A Great Swiss Historian

...Reviewed by Milton Hindus Professor of literature, Brandeis University...

...He would have them take a course in the Book of the Bible which he respects the most...

...Richard Wagner was "the murderer of opera...

...To begin with, there is Burckhardt the model teacher...

...To communicate the value of the spiritual, Burckhardt was gifted with a quality of enthusiasm in the noblest sense...

...Burckhardt's accolade to Nietzsche ("a man of great gifts who possesses everything at first hand, and passes it on") would only occur to one who was worthy of the same praise...

...Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiastes is "at bottom pretty well godless...

...In church, people saying their prayers spit the whole time...

...It goes without saying that he was incomparably richer in genuine erudition than any of the others, for what he knew came from first-hand sources (the incisive impressions of his own sensibility) rather than from second-hand, third-hand or tenth- hand sources...

...To pass on to other matters, he is bleak and pessimistic in his general world outlook...

...In the contest between genuineness and journalism which he sees developing all around him, he seems to have no doubt that cheapness is bound to be triumphant...

...author of books on Proust and Celine Nietzsche referred to him as "our great teacher," and Lord Acton called his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy "the most instructive of all books on the Renaissance...

...It is no reflection upon Symonds, who is in every way an estimable writer, to say that he suffered by the inevitable comparison...

...Cassandra sounded hopeful by comparison...

...Those who hope to direct the movement with the help of their philosophy and keep it on the right lines seem to me completely idiotic...

...In the train...

...He bathes in a place full of ancient Roman associations, but while he appreciates the history "I am afraid I came out dirtier than I went in...

...Burckhardt was entirely out of tune with the age in which he lived and made no secret of this fact...

...The name of the Plague that was destined to ravage the world he identified as Democracy, though what he seems to have had in mind is less like what we mean by the term and more like what has been understood in our time under the absurd appellation "people's democracy...

...It is, in fact, difficult at times to distinguish the difference in him between real depth of perception and a kind of eccentric independence which is the pride of his profession...

...His indication of the aim of teaching has rarely been surpassed either in modesty or in ambition: "A teacher cannot hope to give much...

...In his disaffection with the present, he yokes together the most incongruous objects of his distaste...

...As for the future, that is to say the twentieth century, Burckhardt has achieved the reputation of a prophet, because it looked so desperate to him...

...The fact is, this cheerful and pleasant people is periodically transformed into a vast crowd of expectorating figures...

...And everywhere he goes he is conscious of Jews, especially rich Jews "furiously building palaces" which in his eyes are such execrable monstrosities that they stir him to satiric verse...

...for I want to help to save things, as far as my humble station allows...

...I counted the number of times a man smoking a Virginia spat: about fifty times...

...You don't know what a tyranny is going to be exercised on the spirit on the pretext that culture is the secret ally of capital, that must be destroyed...

...And again he says: "You none of you know as yet what the people are, and how easily they turn into a barbarian horde...

...It is curious to remember that it must have been precisely this quality that made him suspect to his drier colleagues...

...The easiest thing of all is to be liberal...

...And secondly he can awaken the conviction that thereis real happiness to be found in such things...

...It is from a phenomenon of this kind that Burckhardt wrings some of his more hilarious passages...

...He passed, of all things, for something of a dilettante, and he returned the contempt often enough on those whom he called for short the VV.EE., that is to say, the virieruditissimi, the learned "doctors . . . [who...

...and there's a wet or dry puddle under every priedieu...

...This enthusiasm shows in these letters as it does in his other writings and as it must have shown to the greatest advantage in his living lectures on art...

...There is no longer any question of vanitas vanitatutn...

...He advises a younger colleague to remain at a small university, not to move around from job to job (there seems to be a gypsy strain in the professorial class), and above all to stay away from the assemblies of the learned "where they go to sniff one another, like dogs...

...With such recommendations from his peers, the work of the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, aside from his acknowledged masterpiece which has long been standard, is slowly unfolding in the English language...

...The humor of these letters deserves quite special mention...

...This is clear from a number of passages: "The word freedom sounds rich and beautiful, but no one should talk about it who has not seen and experienced slavery under the loud- mouthed masses, called 'the people.' seen it with his own eyes, and endured civil unrest...

...It's a positive pleasure to see them yawn...

...Another place, where I once had the same feeling in the first days of May, is to the right of the Trevi fountainIn Rome, I felt the harmony of everyfaculty as I have never tasted it before, one or two lucky days in Bonn excepted...

...They are the Feuillants of the coming movement, and like the French Revolution it will develop like a natural phenomenon, involving everything that is hellish in human nature...

...Optimism for Burckhardt is the worst drug imaginable, and religion, which might historically have been expected to act as a bulwark against it, is made useless by the fact that for several centuries it has been conducting an affair with optimism...

