Goethe's Literary Essays. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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      The column is very dear to you, and in another clime you would be prophet. You say: The column is the first essential ingredient of a building, and the most beautiful. What noble elegance of form, what pure grandeur, when they are placed in a row! Only guard against using them inappropriately; it is their nature to be free and detached. Alas for the unfortunates who try to join the slender shape of them to heavy walls!

      Yet it seems to me, dear abbe, that the frequent repetition of this impropriety of building columns into walls, so that the moderns have even stuffed the intercolumnia of ancient temples with masonry, might have aroused in your mind some reflections. If your ears were not deaf to the truth, these stones would have preached a sermon to you.

      Columns are in no way an ingredient in our dwellings; they contradict rather the style of all our buildings. Our houses have not their origin in four columns placed in four corners. They are built out of four walls on four sides, which take the place of columns, indeed exclude all columns, and where these are used to patch up, they are an encumbrance and a superfluity. This is true of our palaces and churches, with the exception of a few cases, which I do not need to mention.

      Thus your buildings exhibit mere surface, which, the broader it Is extended, — the higher it is raised to the sky, — the more unendurable must become the monotony which oppresses the soul. But Genius came to our aid, and said to Erwin von Steinbach: Diversify the huge wall, which you are to raise heavenward, so that it may soar like a lofty, far-spreading tree of God, which with a thousand branches, millions of twigs, and leaves like the sand of the sea, proclaims everywhere the glory of God, Its Master.

      When I went for the first time to the Minster, my head was full of the common cant of " good taste." From hearsay, I was an admirer of the harmony of mass, the purity of form, and was a sworn enemy to the confused arbitrariness of Gothic adornment. Under the term, " Gothic," like the article in a dictionary, I piled all the misconceptions which had ever come into my head, of the indefinite, the unregulated, the unnatural, the patched-up, the strung-together, the superfluous, in art. No wiser than a people which calls the whole foreign world, " barbarous," everything was Gothic to me that did not fit into my system, from the turned wooden dolls and pictures of gay colors, with which the bourgeois nobility decorate their houses, to the dignified relics of the older German architecture, my opinion of which, because of some bizarre scrollwork, had been that of everybody, — " Quite buried in ornamentation! "; consequently I had an aversion to seeing it, such as I would have before a malformed bristling monster.

      With what unexpected emotions did the sight surprise me when I actually saw it! An impression of grandeur and unity filled my soul, which, because it consisted of a thousand harmonizing details, I could taste and enjoy, but by no means understand and explain. They say it is thus with the rapture of heaven. How often I returned to enjoy this heavenly-earthly rapture, to embrace the stupendous genius of our older brothers in their works. How often I returned to view from every side, at every distance, in every light of the day, its dignity and splendor. Hard it is for the mind of man when his brother's work is so elevated that he can only bow down and pray. How often has the evening twilight refreshed with its friendly calm my eyes wearied by too much gazing; it made countless details melt together into a complete whole and mass, and now, simple and grand, it stood before my eyes, and, full of rapture, my power unfolded itself both to enjoy and to understand it at once. There was revealed to me in soft intimations the genius of the great builder. "Why are you astonished?" He whispered to me. "All these masses were necessary, and do you not see them in all the older churches of my city? Only I have given harmonious proportion to their arbitrary vastnesses. See how, over the principal entrance which commands two smaller ones on either side, the wide circle of the window opens which corresponds to the nave of the church and was formerly merely a hole to let the light in; see how the bell-tower demands the smaller windows! All this was necessary, and I designed it with beauty. But what of these dark and lofty apertures here at the side which seem to stand so empty and meaningless? In their bold slender forms I have hidden the mysterious strength which was to raise both of those towers high in the air, of which alas only one stands there sadly, without the crown of five towers which I had planned for it, so that to it and its royal brother the country about would do homage." And so he parted from me, and I fell into a sympathetic mood of melancholy, until the birds of morning, which dwelt in its thousand orifices, greeted the sun joyously and waked me out of my slumber. How freshly it shone in the morning rays, how joyfully I stretched my arms towards it, surveying its vast harmonious masses, animated by countless delicate details of structure! as in the works of eternal Nature, every form, down to the smallest fibril, alive, and everything contributing to the purpose of the whole 1 How lightly the monstrous, solidly grounded building soared into the air! how free and delicate everything about it, and yet solid for eternity! To your teaching, noble genius, I owe thanks that I did not faint and sink before your heights and depths, but that into my soul flowed a drop of that calm rapture of the mighty soul which could look on this creation, and like God say, — " It is good! "

      And now I ought not to be angry, revered Erwin, when the German critic and scholar, taking the cue from envious neighbors, and misjudging the superiority of your work, belittles it by the little understood term, " Gothic "; since he ought rather to give thanks that he can proclaim loudly that this is German architecture, — our architecture, — whereas the Italians cannot boast of any distinctively native style, much less the French. And if you are not willing to admit to yourself this superiority, at least show us then that the Goths have already built in this style, — in which effort you may encounter some difficulties. And finally, if you cannot demonstrate that there was a Homer already before Homer, then we will gladly allow the story of small attempts, successful and unsuccessful, and come reverently back to the, work of the master who first drew the scattered elements together into one living whole. And you, my dear brother in the spirit, in your search for truth and beauty, close your ears to the loud talk about the plastic arts, — come, enjoy, survey. Beware of desecrating the name of your noblest artist, and hasten here that you may enjoy and see his glorious work. If it makes an unfavorable impression or none, then farewell, hitch up, and take the road straight for Paris.

      But you I would accompany, dear youth, who stand there, your soul moved, and yet unable to harmonize the contradictions which conflict in your mind, now feeling the irresistible power of the great whole, now calling me a dreamer for seeing beauty where you see only violence and roughness. Do not let a misunderstanding part us, do not let the feeble teaching of the modern standards of beauty spoil you for vigorous though rough strength, so that finally your sickly sensibility is able to endure only meaningless insipidities. They would have you believe that the fine arts originated in the tendency which they impute to us to beautify the things about us. That is not true! For in the sense in which it could be true, it is the bourgeois and the artisans who use the words and not the philosopher.

      Art has a long period of growth before it is beautiful, certainly sincere and great art has, and it is often sincerer and greater then than when it -becomes beautiful. For in man there is a creative disposition, which comes into activity as soon as his existence is assured. As soon as he has nothing to worry about or to fear, this semi-divinity in him, working effectively in his spiritual peace and assurance, grasps materials into which to breathe its own spirit. Thus the savage depicts, with strange lines and forms, ghastly figures, lurid colors, his weapons and his body. And even if these pictures consist of the most arbitrary and incongruous forms and lines, they will, without any intended proportion or balance, yet have a sort of harmony; for a unity of feeling created out of them a characteristic whole.

      Now this characteristic art is the only genuine art. If only it comes fresh from the inner soul, expressing the original, unique sensibilities, untroubled, indeed unconscious of any external element, it may spring from rough savagery or from cultivated sensitiveness, yet it will always be complete and alive. This you can see among nations and individual men in countless degrees. The more the soul rises to the feeling for relations, which alone are beautiful and from eternity, СКАЧАТЬ