Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 3/Two days in Weimar
TWO DAYS IN WEIMAR.
“German Weimar” is Matthew Arnold’s picturesque phrase, summing in one word the many characteristics of the modern Athens. The modern spirit, the spirit of scoffing and fast travelling, has been so much diffused, even over Germany, though accepted only in a limited sense as regards speed on railways and still resisted by eilwagen, that few towns retain that idyllic aspect we are accustomed to call German. No town, to me, retains it so completely as Weimar; and it is fit that simplicity, which lingers last with great men, should plant its extrema vestigia on their long abode and resting-place.
When I woke in the morning, and went out into the streets, I felt as one who wanders through Pompeii, and expects at each turn to meet a resuscitated ancient who has slept through time. The streets looked like rows of toy-houses. The absence of all movement, the listless air of the town, confirmed the impression. And when, turning a corner, I came on a statue looking as much at home on its pedestal as if it had stepped up there, with an air of unconsciousness, not posé as all other street statues, it seemed as it would step down and resume life, or that statues walked in the streets of Weimar like men. I stopped unprompted before a white house in one of the first squares I passed, nor knew till later it was Goethe’s house. Something there must be in all that belonged to Goethe to make it stand apart from all else of its age. Why should I look at his house first, before churches or palaces, without knowing it was his? Why should I select a small low cottage in the park, and say it was, what it actually proved, his Garten-haus, unless there is some cachet, some stamp of distinctiveness impressed on his dwellings, just as there is on his works?
Neither of Goethe’s houses are to be seen, save a part of his town-house once a week. Schiller’s house is always open. It is a low cottage of two storeys, with a shop on the ground floor, and on the upper floor the room he occupied. His bed, the bed he died in, is still there; his desk, which he could raise or lower at pleasure, as he could raise or lower the mind, and some other relics,—little pianoforte, some of his writing, and a few books,—are all that remain in his house. If you want to see more of him, go into the world. Ask the first German you meet, or the tenth of any other nation. Go on the 10th of November, and see all cities on the continent uniting to celebrate his name—enthusiastic crowds in every theatre assembled to fête him. In front of the theatre is a group recently erected of Goethe and Schiller together, each holding one side of a wreath with one hand, Goethe’s other hand placed on his brother’s shoulder. Schiller looks up, as befits an idealist; Goethe looks straight before him, as suits the man who united all views, idealist and realist, as he united art and science. There is something friendly, something unstudied in the group, that makes it come home to the heart more than Schwanthaler’s majestic Goethe at Frankfort or Thorwaldsen’s musing Schiller at Stuttgardt.
What else I saw may be summed up in very few words. A beautiful bust of Goethe when young in the Library, realising all the reports of the beauty that made men look at him and stop eating when he entered a room; a large statue of him in a building in the park, called the Temple Salon; and the coffins of Goethe and Schiller in the Fürstengruft, that is, Princes’ Vault. The two poets lie side by side, a little removed from the obscurer princes, their coffins covered with bay-leaves. Karl August, the friend of Goethe and Grand Duke of Saxe Weimar, wished his coffin to be placed between the two poets, but courtly etiquette forbade. It is better, much as one respects a prince who could protect such great men, that he should derive no adventitious honour from being buried in a higher place than befitted him. He might befriend them while they lived, while fortune placed them lower than him, but to sleep between them in death is no more allowed him than to patronise them in their new sphere.
The Park of Weimar was my great resort. Laid out by Goethe, changed from unreclaimed wild to a shady pleasance, with winding walks under the boughs, open spaces of meadow grass and flowers, and a concert of singing-birds in this young summer weather, it tempted to stroll slowly through the cool alleys, or sit under the shade and muse. Schiller’s Walk was written in this park; and the poet might often be seen wandering in it alone with his muse, turning down unfrequented paths to avoid interrupters. Here it was that Goethe, walking in that majestic pose with his hands crossed behind his back, his secretary following with the work he had broken off in-doors to continue in the air, had to move out of the path to avoid a labourer who stood gazing at him in mute amazement. The river Ilm that runs through this park, in which Goethe bathed day and night, to the horror of well-regulated German minds, did not tempt me; it seemed dirty and small, more of a ditch than a river.
One by one I called up my scattered recollections, the thoughts which made the name Weimar more familiar to me than any place that had been my home. I wondered which square of the town had seen the strange sight of Goethe and Karl August, the young poet and the young prince, cracking dray-whips by the hour. But the earlier days, the genialische zeit, had not so strong a hold over me as the later time when Goethe had developed from the wild youth into the serene man, when he gave laws to the world. I thought of the decree he gave out to check the vagaries of the Schlegels, and to reinstate classic art in the appreciation of his subjects, of which Heine says: “After that, there was no more question of the romantic school or of the classic school, but of Goethe, and always of Goethe!” And the quotation from Heine recalled his interview with the Jupiter of Weimar, how the majestic presence of the god drove out from his memory all his prepared speech, and he could but stammer a praise of the plums that grew on the way-side from Jena.
Happy thoughts, one would suppose; yet they filled me with an invincible melancholy as I sat in the park at Weimar, and looked across the meadow space to Goethe’s garden-house. What right had I to be unhappy, who had not the excuse of greatness?
