Laughing Truths/Allotria
"Faust Idea", "Prometheus Idea", "Wandering Jew Idea", "Don Juan Idea". I have known people who assert that they really mean something in using these phrases. Well, in any case, it is a fine discovery that merely by appending the little word "idea" to any proper name, we can call into existence a gigantic egg of exalted emotions, a veritable roc's nest of profundity. Now, of course, that the secret has been discovered, any schoolboy can work the oracle. Semiramis idea, Zeus idea, Hercules idea, Cæsar idea, Brutus idea, Hohenstaufen idea, Charles XII idea—a game of forfeits is difficult in comparison. I could undertake to produce two thousand such "ideas" in the course of a wet afternoon.
Best of all, however, is when one set of "ideas" is combined with another set to form a regular train of "ideas" like a vestibuled train de luxe. Antinous-Achilles-Mozart-Raphael idea. That is a veritable omnibus. Let me see what I can do myself in this line:—"Uranos-Kronos-Titan-Hannibal-Spartacus-Michael-Angelo-Beethoven-Rembrandt-Goethe-Napoleon Idea". Does that go?
"In a certain sense, if you like—it depends upon how you understand it—yes, it goes."
All right; it is quite a comfort to me that I too can do the trick.
Not for the world would I place any obstacle on the rails by which this philosophical steam-engine has traversed the mists of ages. I understand, of course, that it is an excursion train. There is only one "idea" that annoys me. Tell me, what is a "Don Juan" idea?
"Well, I should say the idea of irresistibility, due to a highly gifted personality"—Have you finished? Excuse me if I interrupt. Please be good enough to show me anything either highly gifted or irresistible in Don Juan. Two indecent attempts, practically coram populo, and one of them in a cowardly disguise; the murder of an old man; the desertion and mockery of a loyal lover, with the addition of a little of the courage of a cornered rat—these are the records in the case. A pretty irresistibility, indeed, when a man has to seek salvation in a rape, and when he fails in this attempt, even though he is a count, in the feudal period, in the land of the primæ noctis, and with one of the would-be victims his own serf.
The argument, then, is that rape, if prosecuted diligently, is a proof of high gifts, an "idea" of genius. And when it is consistently repulsed, it is an "idea" of irresistibility. Now, of "ideas" of this kind there are, thank heaven, a rich crop in our penitentiaries, with projecting ears on their heads and fetters on their legs. Tell them that they are "ideas", they will be delighted and consoled. But I must beg for consistency. If Don Juan is an idea, we must confer the degree of doctor of philosophy on those interesting individuals who assault women in lonely woods or in railway carriages, in order that they may deliver a course of lectures on the Pure Reason; and we must pay them salaries to enable them to develop their important talents.
So far as I am concerned, it seems all to depend in the last resort on a simple difference in language. If you prefer the word "idea" to the word "scoundrel", I have no objection. But it is not clear to me why one is an "idea" when he does something in Andalusia, and a scoundrel when he does the same thing in Germany. Or does rape become ideal when it is accompanied by a baritone aria?
All this in peace and amity. We can differ in opinion, can we not, and yet like each other very well? If, however, you undertake, in the interest of the Andalusian idea-fellow, to hold up the other man, the tenor Ottavio, to ridicule, then I give notice that my stock of peace and friendship is exhausted and that I no longer feel so kindly disposed to my opponent as I should and would be. Where and when, my ladies and gentlemen, are the loyalty and trust of a nobleman towards his bride considered laughable? Surely not in Germany, a land lauded for its fidelity? Can you point to one scene in the opera where Don Ottavio makes himself ridiculous?
No, both the composer and librettist have taken Ottavio seriously and treated him sympathetically. That may be proved, and indeed, if I am well informed, it has already been proved. The opera of Don Giovanni is a glorification of loyalty, just as much as Fidelio.
Or is Ottavio indirectly made ridiculous by the fact that Anna secretly loved Don Juan and not him? That might, perhaps, be truly asserted in the case of a married couple, but only if the critic had pocketed his morality and his principles in order to display the views of foreign people and countries.—On the other hand, is a bridegroom laughable because his bride deceives him, because she conceals from him that she loves another? No; even the most frivolous ages abhor in such a case the perjured bride. Moreover, it is not true that Donna Anna loves Don Juan. First, because the opposite is true; I mean that in the text there is not the least ground for it, while there are many assertions that it is not so. Secondly, because it is impossible. Never and nowhere does a decent woman respond with love to a cowardly criminal assault.
