Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 3Howells, William Dean
General
Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 3
Howells, William Dean
Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Transatlantic voyages -- Fiction
The Goethe and Schiller monument which he had glimpsed the night before
was characteristic too, but less offensively so. German statues at the
best are conscious; and the poet-pair, as the inscription calls them,
have the air of showily confronting posterity with their clasped hands,
and of being only partially rapt from the spectators. But they were more
unconscious than any other German statues that March had seen, and he
quelled a desire to ask Goethe, as he stood with his hand on Schiller's
shoulder, and looked serenely into space far above one of the typical
equipages of his country, what he thought of that sort of thing. But upon
reflection he did not know why Goethe should be held personally
responsible for the existence of the woman-and-dog team. He felt that he
might more reasonably attribute to his taste the prevalence of classic
profiles which he began to note in the Weimar populace. This could be a
sympathetic effect of that passion for the antique which the poet brought
back with him from his sojourn in Italy; though many of the people,
especially the children, were bow-legged. Perhaps the antique had: begun
in their faces, and had not yet got down to their legs; in any case they
were charming children, and as a test of their culture, he had a mind to
ask a little girl if she could tell him where the statue of Herder was,
which he thought he might as well take in on his ramble, and so be done
with as many statues as he could. She answered with a pretty regret in
her tender voice, "That I truly cannot," and he was more satisfied than
if she could, for he thought it better to be a child and honest, than to
know where any German statue was.
He easily found it for himself in the place which is called the Herder
Platz after it. He went into the Peter and Paul Church there; where
Herder used to preach sermons, sometimes not at all liked by the nobility
and gentry for their revolutionary tendency; the sovereign was shielded
from the worst effects of his doctrine by worshipping apart from other
sinners in a glazed gallery. Herder is buried in the church, and when you
ask where, the sacristan lifts a wooden trap-door in the pavement, and
you think you are going down into the crypt, but you are only to see
Herder's monumental stone, which is kept covered so to save it from
passing feet. Here also is the greatest picture of that great soul Luke
Kranach, who had sincerity enough in his paining to atone for all the
swelling German sculptures in the world. It is a crucifixion, and the
cross is of a white birch log, such as might have been cut out of the
Weimar woods, shaved smooth on the sides, with the bark showing at the
edges. Kranach has put himself among the spectators, and a stream of
blood from the side of the Savior falls in baptism upon the painter's
head. He is in the company of John the Baptist and Martin Luther; Luther
stands with his Bible open, and his finger on the line, "The blood of
Jesus cleanseth us."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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