that same chamber he placed the World or Kingdom of Poetry, presided over by Apollo. And from that spot, and from that hour, the intellect and the art of Italy date their degradation. are If Bury had put in writing the views which left such an impress on his fellow-painters in Rome, and which later irritated Meyer, he might have expressed himself much as does Ruskin here, though doubtless less violently. Certainly Ruskin's statement sounds like an expansion and exaggeration of certain passages in Fr. Schlegel's Gemahldebeschreibungen aus Paris und den Niederlanden, and some sentences in it strike one like modified transcriptions from Rio.' His passionate preference for the early masters is attested again and again throughout his work. We all familiar with the praise of Cimabue, Giotto, Orcagna, Fra Angelico, etc., found in the various volumes of Modern Painters and in other works. We remember, too, that Lippi and Botticelli rose on his horizon comparatively late in life-and the fact is not without significance for one who had read Rio. We further call to mind Ruskin's contempt for the Bolognese, especially for Cochin's favorite, Guercino, and also, in spite of appreciation for his technical ability, for that other darling of the eighteenth century, Correggio. "Sensuality and impurity" soiled the brush of both. The Renaissance, readers of Ruskin are well aware, was to the great prose-poet merely an age of decay. As Wackenroder fifty years before had pleaded for a simple spirit in art, and had professed contempt for technique, so his famous English successor never tires of lauding "simple and unlearned men" like Giotto, Orcagna, Angelico, Memmi, Pisano, and of attacking "the learned men that followed them." For knowledge and science (especially the science of words) are a burden. They have a pestilent effect. They lead to the pride of science which killeth; "the one main purpose of the Renaissance artists, in all their work, was to show how much they knew." This is "Renaissance Pride." The interest in paganism, so strong during the Renaissance, is deplorable. There followed from this interest that "all the most exalted faculties of man, which, up to that period, had been employed in 1 Cf. above, p. 55. 2 Stones of Venice, "The Spite of the Proud," sec. 23 (Brantwood edition). 3 Ibid., sec. 32. the service of Faith, were now transferred to the service of Fiction." The inevitable corollary of such self-conceit was decay. This is the great "Mene" to be derived from the study of Venetian history." Ruskin goes beyond Rio, and the Germans from whom Rio borrowed, in more persistently emphasizing the purely moral aspect of art. This attitude frequently comes to the surface in Ruskin's writings, and is perhaps most tersely expressed in "The Relation of Art to Morals," the third of the "Lectures on Art": "You must have the right moral state first, or you cannot have the art. But when the art is once obtained, its reflected action enhances and completes the moral state out of which it arose." This inability to recognize the essential difference between the moral and the artistic instinct was common in the literary and the art criticism of all countries in the eighteenth century. In Germany the cultured had become accustomed to a clearer method of thinking through Geothe's and Schiller's illuminating contributions to criticism. In England and America, mainly through Ruskin's influence, absence of mature insight to this day characterizes discussions of the subject. It is not my purpose, however, to show how much harm Ruskin has done. Quite the contrary. Certainly his method is viciously unscientific. To quote a felicitous word of Professor Norton: "Today he rides with Sir Galahad, pure, inspired, steadfast as he; tomorrow with Don Quixote, generous, deluded, extravagant as he." Yet it was he who by dint of an unequaled genius for prose and an irresistible enthusiasm made love for beauty a strong factor in English culture, and thus gave it a degree of mellowness which, without his influence, it might lack. Surely, to have accomplished that is as much as any mortal need aspire to attain. His very lack of balance helped him, as lack of balance had helped Rousseau, with whom he has so much in common. And his insistence on the identity of religion and true art was 1 Loc. cit., sec. 102. 2 See the concluding chapters of The Stones of Venice. 3 Cf. Brantwood edition, p. 80. 4 Brantwood edition, volume containing the "Lectures on Architecture and Painting," p. v. the very channel through which his message found ready access to the hearts of thousands of his countrymen. For, while the German public had been disciplined through the influence of Goethe, Meyer, and Rumohr, the English had remained indifferent to art in spite of Reynolds and Fuseli,' and hence could best be reached through its veneration for Christian dogma. Ruskin's influence, though still strong, is no longer as overwhelming as it was even twenty years ago. The author of The Gentle Art of Making Enemies has done his share toward mitigating it. Let us not lapse into the tone of bitterness or ridicule which marks much of the estimate of Ruskin on the part of Whistler's school. Still, let us not forget that what was pardonable, even admirable, in Bury, Wackenroder, and Schlegel, as a protest against a view of art chill with intellectuality, need no longer control us who have been freed." CAMILLO VON KLENZE BROWN UNIVERSITY 1 This indifference had evidently not been greatly mitigated by Thomas Phillips' Lectures on the History and Principles of Painting (London, 1833). In the first of these delivered in 1827, he introduced an appreciative estimate of Giotto. In the second, delivered in the same year, he shows fair understanding of Masaccio and rather remarkable insight into the genius of Signorelli. But he evidently has no understanding of Lippi, Botticelli or Ghirlandajo. Besides, Phillips' style was hardly adapted to arouse a whole nation. 