them through an opera gla.s.s, in order to perceive the elegant interlacing of the minute patterns and exquisite finish of the workmans.h.i.+p, I turned away laughing and provoked, and wondering at such a strange perversion, or rather sacrifice, of taste.

MEDON.

But the collection itself?--

ALDA.

It is not very interesting. It contains some curious old German pictures; Stadel having been, like others, smitten with the mania of buying Van Eyks and Hemlings and Sch.o.r.eels. Here, however, these old masters, as part of a school, or history of art, are well placed.

There are a few fine Flemish paintings--and, in particular, a wondrous portrait by Flinck, which you must see. It is a lady in black, on the left side of the door--of--I forget which room--but you cannot miss it: those soft eyes will look out at you, till you will feel inclined to ask her name, and wonder the lips do not unclose to answer you. Of first-rate pictures there are none--I mean none of the historical and Italian schools: the collection of casts from the antique is splendid and well-selected.

MEDON.

But Bethmann, the banker, had already set an example of munificent patronage of art: when he shamed kings, for instance, by purchasing Dannecker's Ariadne--one of the chief lions of Frankfort, if fame says true.

ALDA.

How! have you not seen it?

MEDON.

No--unhappily. The weather, as I have told you, was dreadful. I was discouraged--I procrastinated. That flippant observation I had read in some English traveller, that "Dannecker's Ariadne looked as if it had been cut out of old Stilton cheese," was floating in my mind. In short, I was careless, as we often are, when the means of gratifying curiosity appear secure, and within our reach. I repent me now. I wish I had settled to my own satisfaction, and with mine own eyes, the disputed merits of this famous statue; but I will trust to you. It ought to be something admirable. I do not know much of Dannecker, or his works, but by all accounts he has not to complain of the want of patronage. To him cannot be applied the pathetic common-place, so familiar in the mouths of our young artists, about "chill penury," the struggle to live, the cares that "freeze the genial current of the soul," the efforts of una.s.sisted genius, and so forth. Want never came to him since he devoted himself to art. He appears to have had leisure and freedom to give full scope to his powers, and to work out his own creations.

ALDA.

Had he? Had he indeed? His own story would be different, I fancy.

Dannecker, like every patronized artist I ever met with, would execrate patronage if he dared. Good old man! The thought of what he might have done, and could have done, breaks out sometimes in the midst of all his self-complacent _nave_ exultation over what he _has_ done. I will endeavour to give you a correct idea of the Ariadne, and then I will tell you something of Dannecker himself. His history is a good commentary upon royal patronage.

I had heard so much of this statue, that my curiosity was strongly excited. A part of its fame may be owing to its situation, and the number of travellers who go to visit Bethmann's Museum, as a matter of course. I used to observe that all travellers, who were on the road to Italy, praised it, and all who were on their way home criticised it.

As I ascended the steps of the pavilion in which it is placed, the enthusiasm of expectation faded away from my mind: I said to myself, "I shall be disappointed!"--Yet I was not disappointed.

The Ariadne occupied the centre of a cabinet, hung with a dark grey colour, and illuminated by a high lateral window, so that the light and shade, and the relief of the figure, were perfectly well managed and effective. Dannecker has not represented Ariadne in her more poetical and picturesque character, as, when betrayed and forsaken by Theseus, she stood alone on the wild sh.o.r.e of Naxos, "her hair blown by the winds, and all about her expressing desolation." It is Ariadne, immortal and triumphant, as the bride of Bacchus. The figure is larger than life.