I returned to the table d’hôte, and found an antidote to any thoughts of past Weimar in viewing the reign that has succeeded to Goethe’s. Perhaps to a thinking man the folly that surrounds him is more mournful than the wisdom of the past, but there is at times something cheering in folly when you are saddened by memories. A farce follows a tragedy, and you are not so much shocked; you are relieved from lamenting the state of South Italy when you hear Mr. Bowyer’s comments on it. Thus, when I found myself at the table d’hôte, in the midst of a band of zukunftists, I was cheered, and listened without bitterness. Perhaps you do not know the meaning of this German word; it maybe literally translated “futurists,” and is the name applied to those gentlemen who cultivate the music of the future. This grandiloquent phrase has been given to a school of music intended to supersede Mozart. Its prophet-in-chief is Richard Wagner; one of its heads is Franz Liszt, the pianist, Kapellmeister at Weimar. I fear it may be said of the name of this school, as it was said of some poet’s Epistle to Posterity, that it is never likely to reach its address; and of its pretensions to supersede Mozart, what Porson said of Southey’s poems, that they would be read when Homer and Milton were forgotten, but not till then.
Wagner, the chief prophet, is a better poet than musician. He writes his own libretti, and very well; they merely need setting to music to be excellent operas. The reforms he desires to introduce on the lyric stage are more connected with the libretto than with the partition. He has succeeded in reforming the words, but another school will be needed to reform his music. For, however many reforms music can bear, there is one it cannot bear, the omission of tune. Difficulty of comprehension is but a slight impediment to the success of a musician, so long as he conceals it beneath melody. But when he despises melody, and is not to be understood, he appeals to that limited class whose appreciation is like St. Augustine’s faith. Credo, quia impossibile, is the original of Tadmire, because it is unintelligible.
Of Wagner’s operas I have only a limited acquaintance with one, Tannhäuser, at one time considered his ultimatum, but now almost superseded. Twice I have tried to hear this opera; the first time I sat out two acts, the second time I could only sit out one. Its story is a popular legend of Germany, telling how Tannhäuser, a knight and minstrel, was decoyed by a female devil, once a goddess, and still named Venus, to spend a year with her in her enchanted hill. On returning to life none would speak with him, so great was his crime, and he had to go to Rome to ask absolution from the Pope. But the Pope, on hearing the enormity of his sin, refused him absolution, drove him out of Rome, and he returned to the enchanted hill to pass the rest of his life with Venus. This is the legend which the reader will find in Heine’s work, “De L’Allemagne,” or in “Lewes’s Life of Goethe.”
The opera was to be performed that night at Weimar, and my neighbours at the table d’hôte held themselves in readiness to applaud it. One was a Russian, on his way to England, who had already preached the gospel of Wagner in his own land. He boasted that he had set the overture to Tannhauser for four pianos and sixteen hands. As the said overture is remarkable for the pain it gives the nerves when performed by a full orchestra, I should be loth to hear eight musicians of the future banging it out on four pianos. The rest of their conversation was in the same vein, speaking with bated breath of Wagner and Liszt, with occasional depreciation of greater names. It was not without reluctance that I paid my two shillings for a stall at the theatre. I had a great desire to see the stage on which so many of Goethe’s and Schiller’s works had been performed, the theatre of which Goethe was manager; but I had an idea that this theatre was a building subsequent to their time, erected on the ruins of theirs. But putting this out of the question, I wanted to have a glimpse at the music of the future in its chief stronghold.
The difference between North and South Germany, so puzzling to politicians, is nowhere more apparent than in their music. The South German music is considerably qualified by the neighbouring influences of Italy, and expresses sentiment if not passion; the North German is confined by rules, and unless acted upon by some peculiarity in the composer’s character, is pedantic. Melody is far more an object with South Germany, though in search of it they almost abandon the higher aims of music. Compare the fresh melody of Mozart and Haydn in their symphonies with the correct but colder symphonies of Mendelssohn; see how Beethoven was influenced by his life in Vienna. Wagner is almost universally scouted in South Germany. It is in the North that his influence prevails. His disciples would say with Voltaire:
C’est du Nord aujourd’hui que nous vient la lumière.
I only sat out one act. The overture was loudly applauded, not altogether undeservedly. It has great faults; it is far too long, and the first part abounds in passages that rend the ears, and send a grating shiver through a sensitive frame; but towards the end there is some melody and some good instrumentation. But at Weimar the singers seconded so cordially the wishes of the composer by singing out of tune, even beyond the composer’s own efforts, that it was impossible to stay longer than the first fall of the curtain. South Germans would say they only sang the parts as they were written, and would refer to a caricature in which a leader of an orchestra at a rehearsal of one of Wagner’s operas was represented stopping suddenly and asking for the partition.
“Give me your part,” he says to one of the instrumentalists. “There is some mistake. It is in tune!”
Wagner went to Paris last winter to try the taste of the Parisian public, which considers itself the most infallible judge of musical pretensions. To be sure, when the young Mozart went to Paris he did not meet with undivided approval. Wagner may lay this flattering unction to his soul to compensate for his failure. But how will he reconcile himself to the treatment he received from Berlioz, on whose help he had relied, whom he had considered his alter ego, the Wagner of Paris, and from whom he received a most unflattering dressing in the feuilleton of the “Débats.” That Scudo, the musical critic of the “Révue des Deux Mondes,” an unflinching lover of old music, and the champion of Mozart, should attack an innovator, was to be expected; but Berlioz, who had composed unintelligibility to its most unintelligible development,—Berlioz, who had written heroic symphonies and obscured Beethoven,—if he deserted the cause of Wagner, who would support it? This was everybody’s expectation, and to everybody’s surprise Berlioz took the opportunity to disclaim all connection with Wagner and Wagnerism. And to a lady who said to him, “But you, M. Berlioz, you ought to like Wagner’s music,” he replied in his feuilleton, “Oui, madame, comme j’aime à boire du vitriol, comme j’aime à manger de l’arsenic.”