I have stated where my indignation begins; I shall not conceal where it culminates. It reaches its height when I have to read how German æsthetic writers whisper in our ear, with a triumphant leer, as if it were an æsthetic advantage, that Donna Anna hardly came out of the attempt upon her virtue so innocently as she represented; that, on the contrary, she concealed the most piquant details from the bridegroom. This presentment of the case is supposed to make the opera more enjoyable. It is all to the good that this pleasant insinuation should be expressed and printed. For it serves as an example of the abysses of bad taste into which a generation may be insensibly led by literary panders and the grovelling of the historians of literature before alleged genius.
The winter term is approaching. The various faculties of the university will shortly reopen their courses, which, taken together, represent the entire knowledge of the present day. A rich and varied programme, the different sections of which appear wide as the poles asunder.
If, however, a student, during the first weeks of the term, could manage to visit all the lecture-rooms on the same day, he would find, to his astonishment, the same kind of activity and almost the same lectures, under a different title, in each of them. In all he would hear definitions and logical quibbles about the title of the advertised course, far-reaching retrospects of the achievements of previous centuries in the same field, meticulous lists of the books and theses to be consulted, seasoned with critical analysis and depreciation of the representatives of other academic schools. The real theme or subject of the course makes its appearance, if all goes well, in the third or fourth week of the session.
The explanation of this phenomenon lies close at hand. The modern professor is a scholar in the first place and a teacher in the second; a teacher often in the last place, and sometimes in no place at all.
In consequence of this he does not prepare the manuscript for his "Course of Lectures" from the perspective of the undergraduates; he takes into account neither the psychology of a zealous neophyte nor what will be found useful in examinations (though this latter fact I regard as an advantage). What he really does is to write a scientific work, in one word a book; and this book, before its publication, he reads fragmentarily to his students ex cathedra.
Such a book, in order to bring credit to the scientific reputation of its author, must naturally be equipped with all the appurtenances of scholarship, and these will include a minute and detailed analysis of the existing literature on the subject. For a book has to win its place and justify its existence amid the copious material already published. Exposition of principles, proof of its right to exist, and introductory references to earlier books on its subject must naturally come at the beginning of a learned work. Of that there is no doubt whatever.
The explanation, then, is easy and plausible. All the same, I do not hesitate to call this use an abuse, so long as the university maintains the fiction that it is a high school for the education of youth and does not confess that its main object is to train new professors. For the custom is just as unpedagogic as a custom well could be. The poor undergraduate is in the position of a dinner-guest, who sits down to table with an excellent appetite and a healthy thirst and then finds that, before the soup is served, he has to listen to lengthy disquisitions on the idea and scope of soup, along with a history of dining from Sardanapalus to Gargantua and critical remarks on the preparation of sauces.
If anyone objects that the analogy is false, since the appetite of an undergraduate for instruction is not comparable to that of a hungry man for food, I beg to reply that the objector greatly undervalues our young people. There are both a thirst and a hunger for knowledge; and both of these are the rule with a normal young man. Nothing is more depressing than when the man hungering for instruction, who wants knowledge, and not the knowledge of the ignorance of knowledge, is fobbed oft with dreary scholastic disquisitions and learned wranglings. When I enter my name for a course on Horace or on dogmatics, I do not want to learn wherein the treatise of Griffonius on Horace differs from that of Scribonius, nor do I care what meaning the twelfth century writer, Minutius Rabulista, ascribed to the term dogmatics. No, I want to have my Horace pure and simple and to know whether I am hereafter to be broiled or roasted in hell. That comes home to me, that touches me on the quick, that sets me on fire.
For such reasons as these, it seems to me the university courses should be otherwise introduced. For some sort of instruction is necessary; it does not do to plunge into the thick of things at the first go off. I venture on the following proposal: a lively, stimulating address, the objective or target of which should be the spirit of the science to be studied, while the psychology of the young man thirsting for knowledge should be used for taking the sights. This, would, indeed, be no easy task, but it would be one of benefit and dignity. And, in my opinion, it would be one which any teacher at a national college should be capable of twice a year.
Let us step down from the university to the secondary school. Among the many, far too many, subjects taught in our schools is one called "botany". Botany, literally translated, means the science of the herbs that the cow eats. In this limited sense of the word, botany is never taught in our schools, as the cowherds do not need the knowledge and schoolboys cannot use it. Botany has found its place in education in a somewhat different form—viz. as the knowledge needed by apothecaries. Its original intention was to familiarise young and old, for their own use and advantage, with the simples or medicinal plants. The frequent use of "officinalis" in the Latin names of our plants bears witness to this; such names ate fossil survivals of the naïve botany of the herbalist. The next step was to turn from preoccupation with the utility of plants to a systematic objective study of the claims on our attention possessed by any and every plant, without reference to its utility or harmfulness to us. This transition was made all the more easily because modern medicine deals in mineral, not in vegetable, poisons. When, finally, the place of the dry morphological system was taken by vegetable physiology, which realises and explains the plant as a living organism, we believed and still believe that we had found the right method.