She is seated, or rather reclined, on the back of a panther. The right arm is carelessly extended: the left arm rests on the head of the animal, and the hand supports the drapery, which appears to have just dropped from her limbs. The head is turned a little upwards, as if she already antic.i.p.ated her starry home; and her tresses are braided with the vine leaves. The grace and ease of the att.i.tude, so firm, and yet so light; the flowing beauty of the form, and the position of the head, enchanted me. Perhaps the features are not sufficiently _Greek_: for, though I am not one of those who think all beauty comprised in the antique models, and that nothing can be orthodox but the straight nose and short upper lip, still to Ariadne the pure _cla.s.sical_ ideal of beauty, both in form and face, are properly in character. A cast from that divine head, the Greek Ariadne, is placed in the same cabinet, and I confess to you, that the contrast being immediately brought before the eye, Dannecker's Ariadne seemed to want refinement, in comparison. It is true, that the moment chosen by the German sculptor required an expression altogether different. In the Greek bust, though already circled by the viny crown, and though all heaven seems to repose on the n.o.ble arch of that expanded brow, yet the head is declined, and a tender melancholy lingers round the all-perfect mouth, as if the remembrance of a mortal love--a mortal sorrow--yet shaded her celestial bridal hours, and made pale her immortality. 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. It is true, it is not a natural, but a mythological panther, such as we see in the antique ba.s.so-relievos, and the arabesques of Herculaneum: yet, methinks if he appeared a little more conscious of his lovely burthen, more tamed by the influence of beauty, it would have been better. However, the sculptor may have had a design, a feeling, in this very point, which has escaped me: I regret now that I did not ask him. One thing is certain, that the extreme ma.s.siveness of the panther's limbs serves to give a firmness to the support of the figure, and sets off to advantage its lightness and delicacy. It is equally certain that if the head of the animal had been ever so slightly turned, the pose of the right arm, and with it the whole att.i.tude, must have been altered.

The window of the cabinet is so contrived, that by drawing up a blind of stained gla.s.s, a soft crimson tint is shed over the figure, as if the marble blushed. This did not please me: partly from a dislike to all trickery in art; partly because, to my taste, the pale colourless purity of the marble is one of the beauties of a fine statue.

It is true that Dannecker has been unfortunate in his material. The block from which he cut his figure is imperfect and streaky; but how it could possibly have suggested the idea of _Stilton cheese_ I am at a loss to conceive. It is not worse than Canova's Venus, in the Pitti palace, who has a terrible black streak across her bosom. M. Pa.s.savant,[14] who was standing by when I paid my last visit to the Ariadne, a.s.sured me, that when the statue was placed on its pedestal, about sixteen years ago, these black specks were scarcely visible, and that they seemed to multiply and grow darker with time. This is a lamentable, and, to me, an unaccountable fact.

MEDON.

And, I am afraid, past cure: but now tell me something of the sculptor himself. After looking on a grand work of art, we naturally turn to look into the mind which conceived and created it.

ALDA.

Dannecker, like all the great modern sculptors, sprung from the people.

Thorwaldson, Flaxman, Chantrey, Canova, Schadow, Ranch--I believe we may go farther back, to Cellini, Bandinelli, Bernini, Pigalle--all I can at this moment recollect, were of plebeian origin. When I was at Dresden, I was told of a young count, of n.o.ble family, who had adopted sculpture as a profession. This, I think, is a solitary instance of any person of n.o.ble birth devoting himself to this n.o.blest of the arts.

MEDON.

Do you forget Mrs. Darner and Lady Dacre?

ALDA.

No; but I do not think that either the exquisite modelling of Lady Dacre, or the meritorious _attempts_ of Mrs. Damer, come under the head of sculpture in its grand sense. By-the-bye, when Horace Walpole said that Mrs. Damer was the first female sculptor who had attained any celebrity, he forgot the Greek girl, Lala,[15] and the Properzia Rossi of modern times.

Dannecker was born at Stuttgardt in 1758. On him descended no hereditary mantle of genius; it was the immediate gift of Heaven, and apparently heaven-directed. His father was a groom in the duke's stable, and appears to have been merely an ill-tempered, thick-headed boor. How young Dannecker picked up the rudiments of reading and writing, he does not himself remember; nor by what circ.u.mstances the bent of his fancy and genius was directed to the fine arts. Like other great men, who have been led to trace the progress of their own minds, he attributed to his mother the first promptings to the fair and good, the first softening and elevating influences which his mind acknowledged. He had neither paper nor pencils; but next door to his father there lived a stone-cutter, whose blocks of marble and free-stone were every day scrawled over with rude imitations of natural objects in chalk or charcoal--the first essays of the infant Dannecker. When he was beaten by his father for this proof of idleness, his mother interfered to protect or to encourage him. As soon as he was old enough, he a.s.sisted his father in the stable; and while running about the precincts of the palace, ragged and bare-foot, he appears to have attracted, by his vivacity and alertness, the occasional notice of the duke himself.