...they see everything couleur de rose...

...He does not ever seem to be half-fearful that he may be unbending too much...

...Wagner himself could not have railed at the Jews more...

...We know by experience how, in places we are visiting for the first time, trifles are capable of striking us with tremendous force...

...and I was almost afraid some old crotte from the days of Caesar Augustus would come floating in through the opening, and my veneration for antiquity does not go to such lengths that I should have welcomed it...

...I know too much history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses but a future tyranny, which will mean the end of history...

...According to any criterion applied-felicity of illustratration, conciseness of expression, vividness of presentation,depth of thought-Burckhardt was the superior writer...

...There is nothing more wretched under the sun . . . than a government from under whose nose any club of political intriguers can steal executive power...

...We are simply reduced to contemplating such passages with the same wonder that the writer felt at the objects he describes...

...One of these spots is on the staircase of the Palazzo Farnese, on the first landing, so there was nothing special about the locality...

...nevertheless, he too was damned in Burckhardt's opinion for supplying pabulum to the tastes of nervous and unhealthy appetites...

...What Mosaics one seesin Ravenna, dear Urmau...

...The opulence of the materials here is something that can only be hinted at in a limited space...

...He could have written these sentences today and not been obliged to alter a single word...

...The worst sinners in this respect, however, are the liberals, socialists and communists, whom he more or less lumps together...

...but it was Goethe, I believe, who long ago pointed out that the brightest songs are those with the darkest background, and there is every evidence that his taste for Schopenhauer was no mere whim but absolutely central to our understanding of him...

...I do not want to experience those times, unless I am obliged to do so...

...He enjoys shocking the pietists of Basle with his lectures, and he looks forward to the coming winter when some of his statements will make "the hair on their heads stand up like quills, so that what was said may be fulfilled when I take my leave: And he went out and left a great stink behind him...

...The curb- stones, for example, may be a little steeper than what we are used to, and we fix our attention on this fact as if it were of the greatest importance...

...they are terribly dangerous because of their optimism, and the combination of a small mind and a huge mouth...

...Oh, he comments, "if only something of the preacher's way of thought could be got into the heads of our socialists...

...On this account alone, he must always be a hero to all sorts of malcontents with whom at bottom he has very little in common...

...But in the first place he can keep alive belief in the value of spiritual things...

...A long time ago, I first read The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy side by side with another well- known book on the same subject by John Addington Symonds...

...With this background, it is easier to understand how Burckhardt early proclaimed that he "had the courage to be conservative and not to give in...

...One of his pet peeves is journalism...

...One feels like quoting endlessly or putting down whatever one is doing and setting out to verify the reasons for such feelings on the spot...

...all hate one another like poison...

...The editor of these letters does not seem to believe in the reality of Burckhardt's pessimism, because he gives us so many evidences of happiness...

...The Germans define a professor as "a man of another opinion...

...the fact is...

...And so on, and so on...

...And in spite of all of his sincere modesty, even self deprecation, it is evident that Burckhardt was quite aware of his own superiority and what it stemmed from...

...One thing I do envy them: their beautiful teeth...

...It is an exhilarating task to evoke the personality and work of Rubens," is the way his last essay begins, and the same infectious feeling is present in his letter to Gottfried Kinkel in which he speaks of his Italian travels: "I could show you various spots in Rome, in the streets and in the gardens, where, for no special reason, the feeling suddenly came upon me that I was perfectly happy...

...His favorite among philosophers is Schopenhauer, whom he calls The Philosopher with the same simplicity with which the medieval churchman applied the title to Aristotle...

...The volume of letters under discussion represents another important step in the revelation of a most extraordinary mind and sensibility...

...I found a real echo of Rome in Ravenna, particularly when I visited the wonderful, lonely Basilica in Classe, that lies so beautifully and sadly on the edge of the great pine woods...

...One cannot even say that the sprinkle of exclamation points overstates the case...

...The same superiority is at work in these letters, where the form, moreover, permitting innumerable digressions into all the byways of thought, is congenial to Burckhardt's type of mind and nicely calculated to convey the best of his talent to us...

...It is a leitmotiv that recurs again and again in these letters...

...Art for him is a blessed islet of harmony and reason in a world otherwise lacking in both...

...It is the ever-present consciousness of dignity that ruins academic jokes...

...There is nothing heavy-handed about it...

...Your true professor, and there was no truer professor than Jacob Burckhardt in spite of everything, is naturaliter heterodox, and when he professes to be orthodox we should examine carefully the hypothesis that in the given circumstances orthodoxy represents the most daring of heterodoxies...

...The translation of the last phrase into Greek gives us the word heterodox...

...it was a sudden inner joy, independent of pleasure...

...He loves Italy, of course, "but there is one thing that is awful here: the perpetual spitting...