When, however, we test the success of school botany on our young people, we find that this by no means answers our expectations. Interest in the plant-world does not last beyond their schooldays, and is, indeed, rare even in the class-room. If we consult the popular textbooks of botany, as used to-day, we find it quite easy to understand why this should be so.
From the primitive or utilitarian botany modern school botany has inherited the preferential treatment of field plants and wild flowers; from the scholastic, terminological botany of the savants, it has inherited the impartial ascription of interest to every plant, so that the bracken gets as much, or as little, attention as the palm. But even this was not enough for it. The preference given to simples and common field plants unexpectedly involved a certain neglect of the nobler plants in the botany lessons, a neglect that was more often than not total. It is a matter of common knowledge that the magnificent exotic flowers and shrubs are treated in a very stepmotherly fashion by our schoolteachers. The equal distribution of interest between the interesting and uninteresting led insensibly but necessarily to the laying of the chief stress on the insignificant, the varieties, the humble, the rarer species of plants. Naturally! For a systematic study of plants calls for a collection of plants, and every collector is out for what is rare, not for what is important.
Thus it has gradually come about that botany is as a matter of course regarded as the science of wild, meadow, and wayside plants. Not only are exotic plants neglected, but also the noble plants that have been imported and naturalised.
This goes without saying because we are familiar with the fact as a habit. The obvious, however, in the eyes of intelligence and pedagogy, is regarded as a monster.
Where in all the world do we accept, in any other study, the principle that it is only the wild or rare products that arouse our interest? That the moment any object is "improved", it loses its claim on our attention? What (e.g.) should we say if in zoology the lion and tiger were ignored, or treated superficially, in order that we might devote more close attention to our native beasts of prey, such as the flea? But this is just what botany does when it places our native weeds before the gigantic growths of the tropics. Or what should we think if zoology contemptuously dismissed the horse and the dog, because they are artificial products and not natural developments? But this is just what botany does when it simply ignores our beautiful garden-flowers.
Or, take mineralogy. Should we treat diamonds, gold, and silver cursorily because they are not found on the Uetliberg? But no one is unwilling to accept Swiss francs because they are artificial products, made of raw material from America.
What nonsense it is to rule the garden out of botany on the score that it is unnatural! In making this claim, school botany, in my opinion, pronounces its own condemnation. Unnaturalness versus unnaturalness. May I say how I define the unnatural? I hold it unnatural to give weeds the preference over useful herbs, the vegetables over the flowers, the plantain over the rose, chicory over coffee. I hold it also unnatural to climb the Albis to look for thistles, without sparing a glance for the gardens passed on the way. Or to press lettuces and not even know azaleas by name. Or to cross the Furka to find some slimy toadstool and to pass the flower-shops in the Bahnhof-Strasse with complete indifference.
"Nature." I have never understood that our schools were striving to attain a state of nature. Is the school "nature", is botany "nature"?
My strong conviction is that the garden should have a place, even the highest place, in botanical instruction. With all its flowers, and especially with such flowers as camellias, hyacinths, and tea-roses. And why should I not express the whole of my opinion? I believe that the catalogue of the nurseryman should certainly be among the schoolbooks used; and that the pupils should be taken to visit botanic gardens, private gardens, nurseries, and florists' shops. I maintain that in this way a real interest in botany could be awakened in all the children, while at present interest in it is simply paralysed by the botany of bog-plants and weeds. I should like to see the child whose heart does not leap up when he beholds a white camellia or a garden rhododendron, whereas the counting of the filaments of a horse-vetch is not to everyone's taste, and ought not to be.
We come upon another crying evil when we consider how deliberately the school botany relegates the fragrance, the colour, and the gorgeous beauty of the flower to a secondary place, while these are exactly what the natural man is attracted by. The modern school (by which I mean the teaching of learning that grew on mediæval soil, and was sugared over with a little humanism, in contradistinction to the Græco-Roman educational school) has all along, in consequence of its scholastic and theoretical origin, had great difficulty in recognising the educational value of the beautiful. How long was the drawing-master looked upon as an unwelcome interloper! Even at our universities, æsthetics and the history of art are newcomers.
