In Dresden
"In Dresden I was still much displeased."
"In Dresden I was still much displeased."
You know that a tendency to over-writing is hardly my hereditary sin, and so you, for your own sake, will readily forgive me if I tell you rather too little than too much. Had I meant to write a great deal, I might as well have stayed sitting in my armchair. So take these fragments in good part—for in the end, our whole life is made up of fragments.
In Dresden I was still much displeased, even at the last, that the streets and lanes are not yet marked at the corners for the convenience of visitors and strangers—a regulation that even small provincial towns, and even some in Poland, had thought of ten years ago. It would greatly ease the study of topography; and easier topography, in turn, eases business.
On my last afternoon there I went to see the Mengs(1) collection of plaster casts. Schnorr will tell you better than I how valuable it is, and Küttner, to my knowledge, has already done so most ably. You know that in such matters I am something of an idiot and dare not venture into the sanctuary of the goddess, though I have, about certain works of art—for instance, the Medicean Venus(2) — some thoughts of my own which no antiquary, with all his aesthetics, will easily drive out of me. I already look forward to the moment when I shall see the original in Palermo, where I believe it now stands.
Here I was most interested in a number of heads, which I took for the most part to be Roman. Küttner's(3) wish occurred to me—that the Elector(4) might, for the good of art, complete the collection more fully. The hours allowed for viewing are, besides, too limited; in summer it is open to the public only two days a week, and in winter not at all. Some of the regulations concerning art seemed to me quite absurd. No artist, for instance, is permitted to make a completely finished copy in the gallery, so I was told. That betrays a very petty jealousy. It would be no small honour for the Dresden school if copies of great masters were produced there that might be mistaken for the originals. Nor may any painter work above for more than the appointed two hours—a span in which almost nothing can be done in oil.
Yet the tribe of artists may at times carry its wilfulness to rudeness; and it is said that lately a well-known painter of our German fatherland wiped his brushes on one of the finest originals, to try his colours. I, though a layman, would have felt my stick twitching in my hand at that.
On my last evening I went to an opera, produced with considerable splendour. My memory is like a sieve, but I think it was The Duchess of Amalfi. The music, if I am not mistaken, was of a rather eclectic sort. There was not a single bad singer or actor in the performance—but, in my view, not a single excellent one either, much as people in Dresden insisted otherwise. The fault was probably mine, since in nearly every part I could not help recalling a better performer elsewhere.