2I owe grateful ackowledgment to Geheimrat Professor Suphan and Archivrat Dr. Schüddekopf, of Weimar; to Professor C. E. Norton, of Cambridge, Mass.; as well as to the libraries of Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, for their generosity in granting me access to valuable material. A VENETIAN FOLK-SONG 3 It may be that D'Ancona is right in assuming the following song' to be welded together of three separate fragments. But when he says it is badly welded he oversteps the mark. The joints of a ballad may be visible after the people are done with their soldering, but it is often an ill thing to denominate what they have joined mere casual patchwork; because reasons for such assembling of parts may exist, although the critic beneath his lamp behold them not. The volkslied is herewith divided, however as D'Ancona suggests: Io gli parlai d' amore: Addio, bella sora, Ch' io me ne vò a' Vignone, S'io fo colpo di lancia, S'io moro alla battaglia, Diran le maritate: Diran le pulzellette: Dove il sotterreremo? 1 Widter-Wolf, Volkslieder aus Venetien (1864), no. 139. 2 In his La poesia popolare italiana (1878), p. 87, D'Ancona says: "Nella seguente ci sembrano accozzati, e mal saldati insieme, più frammenti di diverse canzoni: l'uno dei quali va a tutto il decimo verso; poi un altro da questo al diciassettesimo, e dal diciassettesimo fino alla fine, l'ultimo. Così, come vedremo accadere assai spesso nella poesia cantata è raccomandata soltanto alla memoria, si sarebbero fusi e confusi insieme pezzi appartenenti a diversi componimenti." 3 Such purely subjective statement is happily passing out of fashion among Italian folklorists. It is the old school as represented by Pitrè (Studi di poesia popolare, 1872) and Rubieri (Storia della poesia popolare italiana, 1877) which cannot deal with facts without coloring them. It has long been the favorite play of leisure moments to hunt through odd volumes of German schnaderhüpfel or of Italian ballate for the as yet undiscovered sources of certain songs of Wilhelm Müller's.' There are many still to be added to the already long list of his appropriations. In one sense this deliberate search for models partakes somewhat of the pettiness inherent in all source-hunting-in so far at least as its underlying motive may at times be nothing more than to fasten the stigma of plagiarism upon a half-forgotten poet. But, viewed from another standpoint, it is important to know as fully as we may the very last detail of Müller's gleanings from the vernacular verse of earlier generations. For he had an almost unparalleled success in melting foreign themes and forms into the liquid simplicity of his own German verses, afterwards to pass them on to Eichendorff and Heine-not even Rückert escaped the contagion of Müller's boyish enthusiasm. Of course, it was Goethe's great confession in the form of lyric and ballad poetry which made up the bible of Romantic rhyming (with its Old Testament of Klopstock and Herder-its New Testament of the Master in Weimar); but, had it not been for Bürger, we should have been spared the schauerromanze at which every adolescent contemporary tried his hand. Had it not been for Müller, late Romanticism would have lost that je ne sais quoi of transparent sweetness, that certain something of lyric simplicity and directness which so lives in its musical quatrains. Arnold has shown Müller's pre-eminent ability in adapting Greek prototypes, and commented upon that deftness of touch 1Cf. Modern Language Notes, Vol. XIV (1899), pp. 165, 166, 213, 214; ibid., Vol. XVI (1901), pp. 37, 38; Journal of Germanic Philology, Vol. III (1901), pp. 35-91, 431-91. 2I have not been able to ascertain what were the printed anthologies of Italian folksongs which Müller made the basis of the collection that he began in 1818; only part of which was in the manuscript turned over by his heirs to Wolff ten years later. One has but to be familiar with the method of Müller's copying from Meinert (Alte teutsche Volkslieder, 1817), Ziska and Schottky (Oesterreichische Volkslieder, 1819), and Fauriel (TPAгOYAIA POMAIKA, 1824) to be sure that it was printed and not oral material which furnished the groundwork of the songs which we know he adapted from the Italian. Further proof of this fact, if such be needed, meets one on almost every page of his Egeria. The long ballads and chapbook histories which occur in this book, the difficult and various dialectic verses, the villanelles, chansonnettes, and dialogues couched in impeccable literary diction, inform us sufficiently that exacter means than those of oral transmission were everywhere used. When these printed sources of Müller's songs are found-the songs which were later printed in Egeria, as well as those which the poet for obvious reasons suppressed-models for certain other poems of Müller's will come to light. |