On the Cross: A Romance of the Passion Play at Oberammergau
consecrated, the plague passed them by, Ammergau alone was spared.
So the pious seed grew slowly, often with periods when it stood still,
but the watchful eye can follow it in history.
Peace at last came to the world. Purer airs blew. The Egyptian hyena,
satiated, left the ravaged fields, new life bloomed from the graves,
and this new life knew naught of the pangs and sufferings of the old.
From the brutality and corruption of the long war, the new generation
longed for more refined manners, culture, and the pleasures of life.
But, as usual after such periods of deprivation and calamity, one
extreme followed another. The desire for more refined manners and
education led to hyperculture, the love of pleasure into epicureanism
and luxury, grace into coquetry, mirth into frivolity. Then came the
so-called age of gallantry. The foil took the place of the sword, the
lace jabot of the leather jerkin, the smoke of battle gave way to the
clouds of powder scattered by heads nodding in every direction.
Masked shepherds and shepherdesses danced upon the graves of a former
generation, a new Arcadia was created in apish imitation and peopled
with grimacing creatures who tripped about on tiptoe in their
high-heeled shoes. Instead of the mediaeval representations of martyrs
and emaciated saints appeared the nude gods and cupids of a Watteau and
his school. Grace took the place of majesty. Instead of moral law, men
followed the easy code of convenience and everything was allowable
which did not transgress its rules. Thus arose a generation of
thoughtless pleasure seekers, which bore within itself a moral
pestilence that, in contrast with the "Black Death," might be termed
the "Rosy Death" for it breathed upon the cheeks of all whom it
attacked the rosy flush of a fever which wasted more slowly, but none
the less surely.
And through this rouged, dancing, skipping age, with the click of its
high-heeled shoes, its rustling hooped petticoats, its amorous glances
and heaving bosoms, the chaste figure of the Man of Sorrows, with a
terrible solemnity upon his pallid brow, again and again trod the stage
of Ammergau, and whoever beheld Him dropped the flowing bowl of
pleasure, while the laugh died on his lips.
Again history and the judgment of the world moved forward. The "Rosy
Death" had decomposed and poisoned all the healthful juices of society
and corrupted the very heart of the human race--morality, faith, and
philosophy, everything which makes men manly, had gradually perished
unobserved in the thoughtless whirl. The tinsel and apish civilisation
no longer sufficed to conceal the brute in human nature. It shook off
every veil and stood forth in all its nakedness. The modern deluge, the
French Revolution burst forth. Murder, anarchy, the delirium of fever
swept over the earth in every form of horror.
Again came a change, a transformation to the lowest depths of
corruption. Grace now yielded to brutality, beauty to ugliness, the
divine to the cynical. Altars were overthrown, religion was abjured,
the earth trembled under the mass of destroyed traditions.
But from the turmoil of the throng, fiercely rending one another, from
the smoke and exhalations of this conflagration of the world, yonder in
the German Garden of Gethsemane again rose victoriously, like a
Ph[oe]nix from its ashes, the denied, rejected God, and the undefiled
sun of Ammergau wove a halo of glory around the sublime figure which
hung high on the cross.
It was a quiet, victory, of which the frantic mob were ignorant; for
they saw only the foe confronting them, not the one battling above. The
latter was vanquished long ago, He was deposed, and that settled the
matter. The people in their sovereignty can depose and set up gods at
pleasure, and when once dethroned, they no longer exist; they are
hurled into Tartarus. And as men can not do without a god, they create
an idol.
The country groaned beneath the iron stride of the Emperor and, without
wishing or knowing it, he became the avenger of the God in whose place
he stood. For, as the Thirty Years War ended under the scourge of the
pestilence, and the age of mirth and gallantry under the lash of
the Revolution, the Revolution yielded to the third scourge, the
self-created idol!
He, the man with compressed lips and brow sombre with thought, ruled
the unchained elements, became lord of the anarchy, and dictated laws
to a universe. But with iron finger he tore open the veins of humanity
to mark upon the race the brand of slavery. The world bled from a
thousand wounds, and upon each he marked the name "Napoleon."
Then, wan as the moon floats in the sky when the glow of the setting
sun is blazing in the horizon, the sovereign of the world in his bloody
splendor confronted the pallid shadow of the Crucified One, also robed
in a royal mantle, still wet with the blood He had voluntarily shed.
They gazed silently at each other--but the usurper turned pale.
At last, at the moment he imagined himself most like Him, God hurled
the rival god into the deepest misery and disgrace. The enemy of the
world was conquered, and popular hatred, so long repressed, at last
freed from the unbearable restraint, poured forth upon the lonely grave
at St. Helena its foam of execration and curses. Then the conqueror in
Oberammergau extended His arms in pardon, saying to him also: "Verily I
say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise."