This state of things has, theoretically, improved; we now know, and pedagogy admits, that the educational value of beauty is beyond rubies and quite indispensable. It is admitted that joy in the beautiful not only cheers the spirit of man, but also that it purifies it; that a sense of beauty helps, in a word, to make man good. Practice, however, limps slowly and late after intuition; and even what intuition allows has not yet become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Our pedagogy, in spite of its theoretical admissions, still suffers from the conception that beauty should not be taught. And the lower we go in the primary schools, the more numerous and clearer examples do we find of pedagogues who are hostile to beauty. The board school recognises utility as its only standard. Beauty is known to be of no use, at least its usefulness is not so easily demonstrated as that of the sheep or the cow.
This is the root of the matter. It is just because the flower is beautiful, just because a garden is a museum of the most beautiful plants, that the haughty school botany turns up its nose at them. "For Nature nothing is insignificant, and it is well that the pupil should learn to take as much interest in the modest hemlock as in the most superb magnolia." I beg to differ. This maxim is wholly true for scientific botany, it is not true for pedagogics—i.e. for the school. The purpose is not to turn the school-children into doctors of botany. It were a good thing if we could at least get far enough to understand the fundamental principle that the educational method and the scientific method are two different things, and that the former cannot be replaced by the latter. But the practice of our schools offends this principle at every step. The Latin master practises textual criticism, as if he had nothing but budding philologists before him; and every other teacher treats his own subject in a similar way.
In short, my view is that the botanical instruction in our schools has still a great advance to make, viz. the advance to æsthetic botany, in which the beauty, the colour, and the scent of flowers will be treated, not as a mere incidental matter, but as the main topic. And I hope to live to see the botanists eventually make their way from the byre through the apothecary's shop to the garden, where they will find something more edifying both to look at and to teach. And then the pupils who take with them from school a lively interest in the lore of plants will no longer be the exception but the rule.
We now pass over from the school to the domain of private teaching, viz. the teaching of music, especially of the piano.
Many pianoforte teachers believe it to be their duty to give their pupils so-called pleasing melodies and easily understood and childish pieces of music, and their preference is for pieces of this nature containing little snares for the performers, so that the children may learn to overcome difficulties without knowing it. Hence comes the popularity of the meagre sonatina, the lean rondo, the Daughter of the Regiment, the serenade from Don Giovanni, and similar morceaux for use in piano lessons.
I consider this a mistake. In the first place, the technical pitfalls in such pieces are often very troublesome and bear no reasonable relation either to the musical value of the composition or to the elementary capacity of the child. Indeed, when we investigate more closely, we find that most of these so-called pieces for children really presuppose a certain virtuosity on the part of the performer. A rondo (e.g.) played without a delicate touch, a scherzo without grace, a finale without fire, are absolutely intolerable. And the more "childish", i.e. the more pitiful the composition is, the more it demands some facility in execution to make it anything at all. Otherwise nothing is left but sodden dreariness.
Moreover, it is discouraging when a performer cannot do what seems to the ear easy. All such mischievous pieces I should for these reasons rule out from teaching the piano—among them Beethoven's two sonatas of Opus 49. For the same reason, viz. that they are deceitful and discouraging, I should rule out all the pieces that the composer himself has labelled as "easy" or "for beginners". When these pieces prove difficult to the child, he loses heart altogether. Such pieces, however, are not technically easy; they are merely thinly composed, because they dispose of relatively scanty means. Bach marks a fugue as "easy" when it has only two parts; Mozart calls a sonata "easy" when it renounces harmonic and contrapuntal display. All the same, these pieces may presuppose great executive ability, and, as a matter of fact, they do. Let us, therefore, be warned. The directions "for beginners", "easy", "childish" in the mouth of a classical composer must not lead us astray. When the author says "easy", he means "simple" and "unpretentious". Simple and unpretentious compositions are, however, the very last that should be used in giving pianoforte lessons.
And now we come to the most important point. The child of legend and the child of fact are two different things. The real child hates nothing so much in its teaching as the "childish" (or "playful") and finds nothing in art so hard to understand as the pleasing. The child wants to be taken seriously; it wants to grow, i.e. to raise and enlarge itself; it wants to be nourished, so it likes facts in the domain of knowledge and fullness and richness in the domain of art. What seems to it childish or play or easy or readily overcome is to it an object of contempt in instruction. It requires a great and reflective culture to trace the hidden art of a theme under the veil of childishness. It is for the adult, not for the child, to estimate the value of a Daughter of the Regiment melody or of a sonatina in spite of its street-ballad ear-tickling. Thus in my opinion Clementi should not be used for teaching the young, because his material is not rich enough, because he seems to the child too childlike in his theme and too meagre in its elaboration. Just ask them; you will find that all children detest the Clementi bogy. That is why he is called a classic for children. And it is the same with Mozart, though on a very different scale. Why are young people disappointed with Mozart's sonatas? Because they seem too catchy, too pleasing, and withal too insignificant. Youth craves the serious, not the merely pleasing. The very best, the very highest in music is exactly what children need. I should teach every pupil the classical composer that most appeals to him. Verbum sap. For if we enjoy a work of art, we also understand it.
