Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

to Domenico Ghirlandajo, the best teacher of the art of painting that Florence possessed. About this time Ghirlandajo was engaged on the frescoes in the choir of Santa Maria Novella, and made use of a number of his students as assistants. Here, apparently, Michelangelo learned the main principles in fresco painting, so that when Julius II set him his great task, he could show such surprising skill.

Since as an old man he bemoaned the fact that he had not at once been apprenticed to a sculptor, we have a right to believe that his place as a student of Ghirlandajo was not something to be readily given up. However stubbornly he may have maintained that sculpture was merely his avocation, it was not of his own volition that he left the painter's studio. The reason was that Lorenzo de' Medici addressed himself to Ghirlandajo for the purpose of getting some students for a school of sculpture which he desired to establish in the garden of San Marco's cloister. Ghirlandajo chose Michelangelo and his friend Granacci.

After he had set eyes upon the collection of sculpture belonging to the Medici, he never returned to the painter's studio. The antique statues altogether enthralled him. As he wandered there in the shaded walks of San Marco, the boy had before him the masterpieces of the ancients, and he must have felt within him a great desire to deal with marble. The stone-cutters who were building walls and cutting ornaments for the newly established library helped him in his study; for these good people gave him a piece of marble and some sculptor's tools, with which he made his earliest attempt, the head of a faun.

It was Lorenzo himself who showed and explained to the boy his art treasures, gems, and coins. The youth became familiar with what the Florentine

painters before him had achieved. The naïve style that is now called PreRaphaelite, could not possibly appeal to him or to his generation, nor could the archaic style which captivated Thorvaldsen and his period. Michelangelo aimed at the perfect, and found it first in statues like the Torso, and later in the Laocoön. He had for these the deepest admiration. They released within him a creative desire for mastery in the presentation of the human body, or of life as a hopeless but energetic fight, the tragically sublime.

Most important of all was the intellectual liberation that Michelangelo experienced, together with his soaring faith in a platonic ideal, joy in that nature which for so long had been condemned, and a passionate love for the human form, its miraculous construction, the wonderful play of its muscles, its entire hidden mechanism, the whole body as an expression of sorrow and happiness, anger, suffering, action, and

repose.

Equipped with the traditions of antiquity as both offensive and defensive weapons, Michelangelo found himself before the Old Testament. It is at the cross-road where Hellas meets in his mind with Palestine, that Michelangelo is at his best. Julius II had decided on figures of the twelve Apostles as the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo replied that as a ceiling decoration they would be una povera cosa. 'Do as you please,' replied the Pope; and Michelangelo practically eliminated the traditional Christian element.

According to the intellectual traditions of the time, it was customary to look upon heathen sibyls and Hebrew prophets as similar. Michelangelo's comparative indifference to woman as a sex disappeared when she showed herself inspired, divinely spiritualized, as the sibyl was then believed to be. The

prophet was to him an understood and beloved character, for in Michelangelo himself there was something prophetic. The pathos that dwelt within him had this quality, and in it he was kin to some of the chief characters of the Old Testament. But for all that, his intellect was of his own time, heathenish, Greco-Roman.

More important than the fact that he created prophets and sibyls is the fact that he created the Creator. No human being before Michelangelo had been able to present creative activity itself. He could do this because it was his own. The powerful creative force within him found expression in the figure of the Creator, which since that time has stood as the model for all, particularly because Raphael immediately made the type his own.

His genius did not bring happiness

to Michelangelo. He was by nature melancholy, and held aloof from his surroundings. Read his confession in his Canzoniere; when he looks back, he does not find a single day that he can call his own. All is a restless whirlpool of human emotions, to none of which he is a stranger. Everything causes him suffering the transitory nature of all that is, and his own mind, the worst torment of all. When he mentions the history of his own works, it is as a continual chain of disturbance and persecution.

[ocr errors]

Michelangelo could work only when by himself. He needed neither advice nor assistance. Spectators he could not tolerate. Having always contended that he had himself never had a teacher, he never trained a single pupil; and he closed up his cartoons in the face of those who wished to learn.

