And it was precisely the aspiration of
Carl himself. Those verses, coming to the boy's hand at the [124]
right moment, brought a beam of effectual day-light to a whole
magazine of observation, fancy, desire, stored up from the first
impressions of childhood. To bring Apollo with his lyre to Germany!
It was precisely that he, Carl, desired to do--was, as he might
flatter himself, actually doing.
The daylight, the Apolline aurora, which the young Duke Carl claimed
to be bringing to his candle-lit people, came in the somewhat
questionable form of the contemporary French ideal, in matters of art
and literature--French plays, French architecture, French looking-
glasses--Apollo in the dandified costume of Lewis the Fourteenth.
Only, confronting the essentially aged and decrepit graces of his
model with his own essentially youthful temper, he invigorated what
he borrowed; and with him an aspiration towards the classical ideal,
so often hollow and insincere, lost all its affectation. His doating
grandfather, the reigning Grand-duke, afforded readily enough, from
the great store of inherited wealth which would one day be the lad's,
the funds necessary for the completion of the vast unfinished
Residence, with "pavilions" (after the manner of the famous Mansard)
uniting its scattered parts; while a wonderful flowerage of
architectural fancy, with broken attic roofs, passed over and beyond
the earlier fabric; the later and lighter forms being in part carved
adroitly out of the [125] heavy masses of the old, honest, "stump
Gothic" tracery.
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