As a consolatory conclusion and terrible example, I shall now tell you a grotesque but truthful anecdote about the teaching of literature in schools, the accuracy of which I guarantee. In a text-book, which was used six years ago and probably still is, there stands an edifying story entitled "The Cherry Tree". In this story the wonderful cherry-orchard of a peasant is shown to a wise man. Instead of the orthodox manifestation of joyful wonder, the wise man begins to howl "I am afraid". And when asked what the matter is, he replies solemnly that he is afraid of the terrible misfortune that will come to the owner of the orchard, because of the ungodly success of his fruit.
What think you of this story, told in sober earnest, in a school-book, as a laudable example?
What a charming spectacle it would be if this edifying attitude were to become general. Baron Rothschild has invited you to dinner. As soon as the golden coffee spoons make their appearance, you begin to whimper because you shudder at the ghastly fate of your host on account of his golden coffee-spoons. In the ballroom you must wax lachrymose over your partner because she wears diamonds. And must a group of village schoolchildren burst into a shriek of agony when their holiday trip brings them face to face with the outrageous luxury of the town? It would certainly be advisable to find out the exact amount of the bank balance and what the rich stuffs are that excite the envy of the gods, so that we may insure and reinsure ourselves against it. Ladies must wear envy-proof calico wrappers over their silken gowns, and we must all take care not to deposit too much cash in any one safety vault. I am amazed that the Bank of England has hitherto escaped the envy of the gods. According to the theory, a thunderbolt should fall there every quarter of an hour.
And in the case of prosperous joint-stock companies, would the envy of the gods extend to the individual shareholders?
It seems to me we have already quite enough to do with the envy of men and the progressive income tax. I quite understand the praiseworthy idea. The author of our curious little story was quite familiar with his Polycrates, his Iphigenia, and so on, and thought he was showing real scholarship by passing on to our schoolchildren the view of life supposed to be held by the good classics.
There is, however, still a word to be said about the learning of the poets and the transmission of this learning in connection with such an extraordinarily naïve interpretation. Poetic truth is not scientific truth. It must not be literally conceived and obeyed as if it were a truth of intelligence. The poet knows and practises the most various kinds of truth, as, e.g., the truth of costume, which pronounces its oracles in conformity with the views of a given period; the truth of character, which emanates from the individuality of a given person; the petard or explosive truth, which luxuriates in the superb crack of a rhyme or a figure or the turn of a sentence or an epigram.
In the Ring of Polycrates we find the costume-truth and the petard-truth combined. It goes without saying that Schiller did not pretend, personally, to believe in the envy of the gods. He transferred himself metaphorically to the ancient standpoint of the world and wrote his stirring ballad from that point of view, with pleasure in the poetic and rhetorical effects to be gained from it. It certainly was not his idea to inoculate us once more, after two millenniums, with the dogma of the envy of the gods. A proper understanding of this ballad implies not only that we admire the poetic beauties of the narrative, but also that we should not fail to stigmatise the Egyptian guest as a silly croaker.
Anyone accustomed to judge of human arrangements in art and life according to their fitness and intrinsic value will everywhere meet singularities and contradictions. Accidental causes and the too credulous following of an already furnished example are apt to exercise a decisive influence for indefinite periods. The philosophic thinker detects such absurdities mainly in the highest sphere of the human intelligence. I shall, however, select an example to show that this sanctification of the traditional model manifests itself also in the most subordinate fields; that we treat as inviolable even matters that no one takes seriously.
A municipal theatre announces the performance of a ballet, What shall we see? We know practically the whole thing beforehand. There will be a gymnasium of tights and short skirts, sparkling and brilliantly coloured processions, magical transformations, kaleidoscopic changes of scenery, choreographic evolutions, dandified dancers making corkscrew evolutions in the air, and more or less beautiful ladies waving their arms, and sometimes also their legs, above their heads. All this is carried on through a system of signs intelligible in the secret language of the much-strained muscles, but not very clear to us, as, unfortunately, it is not taught in our schools. Below the stage blares a full orchestra, conscientiously exploiting all the effects of the latest scheme of instrumentation.
