Chapter XIV: The Revolution of the German Colourists (2)

With these capacities Makart was scenical painter _par excellence_. His Abundantia pictures in the Munich Pinakothek and the ceiling-pieces of the Palais Tumba in Vienna are among his best creations. There lives in them something of the Olympian blitheness of the ancients, of that easy joyousness which since Tiepolo seemed to have been buried in melancholy reflection and constrained brooding. They fulfil their purpose, as an invitation to the enjoyment of life, precisely because they carry no intrinsic thought to burden the sensuous display. Moreover, the unctuous and gorgeous colouring, with the animated contrasts of warm brown and light blue, mediated by the deep, glowing Makart red, corresponds to the mood they have been designed to awaken--one which called forth the joy of life, luxuriant, full-blooded, and foaming over. The great, fiery red flower, which sprouts out of the ground at the feet of the nymph in "Spring," was the last thing touched by Makart's brush, the last flare of the marvellous colour-demon by which he was possessed.

Was _possessed_! For Makart's whole artistic endeavour had something unconscious. One might say in a variant reading from Lessing: "If Makart had been born without a brain he would nevertheless have been a great painter." It is as if one who lies buried in Antwerp had once more felt the instinct of production, and let himself down into the great head of the little Salzburger; and the head, being a somewhat imperfect medium, only stammered out the intentions of the sublime master. There is something remarkable in the career of this son of the poor servant, on whom fortune showered with full hands all it had to offer a child of the nineteenth century, and who in the midst of his splendour in Vienna remained always the same harmless child of nature that he had been in Munich, when, after receiving his first hundred florins, he drove in a cab the two steps from Oberpollinger to the Academy.

One must take him as he is--a product of nature. Makart was a scene painter, and that not in his scenical pictures only; but he was an inspired scene painter, of an enviable facility, who poured forth in play what others fabricate with pains. His merit it is to have announced to the Germans afresh, in an overwhelming style, that revelation of colour which had been forgotten since the Venetians and Rubens. He has not advanced the history of art, as such. What he gave had been given better before. But the history of German art in the nineteenth century has to honour in him the most perfect representative of the period in which colour-blindness was succeeded by exuberance of colour, and the cartoon style by the delight in painting.

Beside Makart, the child of nature, _Gabriel Max's_ seems a calculating, tormented, unhealthy talent. In the manner in which Makart did his work there lay a certain elementary, logical necessity; in Max there is a great deal of speculation and over-refinement. Makart's home was the town on the lagoons. Max is by education and temperament a disciple of Piloty--that is to say, a painter of disasters; by birth he was a Bohemian. And that resulted in his case in a very interesting mixture. When he exhibited his first pictures it was as if one heard a refined music after the tom-tom of Piloty. In his "Martyr on the Cross," which appeared in the spring of 1867 in the Munich Kunstverein, he first struck that bitter-sweet, half-torturing, half-ensnaring tone in which he afterwards continued to sound. It is dawn; a soft grey light rests, beaming mildly, over the lonely Campagna. Here stands a cross on which a girl-martyr has ended her struggles. A young Roman coming home from a feast is so thrilled by the heavenly peace in the expression of the unhappy girl's face that he lays a crown of roses at the foot of the cross, and becomes a convert to the faith for which she has suffered. The mysterious mortuary sentiment in the subject is strengthened by the almost ghostly pallor of the colouring. Everything was harmonised in white, except that one dark lock, falling across the pale forehead with great boldness, sounded like a shrill dissonance in the soft harmony, like a wild scream; it had come there apparently quite by chance, but was nevertheless calculated to a hair's breadth. The terribly touching vision of the martyr aroused in every visitor to the Kunstverein a shudder of delight. It was even a fine variation, and one which invited pity, that the victim should not have been a hero, as in conventional catastrophes, but a soft and sweet girl, made for love and never for the cross. And it was the more absorbing, too, because it was impossible to say whether the young Roman was looking up to the beautiful woman with the desecrating sensuality of a _décadent_ or with the fervid ecstasy of a convert. The same horrified fascination was wakened again and again in the presence of the later pictures of the painter. Almost every one contained a scene of martyrdom, in which the tormented and sinking heroine was a helpless child or a weak and defenceless woman. The passion for tragic subjects brought into full swing by the historical painters was directed in Max against the purest and tenderest, the most chaste and the most lovely. The type was always the same, with its Bohemian nose and one eye larger than the other, by which was attained a curiously visionary or hysterically enthusiastic expression. And the pictorial treatment corresponded to it: there was always a flesh-tint of poignant mortal pallor, a white clinging drapery, a black veil, a light grey background, all harmonised in one very delicate chord.

