G. A. Bürger in der englischsprachigen Publizistik des 19. Jahrhunderts (eBook)

„Wie man denn dieser ganzen englischen Kunst begreiflich alles eher nachsagen kann als ein Mangel an Decenz, da sie im Gegentheil die Feigenblätter in ganzen Wäldern wachsen läßt, und aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach bis heute nicht erfahren hat wie ein Wäldchen aussieht. Es wäre denn in jener Mischung von Nebelglanz und Mondenschein in welcher Elmore unsere Bürger'sche Leonore in den Armen des gespenstischen Geliebten den Weg auf den Kirchhof hurrah, hopp, hopp unter lauter, sogar ziemlich decolletirten Gespenstern und Nixen und sonstigen nordisch mythologischen Damen, zurücklegen läßt. Das Gespenstische, traumhaft Phantastische, Schauerliche, ist indeß gerade gut genug breit und malerisch vorgetragen gegeben, um jeden Backfisch vor dem Schlafengehen gruseln zu machen.“

„MR. ELMORE has a beautiful girl carried away on a terrible black horse by a dead lover, the moral being that when a lover is dead he should be forgotten by a well-brought-up lady.”

„We have referred to Mr. Elmore's 'Leonore.' A second visit confirms our first impression of this picture in respect to the daring of the conception and the energy and completeness of the drawing. The maddened horse on which the heroine is borne off, the forms of women who hover in the way, are here as vividly depicted on canvas as in Scott's translation of Bürger, quoted in the catalogue.

'Tramp! Tramp! Along the land they rode;

Splash! Splash! Along the sea;

The surge is white, the spur is bright,

The flashing pebbles flee.'

The work has all the correctness, spirit, and force for which not dew of Mr. Elmore's pictures gave been remarkable.”

„'Lenore' (164), by A. Elmore, R. A., is open to the objection of confounding the distinction between poetry and painting. The awe-moving ballad of Bürger calls up phantoms which cannot be reduced to pictorial form. It is related that when this wild genius first read the poem to his friends they were terror-stricken:-

Graut Liebchen auch? Der Mond scheint hell!

Hurrah! die Todten reiten schnell!

Graut Liebchen auch vor Todten?

O weh! Lass ruhn die Todten.

The impetuous poet, it is said, suiting his action to the sentiment, accompanied the rehearsal of his stanzas with the cracking of a huntsman's whip; his hearers, it is added, shook with fear; the summons seemed to have come from the world of spirits. The ballad was no sooner published than it flow as lightning through the land, and was heard alike in palace and in cottage. We repeat that a picture comes flat after a legend which thus inflamed a people's fancy. Yet no one ought to regret that Mr. Elmore has painted this picture. He invests the thought in the shades of night, the idea is veiled in mystery, there is no light in heaven save the cold light of stars; the clouds transmute themselves into fearful forms, vultures fly across the sky, the air is peopled by spectres, the wild horse hurries the lovers to the abode of death:

Tramp! Tramp! along the land they rode,

Splash! Splash along the sea;

The surge is white, the spur is bright,

The flashing pebbles flee.

Siren-like forms float on the waves with spectral fire glistening in their eyes, and a hooded figure as a churchyard ghost bears an extinguished taper. Thus it will be understood that the composition is not wanting in accumulated horror. Neither does it lack the fascination of beauty; terror without beauty repels, while beauty without terror lacks grandeur. The action of the horse is bold und true. We were in Rome when the late Alfred Gatley was modelling his bas-relief, 'The Overthrow in the Red Sea,' and at the same time in Gibson's studio were on view 'Phaeton' and 'The Hours.' In these several works flying speed is given to horses in air and water, a feat by no means easy. Mr. Elmore is equally successfully; the dashing, splashing steed has fire without fury; the action, though high, has not the extravagance of the circus. The picture in imaginative range may be associated with 'Death on the Pale Horse,' also with the 'Four Riders of the Apocalypse' by Cornelius, and with the 'Battle of the Huns' by Kaulbach; compositions which severally, it must be confessed, are open to the charge we have already made, that the painter suffers loss when he invades territories already taken possession of by the poet. It may be urged, further, that this expressly German theme is injured by what may be termed Italian treatment. Mr. Elmore, in common with all the elder Academicians, holds himself aloof from the Gothic movement of recent years. Bürger's wild ballad would translate better into the weird art of Martin Schön than into Italian romance at the time of the decadence.”

„Mr. Elmore steps out of his ordinary track in an illustration of Scott's version of Burger's 'Lenore' (164), where Death, as the wild horseman-lover, bears her over sea and land. The conception and execution are vigorous; but the theme is of a kind that, in a pictorial translation, can hardly escape being melodramatic, unless through the medium of a more purely Teutonic fantasy than our English painter apparently possesses.”

„Exhibition of the Royal Academie

(164) 'Lenore.' In this work Mr. A. Elmore, R. A., has braced himself to a prodigious romantic effort. The result possibly may be caviare to the general; but the endeavour is not the less commendable and exemplary. Mr. Elmore and Mr. Poole are nearly the only professedly romantic painters of note we possess. It is sufficiently remarkable, that, although Sir Walter Scott made a vivid, but too loose, translation of Bürger's ghastly ballad, and that more recently a much more faithful version was executed by the late Mr. Albert Smith, 'Lenore' has never attained more than a very feeble grasp on the English mind. It is less known than Schiller's 'Song of the Bell,' less known than the 'Revenge of the Flowers.' It is certainly less known than 'There was a King in Thule,' or Mignon's song in 'Wilhelm Meister,' 'Know'st thou the land?' The reason may be that to the practical British intellect 'Lenore' has no raison d'être. What had Wilhelm the Dragoon done that he could not rest in his grave comfortably? He had never been false to Lenore. And why should that lorn maiden have been dragged out of her warm bed at daybreak, mounted behind a grisly trooper, and carried off on a hard-trotting horse to a burial-ground which, in the course of nature, she would not have visited for fifty years to come? She had never jilted Wilhelm. What was all the pother about? In 'Alonzo the Brave and the fair Imogene,' there is a definite story of faithlessness to be avenged and vengeance tobe exacted. The Dragoon in 'Lenore' seems to argue on the same principle as that adopted by the ghost of Giles Seroggina in his midnight colloquy with Molly Brown. He tells her that she must come with him 'unto the grave her love to cool.' 'Says she' - very pertinently - 'I am not dead, you fool! Says the ghost, says he, That aren't no rule. Right fol de riddle ril de rol.' There is absolutely 'no rule' why this cadaverous light-cavalry man should carry off Lenore to the cemetery; and indeed the whole poem seems to have been composed – after much beer und many pipes – by Bürger, first with the intent of introducing that marrow-freezing refrain of 'The Dead ride fast,' and next with affording the Herr Professor Moritz Retsch with an...