Here I allow myself to ask: are all the ladies and gentlemen on the stage deaf and dumb? No? Why, then, do they not utter a single word? Because it is not permitted. But who forbade it? And what is the terrible penalty for an infraction of the rule that makes them observe it so punctiliously? Probably no answer will be made to this. So I allow myself a second question. Is there a more absurd spectacle in the world than an audience watching with great solemnity a deaf-and-dumb opera, in which, for reasons which none of them understand, the action is explained, not by the ordinary vehicle of speech, but by nonsensical signs and gestures? Is it really the fact that, as a relief from the usual dialogue play, we need an absolute assurance that to-day we shall not be troubled with a single, solitary word? Very well. Is it, however, also necessary for us to receive the impression that all the characters in the drama have had their tongues cut out? But this impression is forced upon us by a sentimental scene in which the lovers gesticulate violently to each other, pointing to their lips and their heart and their palms and apostrophising high heaven with their arms.
Two different things have to be distinguished, the Dance and the Action. A dance naturally needs no words; and if the ballet could be resolved into disconnected single dances, I should have nothing to say against it. But the idea of employing a symphony orchestra for an intrigue of several acts, in which the action is indicated by pantomime instead of by recitative, is an offence not only against common sense but (which is more important) against the laws of music. The composer is thereby forced to work himself up to an exaggerated emotional ecstasy on the most inadequate provocation, in order to make his music interpret to some degree what is going on on the stage; and the ballet music thus loses its greatest privilege, that of spontaneous and spirited joyousness. It is true that Auber allows the dumb girl of Portici to gesticulate, and Mozart makes Papageno, with the padlock on his lips, indicate his meaning in dumb show; but it would not have occurred to either of them to produce a score of several acts on the loves of Fenella and Papageno, with an obbligato chorus of excited paralytics. Verily, I do not wonder at the difficulty of making a creative thought successful in the higher realms of art, when I reflect that mankind has never mustered enough courage to improve upon the sacred traditional nonsense of a miming ballet. The ballet mime, with all the mannerisms of its conventional leg-play, is an anachronism. It is a survival of the stiff, petrified Renaissance classicism of the French, which we are only too ready to condemn in other fields. We have curtailed the revered hoop-skirts of the dancer very materially; I suggest an equally drastic cut in her coiffure.[1]
The æsthetic value of the circus is by no means slight, since feats of bodily strength and skill have charm as a by-product. This value could be materially increased, if the beauty of the performance were regarded as the main object instead of mere technical virtuosity. The circus, if it were conceived and conducted as an institution for the culture of the higher forms of gymnastics in the service of æsthetics, would infallibly become a visual training school of the first order for the sculptor and the lover of the plastic arts. Indeed, it already is so to a considerable extent, in spite of its lack of system, its haphazardness, and its inadequacy. The French painter Ingres even ventured to suggest that the Greeks put the living models for their statues into tights.
The new fashion of introducing spectacular pieces and dancing is all to the good from the point of view of the spectator. The fact that in certain places the theatres have applied for and received protection against the circus-ballet acts is itself a tribute to their charm, for one does not take arms against the harmless qualities of a rival. Besides gymnastic feats of all kinds, the circus possesses another source of attraction, which it now uses very sparingly and in very poor shape. I mean the art of mimicry. When we remember the rôle played by the independent mime in antiquity, and compare it with the very subordinate services of the mime in the modern theatre, there remains a boundless series of opportunities for the circus, since the theatre despises them. I do not mean to assert, however, that there must be nothing but pantomimes and that the pantomimes must always be of a ludicrous character. A man can do better with his limbs than crawl into a chest with three lids. The circus as a whole shows an astounding lack of invention as soon as its imagination leaves the stables. But, if I here make a few complaints, it is from no hostile spirit towards the circus, but with the most cordial wish to see it attain that well-deserved perfection which lies close at hand.
Why is the circus so tedious for many of us? Because, instead of exploiting its illimitable freedom, it fobs us off with all sorts of old tricks, many of which could never at any time have afforded pleasure to an intelligent eye. Of this character, in the sphere of the manège, are all those stunts which are against the nature of the horse and do wrong to his beauty; e.g., kneeling down, rolling on his back, going round the ring on his hind-legs with his fore-legs on the barrier or on some wheeled contraption, and all that sort of thing. In the equestrian acts the same thing is true of jumping through hoops or over carpets, an exhibition which, though pleasant enough to the eye, is so tame in comparison with the feats of the acrobats that its endless repetition becomes tiresome. The replacing of the slack rope by the tight-drawn wire can hardly be called a change for the better. It is surely more satisfying and more beautiful to see an elastic form poised on an elastic rope than to see a man with broad-soled shoes and awkward gestures wading through the air as if it were a morass.