GERMAN UNIVERSITIES TO-DAY

BY LEVIN L. SCHÜCKING

From The New Statesman, June 25
(LONDON RADICAL LIBERAL WEEKLY)

WHEN the French occupied Strassburg, toward the end of 1918, the German officials who were treated with the most conspicuous harshness were the University professors. Some of them, who were known for their political activity during the war, had to leave the town precipitately before the entrance of the French authorities, who instantly seized all their property and publicly sold the very books from their writing-tables. But even members of the University who had not gone in for pol

itics at all experienced strange things. A friend told me that he found himself in a situation which makes one remember burning Troy. Not being allowed to take with him more than he could carry in his arms, he had the choice between saving his fur coat or his old mother. Later on, when the French University was reopened, M. Poincaré himself, in a great speech, settled accounts with the German professors on Alsatian soil, and undeceived his audience as to the pretensions of German

scholarship in general. The sentiments that revealed themselves in these proceedings were symptomatic of the general feeling in the Entente countries, the German universities being considered as the true strongholds of that sort of political opinion which was most obviously at variance with the ideas of progressive democracy.

It is true that the democratic ideal held no place of honor in German university life. Several causes contributed to the creation of its reactionary atmosphere: the influences of a school of thought which still bore the impression of Bismarckian policy, the pressure of an autocratic and narrow-minded ministry, and, last but not least, those specialist methods of research which monopolized the whole mental activity to the exclusion of any serious occupation with politics at all—great scholars, but bad politicians. The students who two generations earlier had been sacrificing everything to the propagation of revolutionary ideas had become quietist and indifferent and desirous of attaining the highest possible degree of specialist knowledge. The social divisions among them were extraordinary, one group, the Korpsstudent, being universally respected as a kind of aristocracy who had a traditional right to occupy the highest positions in the State. William II himself was a former Korpsstudent, and so were Bethmann-Hollweg, Prince Bülow, and nearly all of those who held the responsible offices at the outbreak of the war. It is difficult to imagine how august these people were. No one of them would have stooped, for example, to make a speech in an election meeting, or to mix in any similar way with his less distinguished fellow creatures.

All those things are, of course, changing rapidly. The revolution did away with the rule of the 'Junker' in the Ministry. It is true that, for a time, it seemed greatly to overshoot the mark,

as in appointing a Minister of Education (Adolph Hoffmann) whose Radicalism was indeed beyond question, but whose constant struggle with the elementary rules of grammar did not seem to make him especially fit for the position of head and reformer of learned corporations. His way of confounding mir and mich, equivalent to 'dropping the h's' in England, led to the witticism that his first ministerial order had been to abolish this difference altogether. There was a counterpart to this in the State of Brunswick, where, in the first month after the revolution, a former washerwoman was entrusted with the Ministry of Education.

But when the most turbulent waves of the revolution subsided, and the 'Independents' left the Government, a new phase of reform set in. The task, however, proved rather difficult; for any really serious measure would have required a violation of that right of selfgovernment upon which the universities had never insisted more strongly than in the face of a democratic government. So, more indirect measures only were taken, notably one which, during the first days of the revolution, the Radical wing of the Berlin students had asked for with quite a new term, viz., the Entgreisung -'desenilization'— of the universities; the oldest members being compelled to quit their office at the age of 68, and the privileges of the 'ordinary' professors in the administration being largely diminished in favor of the younger members.

At the same time, the excellent Socialist Minister, Hänisch, never grew tired of endeavoring to get into touch with the students themselves. Their share in the administration of the university was increased; they were encouraged to feel themselves as a body whose views were not to be slighted; they were induced to choose councils and committees. This was favored by the general

character of the time. The great bulk of the students had had little contact among themselves until then.

But now the tremendous pecuniary difficulties, into which all the brainworkers of Germany were plunged by the effect of the Versailles Treaty, compelled them to act conjointly in order to escape the worst. The great question was, how to find work. This to a certain extent was accomplished by the employment offices founded by the students themselves. The number of students who during the holidays are busy in mines, factories, mills, or on the land, is extraordinary: the University of Halle alone, for example, sends five hundred students into the country to do farm-work. At the last Leipsic Messe, the great bulk of the 'guides' for the foreign merchants consisted of students. Unfortunately, a great many of them are compelled to take to much less decent jobs in order to make both ends meet, and the misery of those whose state of health prevents their taking up hard work is still very great.