Goethe's Gretchen made the beginning. In the Zwinger she lifted up her eyes in frightened anguish to the countenance of the Madonna. She sat in her cell, her face altered by madness and lit up with a wild laughter, and in a reverie passed her hand through Faust's locks. Or as a phantom she wandered in the Walpurgis night, in her long, flowing shroud, with a blood-red stripe round her throat. This picture, exhibited with electric light, was especially effective. Max had brought into the earnest corpse-like eyes an expression that was terribly demoniacal, and had been attained to the same degree by no earlier illustrator of _Faust_. A raven, pecking at the lost ring, was her ghostly escort.

Max showed great invention in hitting upon such things. Bürger's _Pfarrertochter von Taubenhain_ gave him the material for his "Child-murderess"--a young girl who, by the bank of a lonely pool, overgrown with reeds, stabs her child to the heart with a needle, and in a sudden rush of maternal love presses a kiss on the stiff little body before committing it to the water. Here the sombre, disconsolate character of the landscape accorded finely with the action, and the pale body of the child made an exceedingly bright, pungent spot of colour on the dark-green rushes. "The Lion's Bride" illustrated Chamisso's ballad of the jealous lion who killed his mistress before her wedding, because he would not give her over to another. Majestically he lies behind her, with one paw on the arm of the slain, and the other struck into her thigh. The stones of the floor are reddened with her blood. But far more frequently than blood Max employed the tints of corruption, the true _nature morte_. In its colour-values and subtle shades the dead human body, just at the point where corruption begins, was better suited to the painter's pallid scale of colour than the light and brutally effective red of freshly poured-out blood. Among these paintings of mortification must be reckoned "Ahasuerus by the Body of a Child" and "The Anatomist"; the latter meditatively regards at the dissecting-table the corpse, covered with white linen, of a young girl who has committed suicide. In his "Raising of Jairus's Daughter" the effect of mortification was most cleverly heightened by a small detail, which made an extraordinary impression: this was a fly on the naked arm of the girl, put there to remind the spectator of the unconsciousness of the body.

MAX. A NUN IN THE CLOISTER GARDEN.]

The secrets of death are always certain of their effect on the nerves; but by means of the broken hearts of women, with annihilated hopes and agonised hysterical sufferings, he succeeded again in calling forth a bitter-sweet sympathy. "Mary Magdalene" and "The Maid of Orleans" were the masterpieces of this group. The underlying idea of the picture "Light" is that a blind young Christian girl, at the portal of the Roman catacombs, offers lamps to the entering Christians for the illumination of their dark way. The blind woman as the giver of light! Even in his youth, with cruel irony, he had had sung by a blind quartet the song, "_Du hast die schönsten Augen_." A touch of Delaroche is in the other young martyr, who, between the bloodthirsty beasts of the Roman circus, looks up amazed to the rows of spectators, from the midst of which a young Roman has flung her a rose as a last greeting. In the next moment she will be lying on the earth torn to shreds by the beasts.