But the humorous part of a circus performance is, perhaps, the worst of all! The clowns are the chartered libertines of humour, the legitimate descendants of their namesakes in Shakespeare. I certainly do not demand that their smiles should be intermixed with tears; that would be asking too much of them. But we are entitled to demand that they should amuse and cheer us, and this with all the more insistence as no æsthetic prohibitions put hindrances in their way. We all admit that they are entitled to roam over the whole wide field of speech and gesture, to capture anything of a merry nature, no matter of what kind. What a difference there is between what might be made of this licence and what they actually make of it! Their very costume is a declaration of bankruptcy in wit, and moreover it is a humiliation. An article of dress becomes comic when it caricatures something in actual use. When, however, no points of contact or resemblance are visible, an intelligent man cannot find anything to laugh at. What can we make of these floury-faced spectres with their pointed caps, with their Chinese pictures on Parisian dress-coats, with their baggy red breeches reaching up to their armpits? Whom or what do they remind us of? What do they travesty or mock? Nothing; they are simply monstrosities of folly, meaningless to the mind and ugly to the eye. And their attack on our risible muscles is so overdone as to cause reaction. The proper equipment of clowns would naturally be an exaggeration of actually worn costumes or of bodily forms, whether human or animal. All the masks of popular comedy are based originally on this principle; it is common to the English clown, the French paillasse, the Italian pantaloon, and the German Jack-pudding (Hanswurst). Who prevents the humorist of the circus from making use of the thousand-and-one types available in the life of all large cities? Why is it that the "Dumme August"[2] is the only comic figure that the wit of thousands during many years has been able to discover? Nothing prevents it except the clown's own incapacity and the incredible leniency of our demands. When four clowns represent an elephant, or two a Tom and a Tabby cat, they are in their proper sphere; then they are really funny, and make us laugh whether we will or not. But are there no other animals in the world? Must there be a convention even in the choice of objects to parody? Are we all condemned to wander everywhere in well-worn ruts? Is there not a single spark left of healthy extravagance, of cheerful gaiety? But Messieurs the Clowns probably stand too much on their dignity to think out and practise their comic profession with real thoroughness. Moreover, they have various "elevated" performances to go through. Before you can wink, one of them has jumped upon the shoulders of another, and a third upon him, there to twirl his felt cap for an eternity and a half. This may be difficult, it is certainly tiresome. It does not occur to them that the felt-hat juggling might be made really comic if the clowns were disguised as Tartars, who wear felt hats in real life. Apparently several centuries of hard thinking are needed for the discovery of a truth like that. Moreover, the fellows drop out of their part every moment. They ring cow-bells, or thrum on xylophones, or scrape out the inevitable Carnival de Venise in the most ridiculous attitudes, not to give us pleasure, but to excite wonder by their skill. When, however, a mask wishes to amuse, he must not, in between, intrigue for our applause, like a tenor singer; he must take it by surprise and compel it, not beg for it. Of the verbal wit of the clowns, the less said the better. It affords another example of how here too slavish conformity to convention obtains instead of cheerful spontaneity: a horrible and anæmic Anglo-German seems to be their only idea of the comical in pronunciation, and even this they use, not for our sakes, but because they think they are doing a fine thing in speaking English. They should notice what pleasure the audience shows when a Hungarian, or a Swabian, or a Russian steps on the stage in the performance of a comedy. In the theatre, it is true, the critics rather shrug their shoulders over these somewhat crude attempts to be comical, but in the circus they would probably not seem too cheap alongside the performing dogs and the learned pigs. If the gentlemen, instead of devoting their attention to threadbare jokes, would make fun of their public, of me and my neighbours, what a jolly good laugh we should all have!
