In a letter to a young student in philology there are noble passages in which I truly sympathise. He says, among other things: “I wish you had less pleasure in satires, not excepting those of Horace. Turn to the works which elevate the heart, in which you contemplate great men and great events, and live in a higher world. Turn away from those which represent the mean and contemptible side of ordinary circumstances and degenerate days: they are not suitable for the young, who in ancient times would not have been suffered to have them in their hands. Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Pindar,—these are the poets for youth.” And again: “Do not read the ancient authors in order to make æsthetic reflections on them, but in order to drink in their spirit and to fill your soul with their thoughts; and in order to gain that by reading which you would have gained by reverently listening to the discourses of great men.”
We should turn to works of art with the same feeling.
On the whole, all my own educational experience has shown me the dangerous—in some cases fatal—effects on the childish intellect, where precocious criticism was encouraged, and where caricatures and ugly disproportioned figures, expressing vile or ridiculous emotions, were placed before the eyes of children, as a means of amusement.
If I were a legislator I would forbid travesties and ridiculous burlesques of Shakspeare’s finest and most serious dramas to be acted in our theatres. That this has been done and recently (as in the case of the Merchant of Venice) seems to me a national disgrace.
27.
It is strange, confounding, to hear Niebuhr speak thus of Goethe:—
“I am inclined to think that Goethe is utterly destitute of susceptibility to impressions from the fine arts.”(!!) He afterwards does more justice to Goethe—certainly one of the profoundest critics in art who ever lived; although I am inclined to think that his was an educated perception rather than a natural sensibility. Niebuhr’s criticism on Goethe’s Italian travels,—on Goethe’s want of sympathy with the people,—his regarding the whole country and nation simply as a sort of bazaar of art and antiquities, an exhibition of beauty and a recreation for himself: his habit of surveying all moral and intellectual greatness, all that speaks to the heart, with a kind of patronising superiority, as if created for his use,—and finding amusement in the folly, degeneracy, and corruption of the people;—all this appears to me admirable, and so far I had strong sympathy with Niebuhr; for I well remember that in reading Goethe’s “Italianische Reise,” I had the same perception of the artless and the superficial in point of feeling, in the midst of so much that was fine and valuable in criticism. It is well to be artistic in art, but not to walk about the world en artiste, studying humanity, and the deepest human interests, as if they were art.
Niebuhr afterwards says, in speaking of Rome, “I am sickened here of art, as I should be of sweetmeats instead of bread.” So it must be where art is separated wholly from morals.
28.
He speaks of the “wretched superstition,” and the “utter incapacity for piety” in the people of the Roman States.