As he succeeded here in giving a presentiment of the horrible, so in another group of pictures Max attained a yet more demoniacal charm by the ghostly. He had early made himself familiar with Schopenhauer and Buddha and the Indian fakirs; the mystical and spiritualistic movement had just at that time been set going by the writings of Carl Du Prels. Justinus Kerner and the prophetess of Prevorst were the order of the day. Max became the painter of hypnotism and spiritualism. "The Spirit's Greeting" made a special sensation: the young girl at the piano, in this picture, is interrupted in her playing by the touch of a materialised ghostly hand, which stretches towards her from a soft cloudy mist. The mixture of horror, joy, devotion, and ecstasy in the face of the young player was very effective. In order to render effects of the kind he made extensive studies from the hypnotised model, and in this way he sometimes reached an extraordinary intensity of expression. He took a decided position with regard to another question which at the time was very acute--vivisection. This he did in the picture of the man of science from whom an allegorical female figure, "The Genius of Pity," takes away a little dog doomed to be dissected, showing by a pair of scales that the human heart has more weight than the human understanding.

All this goes to show that Max is the opposite of artless. He knows how to calculate an effect on the nerves with extreme subtlety, and most skilfully at times to give his pictures the attraction of the freshly printed newspaper. He appeals to compassion rather than imagination. He would set the heart beating violently. He triumphs generally by his subjects, and his effects are much purer in those few works in which he renounces the piquant adjunct of the demoniacal, the tragical, and the mystical, and becomes merely a painter. Amongst those works is to be reckoned that beautiful "Madonna" on the altar, painted in 1886, and so tenderly illustrating the verses of Heine--

"Und wer eine Wachshand opfert,
Dem heilt an der Hand die Wund,
Und wer ein Wachsherz opfert,
Dem wird das Herz gesund."

And so too does that charming "Spring Tale" of 1873, which breathes only of gaiety, happiness, and peace; a young girl sits under the blossoming bushes, and listens enraptured to the warbling of a nightingale.

MAX. THE LION'S BRIDE.]

Those pictures, the "mood" of which grows out of the landscape around--"The Nun in the Cloister Garden," "Adagio," "The Spring Tale," and "Autumn Dance"--give Max a very high and peculiar place in the work of his period. He appears in them as a tender poet who expresses his emotions through a pictorial medium; as an adorer of nature of a soft melancholy and subtle delicacy, which are to be found in like manner only in the works of the Englishmen Frederick Walker, George Mason, and George H. Boughton. Nature sings a hymn to the soul of the painter, and through his figures it is breathed forth in low, vibrating cadences. A tender landscape of earliest spring gave the ground-tone to his charming picture "Adagio." Young trees with trembling stems raise their slender crowns into the pale blue sky flecked with clouds. As yet the branches are almost naked; only here and there appears the embroidery of fresh yellowish green. And in this soft, tender nature which shyly reveals itself as with a slight shudder after its long winter sleep, there are seated two beings: a boy and his young mother--she looks almost a child--dreamily meditating. Their eyes look strangely into vacancy, as though their thoughts are wandering. Nature works on them, and a melancholy _Warte nur balde_ runs through their souls. A spring landscape of blissful gaiety, where nightingales warble, butterflies sip at the flowers, and sunbeams play coquettishly round the budding rosebushes, is the Setting of the "Spring Tale." Everything laughs and rejoices, shines and scents the air in the early sunlight. Pearls of dew sparkle on the meadows, gnats hum and leaves murmur. She thinks of him. All the joy of a first love-dream sets her heart quivering with a delicious tremor. In her heart as in nature it is spring. Yet even as a landscape painter Max generally has that tender, suffering trait which runs through his creative work elsewhere. Twilight, autumn, pale sky and dead leaves have made the deepest impression on his spirit. Thin, half-stunted trees, in the leaves of which the evening wind is playing, grow upon an undulating, poverty-stricken soil. The landscape spreads around with a kind of lyrical melancholy: a region which gives no exuberant assurance of being beautiful, but which, in its poverty, attunes the mind to melancholy; a region, however, which knows not of storms and loneliness, but is the peaceful dwelling of quiet and resigned men. These beings belong to no age; their costume is not modern, but neither is it taken from any earlier period. They do not act and they tell no story; they dream their time away meditatively and gravely. Max has divested them of everything fleshly and vulgar, so that only a shadow of them remains, a soul that vibrates in exquisite, dying, elusive chords. "The Autumn Dance" is such an unearthly picture, and one of indefinable magic. Children and women are dancing, yet one feels them to be religious dreamers whom a melancholy world-weariness and a yearning after the mystical have drawn together to this secret and sequestered corner of the earth. The pale, transparent air, the tender tints of the dresses, delicate as fading flowers, the flesh tint giving the figures something ghostly and ethereal--it all strikes a note at once blythe and sentimental, happy and sad. "The Nun in the Cloister Garden" is in point of landscape one of his finest productions. In the cloister garden, despite the budding spring, there reigns a disconsolate dreariness. On the thin grass sits a young nun, who follows dreamily the gay fluttering of two butterflies, which flit around at her feet. A black dress, harshly and abruptly crossed by a white cape, envelops the youthfully delicate form. The dying sapling on which she is leaning bends helplessly against the stubborn paling to which it is fastened with iron clamps. The weather-stained wall stretches along in a dreary monotonous grey. An old sundial relentlessly indicates the slow dragging hours. But the deep blue heaven, in which a pair of larks poise exulting, looks in across the wall, from which a scrubby growth climbs shivering in the breeze.

