Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/107

VIII ] the Genoan nobles voting—"they are all in black with little mantles; flat noses and faces."

He conscientiously recorded statues and paintings, but art was for him, as for most of his century, at its best in lifelike and literal representation. Like all Northerners he was overcome by the splendor of marble in buildings and statues, and when, later in Holland, he had a chance to have an inlaid marble table made, with a comb, a pack of cards and a fan represented on it, he sent it home, causing much trouble for his family with the Swedish customs.

The arts which really moved Swedenborg, however, were music and the theater.

The Italy he knew was deeply sundered and corrupt, and France was on its way down a slippery slope, but the stately glitter of the Grand Monarque was still over Paris, its facades and colonnades laid out on a royal scale, the city framed by rounding hills that were green and windmill-crowned. Paris, to use the diary's favorite and almost only adjective, was "magnifique," but what the man of the world most admired in it was the theater. Swedenborg went often to the Comédie, and said, "It seems now brought to the greatest height it ever can reach." He was enthusiastic about the singing and dancing at the Opera, and had his favorites whose names he tried in vain to spell, but later when he saw in the Verona opera house how the Italians could sing and dance, he admitted that "in those respects, the French Opera seems but child's play."

His father, the late Bishop, had left no doubt as to how he felt about the theater; for him it was Satan's own workshop and going to it almost as great a sin as sabbath-breaking or the wearing of wigs that might be made of "whore-hair." Had he seen his son Emanuel attending the Comédie, undoubtedly in a well-curled wig, with a sword by his side, and wearing an embroidered coat with lace collar and cuffs, his words would have been pungent.

Emanuel was not being untrue to his convictions. He might be living in Paris at its most decadent, or in Venice when it had become Europe's illicit pleasure ground, but he did not condemn pleasure as such. On this he was to give an opinion many years later, after his travels had been extended to still another world. "I have met with many in the spiritual world," he wrote, "who in the natural