VOL. XV., No. 90.—SEPTEMBER, 1872.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.
INTELLECTUAL CENTRES.
A thought struck us the other day—a thought that was half a memory—of the interest we should feel in Geneva at the present moment were we to be there as long as the Treaty arbitration lasts. This led us to reflect upon Geneva as we knew it—one of the most delightful, intellectual, and interesting places we ever came across. Thought, like art, has its centres, its headquarters, and, like politics, its changes of dynasties and capitals. In these centres, a person might live undisturbedly a whole generation, and, never stirring ten miles beyond the city gates, not miss any one novelty, person, discovery, or theory worth hearing or seeing. All great personages, whether of royal birth or, what is more important, of intellectual fame, will sooner or later pass through this favored place; all new modes of thought, from theology to unbelief, from Spiritism to Darwinism, will find there a ready field of battle.
Of these centres of thought in modern times, Geneva is not the least. We can speak from experience of the quiet, unpretending old town, standing, in the pride of its antiquity and of its superior taste, aloof from the more frivolous Parisian suburb that commercial enterprise has caused to grow up beside it on the opposite side of the Rhone. It has a population of savants and dilettanti; its salons are “blue-stocking,” and its young men not mere butterflies, but men with a work to do or perchance already begun. Music has a home there, too—grave, classical, instrumental music, such as you can fancy the délassement of a nation of sages should be. Conversation is hardly brilliant among the Genevese (though the use of the French language renders it far from heavy), but it is solid, and words are put for ideas, not strung together to hide nonsense. Theatres are feebly patronized, and are left to the summer visitors of foreign countries, whose exclusive society creates another Geneva by the side of the old historical town—a Geneva that has nothing Genevese about it but the name. Lectures are very prominent, almost as much so as in America, and they are generally upon scientific subjects. Men of fortune give a course of them free, for the enlightenment of the humbler classes, and young men of good family and position spend their time in literary trials, hunting up references and studying abstruse systems of forgotten philosophy. To be uneducated in Geneva brands a man with a worse mark than to be poor among mercantile communities. Frivolity in man or woman is equivalent to dishonor. There is little display in Genevese society—a simplicity far more republican than anything America can point to reigns in domestic affairs; and the people do not court nor take any pains to allure the pot-pourri of foreign princes, merchants, gentlemen, and gamblers that fill the gay quays on the modern side of the river. It is told of one of the highest civil dignitaries of Geneva in the last century—a man of good descent and comfortable means—that he received the envoy of the King of France (it was before the French Revolution), on some diplomatic mission, with one maid-servant holding a lantern. The guest having alighted from his state-coach, and groped his way into the modest house, inquired in surprise: “Mais, monsieur, où sont vos gens?” (“But, sir, where is your household?”) “Mes gens!” repeated the Genevese, with undismayed good-nature; “c’est Jeanne!” (“My household consists of Jane!”) The French magnifico, whose only idea of power lay in profuse display, and who counted his lackeys by the score, was dumfounded at these Spartan barbarians, whose chief unblushingly declared that a kitchen-maid was all his retinue! Yet the chief was probably a savant, while the Frenchman at best was most likely nothing more than a wit. The writer of this article, eager to see something of the home-life of the Genevese, succeeded in making a few acquaintances among these most exclusive of literati. On one occasion we were dining at the primitive hour of five with a charming family, the De la Rives, people of the most polished manners, quick perceptions, and inexhaustible fund of interesting conversation. The meal was plain and frugal, well cooked, yet without a trace of art—what one might have expected at a farmer’s or tradesman’s table; but what in the most modest of gentlemen’s houses in France, England, or Germany would have been an impossibility. The governess and the little children dined with us, the former joining heartily and cleverly in the conversation, which never by any chance fell upon trivialities. The knives and forks were not changed throughout dinner, to our great perplexity; and for the purpose of keeping them from soiling the table during the change of plates, there were provided little glass rests, like thick, short bars. These quaint details seemed quite matters of course, and, strange to say, there was nothing vulgar or repulsive about them, the personnel of the hosts being enough to stamp all belonging to them with the hall-mark of true and unostentatious refinement. There was no dressing for this family dinner, as there would have been in England, nor, indeed, is there much dressing at all among the Genevese women. To tell the truth, they are rather what our fastidious taste would call dowdy in their toilette and appearance; but then, what a solid background of true and deep education lies behind their exterior carelessness! It is the same with their parties, which are rather like family gatherings, and where the old-fashioned habit is still kept up of having the tea served on a large table, round which the guests unceremoniously seat themselves. Men of mark in the literary world are there; inventors of machines that have changed the destiny of commerce, and originated or obliterated this or that trade; botanists who have inherited their talent with their fathers’ name and experience; women who have written treatises that men of science read with approval—and all of them so unaffectedly enjoying themselves, all of them so truly refined and so childlike in their simple manners. Looking at this kind of assemblage, is it wonderful that it should have made its native city a capital of the world of thought? Bad men as well as good pass through it; Mazzinist and International fraternize and plot; Legitimist and Catholic meet, and hold congresses; outsiders from another continent, as at this moment, agree to settle their disputes on its neutral soil. All philosophies, from De Maistre and Cousin down to Darwin and Renan, find their exponents there; their upholders lecture there; their theories are more closely looked into if they start from there. The church is more active at Geneva than almost anywhere in Europe; unbelief is more rampant and more unblushing; dissent more earnest, and, if blinded, yet more sincere. Thirty or forty years ago, a body of Genevese ministers of the “National Church” did what no other Protestant body corresponding in numbers and influence has ever done in modern times—they voluntarily gave up their benefices, and threw themselves with their families, utterly destitute, on the generosity of such among their flocks as would follow their conscience. And why? Because the National Church was becoming more and more Socinian, and dechristianizing the population of Geneva. These dissenters, headed by the Malan family, persevered in their sacrifice, and succeeded in founding a “Free Church,” which is now very prosperous, and counts among its members all the best people of the town. Outside the Catholic Church, it would be difficult to find a parallel to this act of renunciation for the sake of principle. Speaking of Geneva from a religious point of view, we do not know but what we might most decidedly call it a centre of active religion, since its bishop, Mgr. Mermillod, is one of its best known and most distinguished native citizens, and the church under his guidance is making rapid conquests in the former stronghold of Calvinism; but this is beside our subject, which is simply to reckon Geneva as first and foremost in the present tournament of restless intellect.
