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THE ICONOCLASTS

From the History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands': date 1556

THE

HE commencement of the attack on images took place in West Flanders and Artois, in the district between Lys and the sea. A frantic band of artisans, boatmen, and peasants, mixed with public prostitutes, beggars, and thievish vagabonds, about three hundred in number, provided with clubs, axes, hammers, ladders, and cords, only few among them furnished with firearms and daggers, cast themselves, inspired with fanatical fury, into the villages and hamlets near St. Omer; burst the gates of such churches and cloisters as they find locked, overthrow the altars, dash to pieces the images of the saints and trample them under foot. Still more inflamed by this execrable deed, and reinforced by fresh accessions, they press forward straightway to Ypres, where they can count on a strong following of Calvinists. Unopposed they break into the cathedral; the walls are mounted with ladders, the pictures are beaten into fragments with hammers, the pulpits and pews hewn to pieces with axes, the altars stripped of their ornaments, and the sacred vessels stolen. This example is immediately followed in Menin, Comines, Verrich, Lille, and Oudenarde; the same fury in a few days seizes the whole of Flanders. At the very time when the first tidings of these events arrived, Antwerp was swarming with a crowd of homeless people, which the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin had brought together in that city. The presence of the Prince of Orange can scarcely keep within bounds the licentious band, who burn to imitate their brothers in St. Omer; but an order of the court which summons him in haste to Brussels, where the regentess is just convening her council of State in order to lay before them the royal letters, obliges him to abandon Antwerp to the wantonness of this band. His departure is the signal for tumult. From fear of the lawless violence of the mob, which manifested itself in derisive allusions in the very first days of the festival, the image of the Virgin, after having been carried about for a short time, was brought for safety to the choir, without being set up as formerly in the middle of the church. This incited some impudent boys of the common people to pay it a visit there, and scoffingly to inquire why it had recently absented itself in such haste? Others mounted the pulpit, where they mimicked the preacher and challenged the papists to contest.

A Catholic boatman, who was indignant at this jest, wished to pull them down from thence; and it came to blows in the preacher's seat. Similar scenes occurred the following evening. The numbers increased, and many came provided with suspicious implements and secret weapons. Finally it occurred to one of them to cry "Long live the Geuses!" Immediately the whole rabble took up the cry, and the Virgin was called upon to do the same. The few Catholics who were there, and who had given up the hope of effecting anything against these desperadoes, left the church after they had locked all the doors except one. As soon as they found themselves alone, it was proposed to sing one of the psalms according to the new melody, which was forbidden by the government. While they were yet singing, they all cast themselves with fury upon the image of the Virgin, piercing it through with swords and daggers, and striking off its head; prostitutes and thieves snatched the great wax-lights from the altars and lighted them to the work. The beautiful organ of the church a masterpiece of the art of that period-was broken in fragments; the paintings were defaced and the statues dashed to pieces. A crucified Christ of life size, which was set up between the two thieves opposite the high altar,—an old and highly prized work, was pulled to the ground with cords and cut to pieces with axes, while the two murderers at its side were respectfully spared. The holy wafers were strewed on the ground and trampled under foot; in the wine for the celebration of the Lord's Supper, which was accidentally found there, the health of the Geuses was drunk; with the holy oil they greased their shoes. Graves even were rummaged, and the half-decayed corpses taken out and trampled under foot. All this was done with as wonderful regularity as if the parts had been assigned to each one beforehand; every one worked into his neighbor's hands. Dangerous as this business was, no one met with any injury, notwithstanding the dense darkness, notwithstanding the heavy objects which fell around and near them, while many were scuffling on the highest steps of the ladders. Notwithstanding the many tapers which lighted them in their villainous doings, not a single individual was recognized. With incredible rapidity the deed was accomplished; in a few hours a hundred men, at most, despoiled a temple of seventy altars, and next to St. Peter's in Rome perhaps the largest and most magnificent in Christendom. Translation of E. P. Evans.

THE LAST INTERVIEW OF ORANGE WITH EGMONT From the History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands': date 1567

