Читать книгу The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor - Russell H. Conwell - Страница 18

Table of Contents

Pictures at Dresden.—Raphael’s Madonna.—Bayard’s Art Education.—His Exalted Ideas of Art.—His Enthusiasm.—Visits Bohemia.—Stay in Prague.—The Curiosities of Vienna.—Tomb of Beethoven.—Respect for Religion.—Listens to Strauss.—View of Lintz.—Munich and its Decorations.—The Home of Schiller.—Poetic Landscapes, and Charming People.—Statue by Thorwaldsen.—Walk to Heidelberg.

At Dresden, Bayard visited the picture-gallery, for the purpose of seeing Raphael’s Madonna and Child, known as the Madonna di San Sisto. His description of that painting, so unfortunately abridged in his book, was one of the finest examples of art criticism to be found in print. His appreciation of painting and sculpture was remarkable, indeed, for one who never made them a professional study, and whose rude sketches in pencil in his note books, contained nearly all of his undertakings as an amateur. His soul seemed cast in the proper mould for that kind of work, but his hand was never trained to materialize the pictures that filled the galleries of his imagination. He had all those finer sensibilities and acute instincts which fitted him for art in poetry or stone, and he saw in paintings and statuary, beauties or defects which thousands of colder but more studious critics failed to notice.

He spoke of that Madonna at Dresden, as a painting that moved his whole nature in admiration. He enjoyed it. He feasted on it. He read it as one follows an exciting romance. He felt the power of the picture as Raphael felt it, and seemed to appreciate it even more keenly than the artist. How much satisfaction and delight he found in the enormous collections of art in the Old World, cannot be told or understood by any one whose natural genius leads them not in such a direction. His mental appetite for such things grew so keen, as he went on from city to city and gallery to gallery, that he much preferred to leave his meals untasted, than pass a great painting without study. Like the true artist, his mind took in the grand ideals, and his respect and admiration for the divine handiwork in producing man and beast, caused him often to wince under the suggestive and degrading obtrusiveness of fig-leaves and rude drapery in sculpture. The human form in all its heavenly beauty and godlike majesty, as reproduced in marble by the great artists, was too sacred and pure to him, to be marred by the suggestions of sin. No man or woman will ever become an artist, in its highest, noblest sense, until their love for beauty, simplicity, and purity, lifts them above the impressions that are born of ignorance, vulgarity, and sin. Bayard, in after years, thus beautifully wrote of sculpture:—

“In clay the statue stood complete,

As beautiful a form, and fair,

As ever walked a Roman street

Or breathed the blue Athenian air:

The perfect limbs, divinely bare,

Their old, heroic freedom kept,

And in the features, fine and rare,

A calm, immortal sweetness slept.

O’er common men it towered, a god,

And smote their meaner life with shame,

For while its feet the highway trod,

Its lifted brow was crowned with flame

And purified from touch of blame:

Yet wholly human was the face,

And over them who saw it came

The knowledge of their own disgrace.

It stood, regardless of the crowd,

And simply showed what men might be:

Its solemn beauty disavowed

The curse of lost humanity.

Erect and proud, and pure and free,

It overlooked each loathsome law

The life, travels, and literary career of Bayard Taylor

Whereunto others bend the knee,

And only what was noble saw.”

The blameless spirit of a lofty aim

Sees not a line that asks to be concealed

By dextrous evasion; but, revealed

As truth demands, doth Nature smite with shame

Them, who with artifice of ivy-leaf

Unsex the splendid loins, or shrink the frame

From life’s pure honesty, as shrinks a thief,

While stands a hero ignorant of blame!

“Each part expressed its nicely measured share,

In the mysterious being of the whole:

Not from the eye or lip looked forth the soul,

But made her habitation everywhere

Within the bounds of flesh; and Art might steal,

As once, of old, her purest triumphs there.”

This appreciation of the inner feelings of the sculptor and painter, is the more astonishing, because of the unusual disadvantages under which he first studied the works of the ancient masters. Aching limbs, bruised feet, and an empty stomach are not usually aids to the critic in forming a judgment of the symmetry or grace of any work of art. But his enthusiastic recitals of his visits to the celebrated paintings, show no less rapture when he saw them in fatigue and hunger, than when he looked upon them in rest and bodily satiety. Thus, most naturally, he became the companion and intimate friend of a large number of the European artists, and was sought and highly esteemed by all the American painters and sculptors whom he met in Europe. He understood them. He sympathized with their enthusiasm and sacrifices; while a great, cold world went by them without a comforting word or a smile of recognition.

Dresden was like a door to his higher art life, and its collection of paintings is worthy of such a place. There were, besides the Sistine Madonna, the “Ascension,” by Raphael Mengs, the “Notte,” by Correggio, and galleries of master-pieces by Titian, Da Vinci, Veronese, Del Sarto, Rubens, Vandyck, Lorraine and Teniers; with sculpture in marble, ivory, bronze and jewels, from Michael Angelo and his cotemporaries. Being the widest and most diversified collection in Germany, it was eagerly sought by Bayard, and more reluctantly left behind. More grand than the battle of Napoleon before its gates, and more lasting in their effects, were the historic works of art which Dresden is so proud to possess.

THE DANUBE AT LINTZ.

From Dresden, Bayard walked to Prague, leaving behind him, as he then thought forever, the cheerful, hospitable, kind-hearted people, with whose kin he afterwards became so intimately and advantageously connected. In Prague, he ascended the heights where the Bohemian kings and Amazon queens used to reside, heard the solemn mass in one of Europe’s most solemn Cathedrals, visited the bridge under which the Saint Johannes floated with the miraculous stars about his corpse, lost himself in the bedlam of Jewish clothing-shops, and then, staff in hand, hastened on over the monotonous plains, and through the highways almost fenced with wretchedly painted shrines, to the Paris of the west, Vienna.

There again were rare, treasures of art on which he might study, and in study, increase in that dignity and expansion of soul which only such contemplation can give. He was delighted to hear the composer Strauss, and his orchestra, and amusingly describes the queer antics of that nervous little musician. He gazed with awe at the stained banners of the Crusaders, and, with uncovered head, listened to the grand chants in St. Stephen’s Cathedral; but his pathetic mention of his visit to the tomb of Beethoven is the most characteristic.

There was a most lovable trait in Bayard’s character, which became even more prominent in his after years of travel, which deserves mention in this connection. He never railed upon the dead, nor ridiculed the religious belief or acts of devotion of any people, however ignorant or heathenish. He often mentioned, with emotion, the efforts of the darkened human mind to find its Creator and Ruler. He treated with sincerest respect every act of devotion performed in his presence, whether by Protestant, Catholic, or Mahomedan. There was that in his nature, and his early Quaker education, that not only kept him in the paths of morality and on the side of virtue, but through all his writings there runs a thread of faith in God, which cannot be better expressed than by quoting one of his own sweet hymns.