Then follows a splendid description of the brutal materialism of the Romans which hangs to this very day like a pall about her ruins: “They loved to revel in concrete and open bloodthirstiness.” Mutual slavery of Emperor and people was the result, and “self-contempt, disgust with existence, horror of community” found their expression in Christianity. But this Christianity of Constantine Wagner is careful to distinguish from the teaching of “the humble son of the Galilean carpenter; who, looking on the misery of his fellow-men, proclaimed that he had not come to bring peace, but a sword into the world; whom we must love for the anger with which he thundered forth against the hypocritical Pharisees who fawned upon the power of Rome; ... and finally who preached the reign of universal human love.” In short, one might say that Jesus and his teaching stood in the same relation to the later Christianity as Dionysus and the early pure mysteries to the later degraded and materialized Bacchic mysteries.
Then in a very fine passage Wagner indicts Modern Art, based, as it is, on fame and gain and serving all the lower needs of a debased public taste. The Drama is separated into Play and Opera; the one losing its idealizer—Music,—the other, its dramatic aim and end: “What serves it us, that Shakespeare, like a second Creator, has opened for us the endless realm of human nature? What serves it, that Beethoven has lent to Music the manly, independent strength of Poetry? Ask the threadbare caricatures of your theatres, ask the street-minstrel commonplaces of your operas: and ye have your answer!”
Think of it! This was written half a century ago, and in spite of it the Music Hall more than ever sways the masses, and the cheap inanities of the comic opera are the rage with the rest of the community. I shall review the remainder of this essay in the next article.
(To be continued.)
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE.
IV. POET, DIPLOMAT, TRAVELLER.
Lamartine spent two winters at Paris after the Restoration. His former acquaintances were scattered, and he had new ones to make. He was for a time solitary and little occupied. He was, nevertheless, resolute in his quest for an opening into public life. His friend Virieu and others introduced him to persons of distinction and one step led presently to another. The passion for literature served to place him on a friendly footing with others of similar tastes, and he became able after a while to enumerate among his acquaintances Chateaubriand, the “Napoleon of French literature,” Lamennais, the French Savonarola, Rocher, Aimé Martin, De Vigny.
The epoch of the Restoration was also the epoch of the Revival of Letters in France. The Revolution had sent scholars and literary men to the scaffold or driven them into exile, and Bonaparte had attempted to level all learning and philosophic culture to the plane of physical and mathematical science. Whatever might elevate the human soul was not tolerated. He aspired to restore the Sixteenth century at the end of the Eighteenth and required literature to be adapted to that end.
Louis XVIII. was always broad and liberal in his sentiments, and even before the Revolution he had cherished familiar relations with literary men and men of learning. His long term of enforced leisure, during his absence from France, and a weakness in his limbs which compelled him to sedentary life, had tended to deepen his interest in such pursuits. He was emphatically a king of the fireside.
The emigrants that returned with him to France, had but imperfectly apprehended the change. Those most bigoted formed a coterie around the Count D’Artois; others endeavored to qualify the action of the King. Hence the court was a combination of old royalty with a new order of things.
A galaxy of stars of the first magnitude was now shining in France. Naturally Lamartine was dazzled by them when he came to Paris. Observing that several young men were recognized in the literary world, he again cherished the notion of publishing.