CHAPTER II
THE HISTORICAL POSITION OF ART ON THE CONTINENT
Goethe compared the history of knowledge with a great fugue: the parts of the nations first come to light, little by little; and this analogy, already once made by Hettner, holds true in a very high degree of the history of art during the eighteenth century. The three great nations of culture—the German, the English, and the French—take up their parts in turn, and through all there sounds one common, equal, dominant note. England was in the vanguard of that great period of struggle known as the age of enlightenment. Since the middle of the eighteenth century English influences had begun to fertilise the Continent. The truth and naturalness of English ideas were introduced as models, and England became in her whole culture the schoolmistress of the Continent. In every region war was declared against the pedantry brought over from the past, while new conditions were aimed at. Obviously it was not so easy for other nations to take their stand on the basis of modern society. England had accomplished her revolution in the seventeenth century; France was only preparing herself for hers. For all other nations, too, the eighteenth century was a transition period, in which the old and the new civilisation of culture were parting—an age of prodigious controversy, full of Sturm und Drang. Men did homage to every kind of extravagance, and went into ecstasies over virtue. The sarcasm of scoffers went hand in hand with the deepest sentimental feeling for nature; superstition flourished by the side of enlightenment and learning; in the salons of the aristocracy courtly abbés file past with the greatest thinkers, glowing with a holy zeal for the rights of man. And, in the midst of all this contradiction, there exists that simple, virtuous middle class which is preparing to make the ascent which will lead it to power.
| PORTRAIT OF GOYA. BY HIMSELF. |
| From: “Los Capriccios.” |
One may imagine oneself in a salon of the ancien régime, in which wit is lord, and laughter and merriment reign. Into that salon enters abruptly a rough plebeian, with none of the fine tact of that company, yet a great, aristocratic spirit, a man who despised such a society and would make the world anew. Such is one’s impression of the effect produced at the time by the appearance of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Voltaire was the first on the Continent to break through social barriers, but none the less he coined his heart for gold in society. Rousseau signifies a great advance: he gave up his place, laid aside rapier, silk stockings, and perruque, and clothed himself after the manner of a common man in order to earn his bread as a copier of music. He is, as Weigandt has called him, the first man of the bourgeois century, the first pioneer of the new age. Against the traditions bequeathed by the past, which in the course of time had become over-refined and corrupt, he set up the natural conditions demanded by reason. His fight against inequalities of rank is, as it were, a foretaste of the revolution. “What hellish monsters are these prejudices. I know no dishonourable inferiority other than that of character or education. A man who is trained to an honourable mind is the equal of the world; there is no rank in which he would not be in his place. It is better to look down upon nobility than upon virtue, and the wife of a charcoal-burner is worthy of more respect than the mistress of a prince.” Those were words in which the coming revolution was presaged.
The Nouvelle Heloise appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later followed Goethe’s Werther, that history of a young Titan whose zeal for liberty felt all the partition walls of Society to be prison walls, and who rose against everything that was ceremonial, against all the subordinations of the social hierarchy, against all trivial and rigid rules of prudent everyday life. Werther abhorred rules in every sphere. “One can say much in favour of rules, about as much as one can say in praise of bourgeois society.” He scoffed at the Philistines, who daily went along the same measured way. He saw in “Society,” having hitherto moved in the simple world of the bourgeois, “the most sacred and the most pitiful emotions wholly without clothing.” And this Society outraged him, and sent him with contumely from its midst. “Working folk carried him to the grave, and no minister of religion followed him.”
Soon afterwards young Schiller came upon the scene with his first works, which were a declaration of war against all the foundations of human society, those manifestoes of revolution which, were they new writings to-day, no Court Theatre would dare to produce. The fierce, rampant lion, with the inscription “In Tyrannos,” which was displayed on the title-page of the second edition of the Robbers, was an intimate symbol of the deep revolutionary spirit that inspired the whole age. “I grew disgusted with this ink-stained age, when I read in my Plutarch of great men. Fie, fie upon the flaccid, castrated century, that has no other use than to chew over again the deeds of the past. Let me imagine an army of fellows like you, and I see a republic arising in Germany, in comparison with which those of Rome and Sparta would be convents of nuns.” In a loud voice Ficsco proclaims itself on the very title-page to be a “republican” tragedy. Intrigue and Love even aims full at the rottenness and corruption of the actual time. It can be traced—and Brandes has done it in his Haupströmungen—how in the literature of the age, the life of sensibility and idealism prevailing in the previous century gradually dwindles, and in its stead quite modern progressive views—religious, political, and social—surge up in an ever-increasing wave. The authors were the bold inciters to the battle. They were all leaders in the battle for liberty against fossilised tradition,—some in the field of poetry only, others in the whole sphere of intellectual life. These are they who gave the signal for the war-cry of the Revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; who rent asunder the old society, inaugurated the age of citizenship, and were at the same time the first to lose, as quite modern spirits, their faith in another world.
| GOYA. THE MAJAS ON THE BALCONY. |