Rome naturally suggests itself as another of these centres. We put it second in the intellectual scale and in the wide sense in which we are speaking, although in religion it stands more than first, that is, perfectly unequalled. Still, when Byron called it “city of the soul,” he made that delicate shade of a distinction that marked it as a spiritual capital more than an intellectual centre. For the spirit of Rome is too calm for agitation, too conservative for creation. Yet in a secondary sense to volcanic Geneva, and in a contrasting sense too, Rome is a wonderful rendezvous of the talent and thought of Europe. A life spent in Rome would include a sight of almost all the distinguished men and women of both hemispheres. Unbelievers go to Rome to scoff, and often remain to pray; curious idlers go to see the old man of the Vatican, and often stay to ask his blessing; antiquarians find enough work for a lifetime in digging up a few square feet of ground; artists have a range of subjects before them so vast that, if they had a thousand lives to live, they could not exhaust it; men of science go to meet their kin and discuss things in quiet congresses, which it is impossible to end otherwise than peaceably, for the curious and unique charm of Rome is its subtle power of harmonizing the minds of its guests with the traditions of its own mysterious existence. It has a faculty of spiritual alchemy, and changes the visitor for the time being into a different creature. All its lessons seem to be taught in silence, and for argument it has but little sympathy. Intrinsically, it is a centre of love; accidentally, a centre of thought. Men with wearied hearts are its “chosen few,” for its power is rather recuperative than creative. It is most difficult to say what we mean, and yet not to seem to speak in disparagement of this wonderful “city of the soul”; and perhaps a description of its society, though that would be the easiest way to make our meaning clear, would be tedious, because so familiar. We all of us seem to know Rome as if each one had been there; and so perhaps after all we may trust to be better understood than we had hoped to be at first. A short walk on the “Pincio” will show us the utmost cosmopolitanism possible; the Polish exile secure while within a few paces of the Russian official; the Anglican minister, with his trained Oxford refinement, calmly discussing with the energetic, passionate, and voluble Italian ecclesiastic; the Mazzinist bowing involuntarily to the cardinal whose generosity raised him from the poor-house; the French philosopher and the German artist; the American sculptor, with his prejudiced yet not unkindly view of Rome; the English convert, enthusiastic and interested; and the languid Italian, taking everything as a matter of course—such are a few of the common types one jostles against every minute. These things, however, are too well known; and from this strange, perplexing city, so dearly loved and so well hated, so prominent in the world’s annals that no dark future can obscure her ever-real and ever the same present—this city whose Christian fame overrides even her glorious heathen past of unlimited power and unchecked Cæsarism—we will go forward to the land of those “barbarians” who regenerated Europe and materially helped to build the church. But how changed is the brightest city of that land, Munich, the undoubted centre of the highest intellect, but now also the unhappy cradle of a new perversion of that very intellect!
Though we are less conversant with Munich than with the two foregoing places, we shall yet attempt to say a few words on its influence in modern times.
It is perhaps a more recent focus of thought than any other of the present day, yet it is none the less powerful for that. The Bavarian royal family has preserved for two or three generations the traditions of a modern Medici dynasty; they are the declared champions of talent, the protectors of innovations of any kind. As long as there is genius, originality, vitality, in a thing or idea, no matter what its tendency, good or bad, it is sure of patronage and help. Intensely national in its leanings, Munich aspires to make Germany paramount, to impose her ways of thought upon the world, to mould Europe according to a German standard, and set up in a new Rome of the north a new ideal that might be expressed in these words, Le génie c’est moi. If Christianity had not yet appeared, the plan would have been magnificent, and this Roman Empire of absolute intellect a far grander conception than Plato’s Republic, but now God has reserved universality as a mark of his church alone; and the power that would tear this badge from her to crown itself therewith, in opposition to her, cannot hope to succeed any better than the great angel of light succeeded in his gigantic rebellion. Still, notwithstanding this blot upon the otherwise fair system of intellectual supremacy of which Munich is the headquarters, the fact of this practical supremacy remains, and is the more felt and the better tested now since Prussia has attempted to establish herself in opposition to it. The story of ancient Greece and Rome is being enacted anew—matter and mind are face to face; and the military machine which is called the North German Empire, and which has proved itself so politically resistless, stands baffled before the more Attic and refined organization of the capital of thought and art. Impossible to transplant to the alien atmosphere of iron-bound Berlin the delicate grace and play of intellect that distinguishes Munich; impossible to make philosophy accept the trammels of officialism, or persuade artists to wait the nod of bureaucrats. The intangible charm of cosmopolitan life belongs to the Bavarian city, the freemasonry of intellectual activity vivifies it. Napoleon carried half the marbles of Rome to his palace of the Louvre, and yet he could not make the Louvre a Vatican, and Belshazzar, though he robbed the temple of its golden cups and drank from them at his banquets, could not make himself high-priest of the Hebrew faith.