Duke Charles, the grandfather of the present king of Wurtemburg, had founded a military school, called the Karl Schule, (Charles' School,) annexed to the Hunting Palace of the Solitude. At this academy, music and drawing were taught as well as military tactics. One day, when Dannecker was about thirteen, his father returned home in a very ill-humour, and informed his family that the duke intended to admit the children of his domestics into his new military school. The boy, with joyful eagerness, declared his intention of going immediately to present himself as a candidate. The father, with a stare of astonishment, desired him to remain at home, and mind his business; on his persisting, he resorted to blows, and ended by locking him up. The boy escaped by jumping out of the window; and, collecting several of his comrades, he made them a long harangue in praise of the duke's beneficence, then placing himself at their head, marched them up to the palace, where the whole court was a.s.sembled for the Easter festivities. On being asked their business, Dannecker replied as spokesman--"Tell his highness the duke we want to go to the Karl-schule." One of the attendants, amused, perhaps, with this juvenile ardour, went and informed the duke, who had just risen from table. He came out himself and mustered the little troop before him. He first darted a rapid scrutinizing glance along the line, then selecting one from the number, placed him on his right-hand; then another, and another, till only young Dannecker and two others remained on his left. Dannecker has since acknowledged that he suffered for a few moments such exquisite pain and shame at the idea of being rejected, that his first impulse was to run away and hide himself; and that his surprise and joy, when he found that he and his two companions were the accepted candidates, had nearly overpowered him. The duke ordered them to go the next morning to the Solitude, and then dismissed them. When Dannecker returned home, his father, enraged at losing the services of his son, turned him out of the house, and forbade him ever more to enter it; but his mother (mother like) packed up his little bundle of necessaries, accompanied him for some distance on his road, and parted from him with blessings, and tears, and words of encouragement and love.

At the Karl-schule Dannecker made but little progress in his studies.

Nothing could be worse managed than this royal establishment. The inferior teachers were accustomed to employ the poorer boys in the most servile offices, and in this, so called, academy, he was actually obliged to learn by stealth: but here he formed a friends.h.i.+p with Schiller, who, like himself, was an ardent genius pining and writhing under a chilling system; and the two boys, thrown upon one another for consolation, became friends for life. Dannecker must have been about fifteen when the Karl-schule was removed from the Solitude to Stuttgard. He was then placed under the tuition of Grubel, a professor of sculpture, and in the following year he produced his first original composition. It was a Milo of Crotona modelled in clay, and was judged worthy of the first prize.

Dannecker was at this time so unfriended and little known, that the duke, who appears to have forgotten him, learnt with astonishment that this nameless boy, the son of his groom, had carried off the highest honours of the school from all his compet.i.tors. For a few years he was employed in the duke's service in carving cornices, Cupids, and caryatides, to ornament the new palaces at Stuttgard and Hohenheim: this task-work, over which he often sighed, may possibly have a.s.sisted in giving him that certainty and mechanical dexterity in the use of his tools for which he is remarkable. About ten years were thus pa.s.sed; he then obtained permission to travel for his improvement with an allowance of three hundred florins a-year from the duke. With these slender means Dannecker set off for Paris on foot. There, for the first time, he had opportunities of studying the living model. His enthusiasm for his art enabled him to endure extraordinary privations of every kind; for out of his little pension of 23 a-year he had not only to feed and clothe himself, but to purchase all the materials for his art, and the means of instruction; and this in an expensive capital, surrounded with temptations which an artist and an enthusiastic young man finds it difficult to withstand. He told me himself that day after day he has studied in the Louvre dinnerless, and dressed in a garb which scarce retained even the appearance of decency. He left Paris, after a two years' residence, as simple in mind and heart as when he entered it, and considerably improved in his knowledge of anatomy and in the technical part of his profession. The treasures of the Louvre, though far inferior to what they now are, had let in a flood of ideas upon his mind, among which (as he described his own feelings) he groped as one bewildered and intoxicated, amazed rather than enlightened.