A time of peace now dawned, the century of _thought_. After the great
exertions of the war of liberation, a truce in political life followed,
and the nations used it to make up for what they had lost in the
development of civilization during the period of political strife. A
flood of ideas inundated the world. All talent, rejoicing in the mental
activity which had so long lain dormant, was astir. There was rivalry
and conflict for the prize in every department. The rising generation,
conscious of newly awakening powers, dared enterprise after enterprise
and with each waxed greater. With increasing production, the power of
assimilation also increased. Everything grand created in other
centuries was drawn into the circle of their own nation as if just
discovered. That for which the enlightened minds of earlier days had
vainly toiled, striven, bled, now bloomed in luxuriant harvests, and
the century erected monuments to those who had been misjudged and
adorned them with the harvest garland garnered from the seeds which
they had sowed in tears.
What Galvani and Salomon de Caeus, misunderstood and unheard, had
planned, now made their triumphal passage across the earth as a panting
steam engine or a flashing messenger of light, borne by and bearing
ideas.
The century which produced a Schiller and a Goethe first understood a
Shakespeare, Sophocles and Euripides rose from the graves where they
had lain more than a thousand years, archaeology brought the buried
world of Homer from beneath the earth, a Canova, a Thorwaldsen, a
Cornelius, Kaulbach, and all the great masters of the Renaissance of
our time, took up the brushes and chisels of Phidias, Michael Angelo,
Raphael, and Rubens, which had so long lain idle. What Aristotle had
taught a thousand, and Winckelmann and Lessing a hundred years before,
the knowledge of the laws of art, the appreciation of the beautiful,
was no longer mere dead capital in the hands of learned men, but
circulated in the throbbing veins of a vigorously developing
civilization; it demanded and obtained the highest goal.
The circle between the old and the new civilization has closed, every
chasm has been bridged. There is an alternate action of old and new
forces, a common labor of all the nations and the ages, as if there was
no longer any division of time and space, as if there was but one
eternal art, one eternal science. Ascending humanity has trodden matter
under foot, conquered science, made manufactures useful, and
transfigured art.
But this light which has so suddenly flamed through the world also
casts its shadows. Progress in art and science matures the judgment,
but judgment becomes criticism and criticism negation. The dualism
which permeates all creation, the creative and the destructive power,
the principle of affirmation and of denial, cannot be shut out even
now, but must continue the old contest which has never yet been
decided. Critical analysis opposes faith, materialism wars against
idealism, pessimism contends with optimism. The human race has reached
the outermost limit of knowledge, but this does not content it in its
victorious career, it wishes to break through and discover _the God_
concealed behind. Even the heart of a God must not escape the scalpel
which nothing withstood. But the barrier is impenetrable. And one
party, weary of the fruitless toil, pulls back the aspiring ones.
"Down to matter, whence you came. What are you seeking? Science has
attained the highest goal, she has discovered the protoplasm whence all
organism proceeded. What is the Creator of modern times? A
physiological--chemical, vital function within the substance of a cell.
Will ye pray to this, suffer for this, ye fools?"
Others turn in loathing from this cynical interpretation of scientific
results and throw themselves into the arms of beauty, seeking in it the
divinity, and others still wait, battling between earth and heaven, in
the dim belief of being nearest to the goal.
It is a tremendous struggle, as though the earth must burst under the
enormous pressure of power demanding room, irreconcilable contrasts.
Then amid the heat of the lecture rooms, the throng of students of art
and science, comes a long-forgotten voice from the days of our
childhood! And the straining eyes suddenly turn from the teachers and
the dissecting tables, from the glittering visions of art and the
material world to the stage of Oberammergau and the Passion Play.
There stands the unassuming figure with the crown of thorns and the
sorrowful, questioning gaze. And with one accord their hearts rush to
meet Him and, as the son who has grown rich in foreign lands, after
having eaten and enjoyed everything, longs to return to the poverty of
his home and falls repentantly at the feet of his forsaken father, the
human race, in the midst of this intoxication of knowledge and
pleasure, sinks sobbing before the pale flower of Christianity and
longingly extends its arms toward the rude wooden cross on which it
blooms!
That powerful thinker, Max Mueller, says in his comparative study of
religions:[1] "When do we feel the blessings of our country more warmly
and truly than when we return from abroad? It is the same with regard
to religion." That fact is apparent here! It is an indisputable verity
that, at the precise period when art and science have attained their
highest stages of development, the Oberammergau Passion Play enjoys a
degree of appreciation never bestowed before, that during this critical
age, from decade to decade, people flock to the Passion Play in ever
increasing throngs. Not only the uncultivated and ignorant, nay, the
most cultured--artists and scholars, statesmen and monarchs. The poor
village no longer has room to shelter all its guests; it is positively
startling to see the flood of human beings pour in on the evening
before the commencement of the play, stifling, inundating everything.
And then it is marvellous to notice how quiet it is on the morning of
the play, as it flows into the bare room called the theatre, how it
seems as it were to grow calm, as if every storm within or without was
subdued under the influence of those simple words, now more than two
thousand years old. How wonderful it is to watch the people fairly
holding their breath to listen to the simple drama for seven long hours