There is, besides, a still more unbearable company than the mechanical felt-hat humorists; I mean the human statues. It has always been a puzzle to me why a respectable public does not drive these meal-worms out of the arena with the abuse that they deserve. I cannot for the life of me see what secures condonation for these offenders against decent taste; on the other hand, I know very well why I find them intolerable. I£ I am not mistaken, the beauty of a statue depends mainly on its beauty; but surely no one will maintain that beauty attaches to these figures in bathing-drawers, wrinkled flannel sweaters, pointed hose, and obvious wigs, with their grease-painted faces, their necks clearly defined by the upper end of their jerkin, and their bare-faced appeal to our applause both by look and attitude? Another significant merit of marble groups seems to me to lie in the marble; but it may be questioned whether marble can be successfully reproduced by a mixture of paste, flour, and sweat. But perhaps it is an artistic enjoyment to be reminded of classical statues, no matter how? Here we come on a curious paradox. The ancients imitated the human body in their statues, dignifying it with noble material and the most ideal forms; we imitate ancient statues through human bodies, bowdlerising them with the meanest forms and the commonest material. Another step, and our sculptors will be found executing the pasty-faced acrobats of the circus in marble, in order thus to reach nature and the antique. The apex of intellectuality will be reached when the motley felt-hat virtuosi, filled with envy of the success of their plaster-of-paris colleagues, trespass on their ground, throw themselves into the same tomfoolery in their red coats, make martial grimaces like a Bolognese maître d'armes, and raise their fists like a patriarch cursing his son. That also happens, and is naturally received with a frantic outburst of applause.
Among German writers on æsthetics there has always been much discussion as to the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the Allegory. The views on this subject are different, and my views are different from the others. In actual practice the matter has in the meantime assumed a somewhat curious form. In the sphere of thought, where it really belongs, the allegory is shunned as if it were a scorpion; in the plastic arts, where it is least suitable, it has been passed on as a treasure from one generation to another. I am the last to grudge sculpture and painting this privilege, but I think they ought to scrutinise more closely the utility of the traditional allegorical motives, and should take possession of their archæological inheritance only sub beneficio inventarii.[3]
There is, however, one among the traditional allegories, the universal popularity of which stands in the most violent contrast with its value or even its bearableness. I mean Cupid as a Boy, with or without his bow, his wings, and his bandage.
If once we admit allegory in general, I imagine we should all be at one in regard to the rule by which any given allegory should be judged in its relation to sculpture. The question is not whether the idea to be allegorised in a given instance is or is not a good one, but whether the symbol, selected to express the idea, stands the test of the onlooker's eye. Now the idea or thought that produced the boyish Cupid is clear and apparent, terribly clear and apparent. Beauty gives birth to love, therefore the god of love must be the son of the goddess of beauty. The goddess of beauty can hardly be conceived of as a matron, she needs the charm of blooming youth. But a very young goddess cannot have a grown-up son, hence Cupid is a child. The argument is complete. Moreover, love is blind; the boy must therefore be blindfold, like Justice. Love, too, as is well known, has its moods, its tricks, its caprices; thus, quite naturally, Cupid is furnished with a roguish dimple and an arch smile. Love wounds and hurts, it often strikes suddenly, and its wounds are difficult to heal. This is child's play for the trained allegorist, who at once arms him with a quiver, a bow, and a sheaf of barbed arrows. No one could miss the meaning of this.
All this is as mathematically simple as it is shallow and jejune. For a rhetorical embellishment it may pass. Allegorical poetry may, as far as I am concerned, go on trafficking with the bald symbolism, if she can content herself with circulating worn-out coins. But in painting! What satisfaction does painting give the beholder in presenting these thin, abstract ideas rolled into concrete blobs of colour before his eyes? One of the most disgusting things that ever was hatched—a boy in the rôle of pander. And, at that, a pander who knows very well what he is about. This is obvious in his coquettish gestures, his mock-modest mien, and his knowing smile. Is there in the whole realm of wantonness anything more sickening than this example of an eight-year-old scapegrace? An eight-year-old pimp is not only unnatural, but impossible. And yet this object has been presented to our gaze for centuries with devout reverence, in statues, paintings, and engravings. And everyone accepts it credulously as the most harmless and self-evident thing in the world.
This interesting youth reaches the apex of his lovableness when, at the sight of an approaching wooer, he deprives his mamma, with a cunning leer, of her last shred of drapery. What a charming disposition, experience of the world, and knowledge of men this implies in the pretty little scamp! And how consummately blasé he must be.
It is, I hope, needless to waste further words on this topic. I think it is enough to have indicated the horrible antagonism between sense and symbolism. But, in the name of common sense and good taste, I fervently beseech our artist friends to be good enough to spare us future representations of this repulsive boy-pimp.
- ↑ The German play on words here cannot be reproduced in English. The word I have translated as coiffure is Zopf, which means (1) pig-tail and (2), in a figurative sense, petty formalism or antiquated pedantry.
- ↑ The "Foolish Augustus" is a German clown, whose chief function is to make exaggerated gestures of energetic helpfulness while really doing nothing.
- ↑ I.e. without being liable for the testator's debts beyond the value of the estate.