MAX. LIGHT.]

In such pictures, too, Max has a morbid inclination to a mystical delicacy of sentiment. He gives what is real an exquisite subtlety which transplants it into the world of dreams, and his tender sense of pain perhaps appeals only to spirits of an æsthetic temper. He is the antithesis of robust health; and yet there lies in the excess of nervous sensibility--in the pathological trait in his art--precisely the quality which inspires the characteristic delicacy of his earlier works. Here is no pupil of Piloty, but our contemporary. In their anæmic colour his pictures have the effect of a song of high, fine-drawn, and tremulous violin tones, at once dulcet and painful. With their refinement and polish, their subtle taste and intimate emotion, so wonderfully mingled, they reach the music of painting. They paint the invisible, they revel in dreams. In a period which played only _fortissimo_, and was at pains to drum on all the senses at once with a distorting passion, Max was, next to Feuerbach, the first who prescribed for his compositions _dolce_, _adagio_, and _mezza voce_; who sought for the refined, subdued emotions in place of the _emotions fortes_.

MAX. THE SPIRIT'S GREETING.]

MAX. ADAGIO.]

These pictures, the more subdued the better, make him the forerunner of the most modern artists, and assure his name immortality much more certainly than the great figure resting on an historical or literary basis. Their delicate black, green, and white simplicity has a nobleness of colouring which stands quite alone in the German painting of the century, and this, together with their refined musical sentiment, is probably to be set rather to the account of his Bohemian blood than of his Munich training. And whilst in the heads of his figures elsewhere a certain monotonous vacuity disturbs one's pleasure, he appears here as a psychic painter of the highest mark; one who analysed with the most subtle delicacy all the fleeting _nuances_--so hard to catch--of melancholy, silent resignation, yearning, and hopelessness. Only the figures of the English new pre-Raphaelites have the same sad-looking, dove-like eyes, the same spiritual lips, tremulous as though from weeping. There must have been a divine moment in his existence when he first filled the loveliest form with the expression of the holiest suffering, the sweetest reverie, the deepest devotion, and the most rapt ecstasy. And if later, when people could not weary of this expression, he took to producing it without real feeling and by purely stereotyped means, that is, at any rate, a weakness of temperament which he shares with others.