THE

HE warning of Orange came from a sad and dispirited heart; and for Egmont the world still smiled. To quit the lap of abundance, of affluence and splendor, in which he had grown up to youth and manhood, to part from all the thousand comforts of life which alone made it of value to him, and all this in order to escape an evil which his buoyant courage regarded as still far off,- no, that was not a sacrifice which could be asked from Egmont. But even had he been less self-indulgent than he was, with what heart could he have made a princess pampered by long prosperity — a loving wife and children, on whom his soul hung-acquainted with privations at which his own courage sank, which a sublime philosophy alone can exact from sensuality? "Thou wilt never persuade me, Orange," said Egmont, "to see things in this gloomy light in which they appear to thy mournful prudence. When I have succeeded in abolishing the public preachings, in chastising the iconoclasts, in crushing the rebels and restoring their former quiet to the provinces, what can the King have against me? The King is kind and just, and I have earned claims upon his gratitude; and I must not forget what I owe to myself." "Well then," exclaimed Orange with indignation and inner anguish, "risk the trust in this royal gratitude! But a mournful presentiment tells me- and may Heaven grant that I may be deceived!-thou wilt be the bridge, Egmont, over which the Spaniards will pass into the country, and which they will destroy when they have passed over it." He drew him, after he had said this, with ardor to himself, and clasped him fervently and firmly in his arms. Long, as though for the rest of his life, he kept his eyes fixed upon him and shed tears. They never saw each other again.

Translation of E. P. Evans.

THE

ON THE ESTHETIC EDUCATION OF MAN

Extract from Letter No. 9

HE artist, it is true, is the son of his age; but woe be to him if he is also its pupil, or even its favorite. Let a beneficent divinity snatch him betimes as a suckling from his mother's breast, nurse him with the milk of a better time, and

let him ripen to manhood beneath a distant Grecian sky. Then when he has attained his full growth, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not however to delight it by his presence, but terrible, like Agamemnon's son, to purify it. The subject-matter he will of course take from the present; but the form he will derive from a nobler time, or rather from beyond all time, from the absolute, unchangeable unity of his own being. Here, from the pure ether of his spiritual nature, flows down the fountain of beauty, uncontaminated by the corruption of generations and ages, which welter in turbid whirlpools far beneath it. The matter caprice can dishonor, as she has ennobled it; but the chaste form is withdrawn from her mutations. The Roman of the first century had long bent the knee before his emperors when the statues were still standing erect; the temples remained holy to the eye when the gods had long served as a laughing-stock, and the infamies of a Nero and a Commodus were put to shame by the noble style of the edifice which gave them its concealment. Man has lost his dignity, but art has saved it and preserved it in significant stones; truth lives on in fiction, and from the copy the original will be restored. As noble art survived noble nature, so too it goes before it in the inspiration that awakens and creates it. Before truth sends its conquering light into the depths of the heart, the poetic imagination catches its rays, and the summits of humanity begin to glow, while the damp night is still lying in the valleys. But how is the artist to guard himself against the corrup tions of his time, which encircle him on every side? By contempt for its judgments. Let him look upward to his dignity and the law of his nature, and not downward to his happiness and his wants. Free alike from the vain activity that would fain make its impress on the fleeting moment, and from the impatient spirit of enthusiasm that measures the meagre product of the time by the standard of absolute perfection, let him leave to common-sense, which is here at home, the sphere of the actual; but let him strive from the union of the possible with the necessary to bring forth the ideal. Let him imprint this in fiction and truth; let him imprint it in the play of his imagination and in the earnestness of his deeds; imprint it in all sensible and spiritual forms, and cast it silently into endless time.

Translation of E. P. Evans.

FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL

(1772-1829)

HE older Romantic school of Germany, which had its origin in the movement inaugurated by Herder and Goethe, found in Friedrich von Schlegel its first philosophical expounder. It is in this sense that historians refer to him as the founder of the new school. In the pages of the Athenæum, which from 1798 to 1800 was the official organ of the Romanticists, Schlegel published his Fragments.' In these he sought to

establish upon philosophic foundations a critical theory of romantic poetry.

In the later development of his critical genius he was obliged to retract much that he had promulgated in the 'Fragments'; but these writings formed a rallying-point for the young enthusiasts whose works ushered in the nineteenth century. Lacking creative power himself, Schlegel nevertheless exerted a fine and broadening influence upon his time. With comprehensive knowledge, philosophical insight, and deep intuitional judgment, he was able to put forth a body of literary criticism which has been aptly called "productive." His broad synthesis, based upon careful analysis, has given to his work a permanent inspirational value.

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F. VON SCHLEGEL

Friedrich von Schlegel was born in Hanover on March 10th, 1772. He came of a family of poets and distinguished men. His father, Johann Elias Schlegel, was the author of several tragedies in Alexandrines; and although he belonged to the periwig-pated age of Gottsched, he had called public attention to the beauties of Shakespeare. It was his son Wilhelm, the famous critic and poet, that furnished the classic and incomparable German versions of seventeen Shakespearean plays. Friedrich's two uncles, Johann Adolf and Johann Heinrich Schlegel, were, the former a well-known poet and pulpit orator, the latter royal historiographer of Denmark. Although Friedrich was reared among family traditions so entirely intellectual, he was, strangely enough, destined for a mercantile career; but the inherited tendencies proved too strong, and he joined his brother Wilhelm at Göttingen. There and at Leipzig he pursued the study

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