The Invisible Lodge

by Jean Paul

When I shall have rescued in an extra sheet two more educational idiosyncrasies--one of which is that I exercised the wit of my pupil as strongly as his understanding; the second, that I went over with him only authors from the ages of the baser metals;--then we will go on again with his life.

EXTRA-LEAF.

Why I Allow My Gustavus Wit and Corrupt Authors and Forbid Him The Classics, I Mean Greek and Roman.

I must first show, in three words, or pages, that and why the study of the ancients is declining,[^[30]] and secondly, that it is no great matter.

We have now, as is well known, come out of the philological centuries, when nothing but Latin was used at altars, in pulpits, on paper or in thinking, and when it knit together all learned dressing-gowns and night-caps from Ireland to Sicily into one confederacy; when it constituted the state language and often the language of conversation in the great world, when one could not be a scholar without carrying in his head an inventory of all Greek and Roman household furniture, and a bill of fare and washing schedule of those classic people. Now-a-days our Latin is German to that of a Camerarius, who therefore would not have found it necessary to compose his Smalcaldic war in Greek; at the present day a sermon is seldom written in Latin, not to say in Greek, as once, and therefore cannot be translated, as once, into Latin, but merely into German. In our days no lady squeezes her powdered and mitred head through the narrow classic collar, unless it be the daughters of Hermes. This was known to my readers longer ago than to me, because I am younger--just as the present improved reviewing, translating and interpreting of the ancients is well known to both of us. Only the number of their admirers does not keep pace with the worth of them; all our branches of knowledge share now-a-days among themselves a universal monarchy over all readers; but the ancients sit alone with their few philological vassals on a rock-of-San-Marino. There are now none but Polyhistors who have read everything else, but not the ancients.

Taste for the spirit of the ancients must grow dull, as well as for their speech. I do not assert that in the classic parrot-centuries this spirit was more truly felt than now; for Vossius hung upon Lucan, Lipsius on Seneca, Casaubon on Persius; I do not say that in those days a Faust, an Iphigenia, a Messiah, a Damocles, were written, as now. But I speak of the present taste of the people, not of the men of genius.

If the spirit of the ancients consisted in their firm, steady step to the object, in their hatred of a double, three-fold finery of ruffles, in a certain childlike sincerity; then it must be growing always easier for us to feel that spirit and harder for us to breathe it in our work; with every century our style must betray an inspection, circumspection and retrospection that increases with the increase of our learning; the fullness of our composition must hinder its roundness; we refine finery, bind[^[31]] the binding and draw an overcoat over the overcoat; we must needs decompose the white sunbeam of truth, as it no longer strikes us for the first time, into colors, and whereas the ancients were prodigal of words and thoughts we are penurious with both. Still it is better to be an instrument of six octaves, whose tones easily sound impurely and run into each other, than a monochord, whose only string is harder to get out of tune; and it were just as bad if every one, as if no one, wrote like Monboddo.

With our unfruitfulness in works after the old style, the taste for these works proportionately increases. The ancients felt the worth of the ancients--not at all; and their simplicity is enjoyed by those only who cannot attain it: by ourselves. For this reason, I think the Greek simplicity differs from that of the Orientals, savages and children[^[32]] only in the higher talent by which the serene Greek climate caused that simplicity to be distinguished. That is the inborn, not the acquired. The artificial, acquired simplicity is an effect of culture and taste; the men of the 18th century have to wade up to this Alpine source through marshes and torrents; but one who is up there by its side never more forsakes it, and only peoples, not individuals, can degenerate from the taste of a Monboddo to that of a Balzac. This acquired taste, which the youthful genius always attacks and the elder mostly acknowledges, must from Fair to Fair by practice upon all that is beautiful grow in the case of individuals more and more keen and sensitive; but nations themselves fall away every century farther and farther from the Graces, who, like the Homeric Gods, hide themselves in clouds. The ancients therefore could no more feel the natural simplicity of their productions, than the child or the savage does that of his. The pure, simple manners of an Alpherd or a Tyrôlese are matter of admiration neither to their own possessor nor to his compatriot, but only to the refined count which cannot attain to them; and if the great folk of the Romans enjoyed the sports of naked children, with which they adorned their chambers, it was the great folk but not the children, who had the enjoyment and the taste. The ancients, therefore, wrote with an involuntary taste, without reading with the same--as authors of genius to-day, e. g., Hamann, read with far more taste than they write--hence these fever-pustules and rash-eruptions on the otherwise healthy children of a Plato, an Æschylus, even a Cicero; hence the Athenians clapped no orators more than the turners of antitheses and the Romans none more than the punsters. For the immoderate admiration of Shakespeare they wanted nothing but Shakespeare himself. For that very reason these nations could, like the child, degenerate from natural simplicity to polished, varnished witticisms.

Secondly, I promised to affirm on three pages that the neglect of the ancients does little harm. For of what use, then, is the cultivation of them? They are, like virtue, far less felt and enjoyed than is generally professed.[^[33]] The enjoyment of them is the truest nine-proof of the best taste; but this best taste presupposes such an intellectual appreciation of all kinds of beauty, such a pure and fair symmetry of all inner faculties, that not merely Home finds taste irreconcilable with a bad heart, but I also know nothing--next to Genius, which always attains it after the discharge of its intellectual exuberance--more rare than this very perfection of taste. O ye Conrectors and Gymnasiarchs, you who moan and weep over the depreciation of the ancients, if you still had eyes, they would weep over your appreciation! Oh, it requires other hearts and spiritual wings (not mere lung-wings) than belong to your pedagogic bodies to discern why the ancients called Plato the divine, why Sophocles is great and the Anthologists are noble! The ancients were men, not literati. What are you? And what do you get from them?...

Copiam vocabulorum.--In the Middle Ages every least benefit derived from the ancients was great; but now, in the eighteenth century, when all nations have hewn a gradus ad Parnassum in the granite of the Muses, two or three steps more or less make very little difference. Have, then, modern nations not written in the ancient taste? Were it so, then, at any rate, models, which have not multiplied themselves at all in copies, might easily be spared. But it is not even so, and an Omar-like conflagration of all the ancients could only snatch from us a little more than if the still extant autumnal-flora of a few Greek temples and other ruins were swept away; we should still possess houses in the Greek taste. The models themselves surely wrote without models, and the statue of Polycletes was fashioned after the statue of a Polycletes. Despite the study of the ancient writings, the poetic and creative power once lay in Germany, and still lies in Italy, on the sick bed.