On the other hand, new tendencies developed among the students, aiming at a higher ideal than that of the mere specialist. One wanted to do away with the blinkers. At the Charlottenburg Technical High School, for instance, there was founded a students' Kultur office at the beginning of 1921, with the aim of cultivating all sorts of artistic and intellectual pursuits much more seriously than before; an academic choir was founded in Berlin; an orchestra, a dramatic society, and what not, are to follow. At other universities the plan is being discussed of a 'humanist' faculty, which would represent a kind of entrance hall which the student would have to pass before getting to his specialist work. Nearly everywhere the cry for better political education has arisen, and every scheme is sure to be applaud

ed that procures better knowledge of things abroad.

But in spite of all this mental activity, the progress of political thought is not precipitate. An astonishingly large percentage of the students are still politically more or less indifferentthe reaction having the benefit. The Socialist and Democratic groups are small, the Clerical ones are in many cases tainted by chauvinism. This state of things, however, would be alarming only to an observer who does not know that all good things want time. The democratizing of the universities is not to be expected from the representatives of a bygone era, who up to now still hold the field notwithstanding all endeavor to the contrary; but it will be the unavoidable effect of circumstances. Already the privilege of the academically trained official is broken. The Reichspräsident Ebert and the Prussian Prime Minister Stegerwald are former workingmen. The example of cases like this has had an enormous influence. There is a powerful movement among the subordinate officials of the Prussian administration, which desires the bars between the official with university training and the man who has risen from the ranks to be abolished altogether. Everybody should have a chance to rise to every position. There is no doubt that this movement will prove irresistible. At a number of places already these subordinate officials are admitted to university courses which are destined to supply them with the most urgent theoretical foundations for their task, and the lecturers testify to their unusual diligence and interest.

It is easy to understand that this movement must be favored by the Government, not only from principle, but because the sabotage of the old Geheimrat who still rules in the ministry makes a fundamental change simply a matter of necessity. For the newcomers

are for the most part naturally free from the political and social prejudices of their former superiors. The whole thing means a tremendous change in the social life of Germany. The two pillars of the old caste system were the reserve officer and the official with academic training. There was a line drawn between the

world in which these two reigned and the world below, which nobody overstepped. The one has disappeared, the other's position is going to be shaken. In this way new blood will be infused into the veins of the old bureaucracy. It will react on the universities themselves.

RUSSIA'S NEW ECONOMY

BY N. BUCHARIN

[The following is a German report of the speech which the Soviet Commissar Bucharin delivered on the eighth of last June, before the Third World-Congress in Moscow.]

From Die Rote Fahne, June 28, 29
(BERLIN OFFICIAL BOLSHEVIST DAILY)

In order to understand the new course we have adopted, it is necessary to know its connection with the economic and social crises that we passed through last spring. The experience of the Russian Revolution shows that our earlier ideas of revolutionary processes were rather naïve. Even the most orthodox followers of Marx supposed that the proletariat needed only to seize political power in order to get full control of the instruments of production after first ejecting, of course, the higher ranks of the bourgeoisie. Experience teaches quite the contrary. Every revolution involves a complex reorganization of society. A proletarian revolution involves this in a much higher degree than the bourgeois revolutions of the past. A proletarian revolution requires the people not only to seize and reorganize the government, but to seize and reorganize the whole productive mechanism of society. The latter, in fact, is its most important task.

Now, what is the character of this productive mechanism in a capitalist state? In the first place, you have a capitalist hierarchy, one group below another - at the top the wealthy owners; next to them, the business administrators; next below them, the technical personnel; one step further down the scale, skilled artisans and mechanics; and at the bottom, common laborers. When you start out to reorganize this society, you disturb the balance between these groups, you break off connection between them. The workmen start this by open revolt against the government and by strikes. So long as soldiers obey their officers, you cannot have a revolution in the army. So long as employees obey their bosses and employers, you cannot have a revolution in industry. But the moment you break the ties between these different classes and groups, you stop production. If the employees strike or man the barricades, work ceases.

« VorigeDoorgaan »