in the side chambers, while the chief salon was hung with tapestries worked after pictures by modern French artists. That Raphael should thus be thrown into a subordinate position was less exasperating to him than the subjects chosen from the modern artists. These pictures were the history of Jason, Medea, and Creusa― consequently, a story of a most wretched marriage. To the left of the throne was seen the bride struggling against a horrible death, surrounded by persons full of sympathetic grief; to the right stood the father, horror-struck at the murdered babes at his feet; whilst the fury, in her dragon car, drove through the air.' All the ideas which he had learned from Oeser were outraged by this selection. He did not quarrel so much with the arrangement which placed Christ and the Apostles in side chambers, since he had thereby been enabled to enjoy the sight of them. 'But a blunder like that of the grand saloon put me altogether out of my self-possession, and with loud and vehement cries I called to my comrades to witness the insult against feeling and taste. "What!" I exclaimed, regardless of bystanders, "can they so thoughtlessly place before the eyes of a young queen, on her first setting foot in her dominions, the representation of the most horrible marriage perhaps that ever was consummated! Is there among the architects and decorators no one man who understands that pictures represent something — that they work upon the mind and feelings that they produce impressions and excite forebodings? It is as if they had sent a ghastly spectre to meet this lovely, and as we hear most joyous, lady at the very frontiers!" To him, indeed, pictures meant something; they were realities to him, because he had the true artistic nature. But to the French architects, as to the Strasburg officials, pictures were pictures,-ornaments betokening VOL. I. 9 more or less luxury and taste, flattering the eye, but never touching the soul. Goethe was right; and omen-lovers may now see in that picture the dark foreshadowing of her destiny. But no one then could have foreseen that her future career would be less triumphant than her journey from Vienna to Paris. That smiling, happy, lovely princess of fifteen, whose grace and beauty extort expressions of admiration from every beholder, as she wends her way along roads lined with the jubilant peasantry leaving their fields to gaze upon her, through streets strewn with nosegays, through triumphal arches, and rows of maidens garlanded, awaiting her arrival to offer her spring-flowers as symbols can her joy be for a moment dashed by a pictured sorrow? Can omens have a dark significance to her? 'I still vividly remember,' says Goethe, the beauteous and lofty mien, as charming as it was dignified, of the young princess. Plainly visible in her carriage, she seemed to be jesting with her female attendants respecting the throng which poured forth to meet her train.' Scarcely had the news of her happy arrival in the capital reached them, than it was followed by the dreadful intelligence of the accident which had disturbed the festivities of her marriage. Goethe's thoughts naturally recurred to the ominous pictures: a nature less superstitious would not have been entirely unmoved by such a coincidence. 'The excitement over, the Strasburgers fell into their accustomed tranquillity. The mighty stream of courtly magnificence had now flowed by, and left me no other longing than that for the tapestries of Raphael, which I could have contemplated and worshipped every hour. Luckily my earnest desires succeeded in interesting several persons of consequence, so that the tapestries were not taken down till the very last moment.' The halt, the lame, and the blind had been sedulously kept out of the dauphiness's way, lest their appearance should mar the joyousness of her reception. Many were the witticisms hazarded on this subject; and Goethe composed a little poem in French, contrasting the advent of our Saviour, who came into this world almost especially on account of the sick and deformed, with the advent of the young princess, which made the unfortunate wretches disappear. His friends were delighted with this poem; but a Frenchman having pitilessly criticized some of the expressions and the versification, it was destroyed. 'I never remember to have again written French verses.' An alleged copy of these verses, supposed to be destroyed, has been published by Pfeiffer, and may be inserted here: Lorsque le fils de Dieu descendit sur la terre, La police attentive a soin de décreter, Ni bossu, ni goutteux, ni pauvre apoplectique, Ni perclus, ni bancal, ni même rachitique. Comme ça de chez soi Strasbourg fait les honneurs ! The want of authenticity which discredits Pfeiffer's book, of course discredits these verses. Internal evidence is fallacious; for although the faults of language noticeable in them are of the kind alluded to by Goethe, yet they *Goethe's Frederika, von Freimund Pfeiffer. The book is a clever mystification, which has taken in even sharp sighted and well instructed writers; but it is now acknowledged not to be genuine. may have been made expressly to suit his description. Pfeiffer, and after him Viehoff, notice comblés de misère as false in idiom and false in rhythm, wondering how the proper phrase accablés de misère could have been overlooked. But it seems one of those errors which would be made expressly; and still more suspicious is the des perclus gisants sur leur grabats qui se pressent sur ses pas' which is not the style Goethe would fall into in any language. On the other hand the shocking vulgarity of Comme ça de chez soi Strasbourg fait les honneurs ! has a certain stamp of authenticity on it. It is the French he might have picked up from the soldiers with whom he conversed so freely in Frankfurt. 6 The re-established quiet left him time for studies again. In a letter of this date, he intimates that he is so improved in knowledge of Greek as almost to read Homer without a translation. I am a week older; that you know says a great deal with me, not because I do much, but many things.' Among these many things, we must note his ardent search through mystical metaphysical writings for the pabulum on which his insatiable appetite could feed. Strange revelations in this direction are afforded by his Note-book. On one page there is a passage from Thomas à Kempis, followed by a list of mystical works to be read; on another page, sarcastic sentences from Rousseau and Voltaire; on a third, a reference to Tauler. The book contains an analysis of the Phadon of Moses Mendelssohn contrasted with that of Plato; and a defence of Giordano Bruno against the criticism of Bayle. Apropos of Bruno, one may remark the early tendency of Goethe's mind towards Nature-worship. Tacitus, in deed, noticed this tendency as national. The scene in Frankfurt, where the boy-priest erected his Pantheistic altar, will help to explain the interest he must have felt in the glimpse Bayle gave him of the great Pantheist of the sixteenth century the brilliant and luckless Bruno, who after teaching the heresy of Copernicus at Rome and Oxford, after combating Aristotle and gaining the friendship of Sir Philip Sidney, was publicly burnt on the 17th February, 1600, in the presence of the Roman crowd, expiating thus the crime of teaching that the earth moved, — the Church declaring it to be stable. A twofold interest attached itself to the name of Bruno. He was a martyr of Philosophy, and his works were rare; every one abused him, few had read him. He was hated almost as much as Spinoza, and scarcely any one knew the writings thus reviled. The rarity of Bruno's works made them objects of bibliopolic luxury; some were among the black swans of literature. The Spaccio had been sold for thirty pounds in England, and three hundred florins in Holland. Hamann, whom Herder and Goethe ardently admired, searched Italy and Germany for the De la Causa and Del Infinito in vain. Forbidden fruit is tempting; but when the fruit is rare, as well as forbidden, the attraction is irresistible. Pantheism, which captivates poetical minds, * De Moribus, ix. sub fine. What Tacitus there represents as a more exalted creed than anthropomorphism, was really a lower form of religious conception - the Fetichism, which in primitive races precedes Polytheism. † Since then the works have been made accessible through the cheap and excellent edition collected by A. Wagner: Opere di Giordano Bruno Nolano. 2 vols. Leipsic : 1830. But I do not observe that, now they are accessible, many persons interest themselves enough in Bruno to read them; yet they are better worth study than hundreds of metaphysical works eagerly read. |