Gabriel Max is an individuality, not of the first rank indeed, but he is one; and there are not many painters of the nineteenth century of whom that can be said. He has often underlined too heavily, printed too much in italics, and done more homage to crude than to fine taste. But he has, in advance of his contemporaries, in whose works the good was so seldom new, the priceless virtue that he always gave something new, if not something good. His art was without ancestry, an entirely personal art; something which no one had before Max, and which after him few will produce again. A province which had not yet been trodden, the province of the enigmatic and ghostly, was opened up by him; he set foot in it because he is a philosophic brooder, fascinated by the magic of the uncanny. His studio is like a chapel in which a mysterious service for the dead is being held, or the chamber of an anatomist, rather than the workroom of a painter. The investigation of dead birds occupied him after his Prague days just as much as the sounding of the life of the human spirit. He lived at the time with his parents in an old, ghostly house, and roamed about a great deal in the picture gallery of the Strahow foundation; and here in lonely nights and mysterious picture-rooms there arose that grave and sombre spirit which runs through his work. As a child at the death of his father he had his first "vision." His earliest picture, which he finished while at the Prague Academy, and sold afterwards to the Art Union there for ninety florins, showed that he had begun to move on his later course: "Richard the Lion-heart steps to the Corpse of his Father and it bleeds." He was thus inwardly ripe when, in 1863, he came to Piloty in Munich, and, equipped with the technique of the latter, refined in so delicate a manner on the traditional painting of disasters. And if a conscious design on the nerves of the multitude frequently entered into his work, it was, as a rule, veiled by captivating beauty and excellence of painting. His older good pictures fascinate the most jaded eye by their remarkably tender sentiment, and the mystical spirituality of his soft and lovely girlish heads has been reached by few in his century. He is at the same time a colourist of complete individuality, who made pigments the subtilised and ductile means of expression for his visionary moods of soul. He has brought into the world a numerous stock of works prepared for the market; and he has not disdained to paint glorified wonders of the fair, like the Christ's head upon the handkerchief of Veronica, whose eyes seem to be closed by their lids and are looking out at the same time wide open. But much as he sinned, he always remained an artist. A curious, interesting, characteristic mind, one of the few who ventured even forty years ago to give themselves out as children of their time, in the firmament of German, and indeed of European art, he appears as a star shining by its own and not by borrowed light, as one whose incommensurable magnitude it is that his talent cannot be compared with any other. That is what gives him his artistic importance.

MAX. A WINTER'S TALE.]

All the less room can be claimed by the many who, likewise following in their subject-matter the lines of Piloty, get no further than the traditional catastrophe. Not Munich only, but all Germany, lay for more than a decade after the middle of the century under the shadow of historical painting, which here, as in other countries, came as the logical product of an unhappy time, dissatisfied with its own existence when Germany was merely a geographical expression, and in the pitiable misery of that age of state-confederations, dreamt of a better future at singing contests, athletic tournaments, and rifle meetings. The more poverty-stricken the time was in real action, the more vehement was the desire to read of action in books or to see it on canvas; and in this respect historical painting rendered at that time important political services, which are to be acknowledged with gratitude; just as the historical drama, the historical ballad and the historical novel were, all and several, means for the expression of the deep-seated longing of a backward people for political labours, for deeds and for fame.

But the artistic yield was not greater than elsewhere.

When the learned in the thirties laid it down in doctrinaire fashion that, with the destruction of religious fervour begun by science, the old traditionary sacred painting would fall away of itself and the painting of profane history take its place, they overlooked from the very beginning the fact that, so long as the much discussed worship of genius had not actually become a reality the painting of history had to fight against insuperable obstacles. What constitutes the prime condition of all art--that its contents must be some fact vivid in consciousness--should, at any rate, determine its limitations, and ought to have confined the historical picture to the nearest universally known subjects. And what happened was just the contrary.

When Delaroche had skimmed the cream, his successors were forced to search in the great martyr book of history for events which were more and more unknown and indifferent. Piloty took from ancient history "The Death of Alexander the Great," "The Death of Cæsar," "Nero at the Burning of Rome," and "The Triumphal Progress of Germanicus"; and from mediæval history, "Galileo in his Prison observing the Periodic Return of a Solar Ray," and "Columbus sighting Land"; from the history of the Thirty Years' War, "The Foundation of the Catholic League by Duke Maximilian of Bavaria," "Seni before the Body of Wallenstein" (the morning before the battle at the White Mountain, Seni has come to carry away Wallenstein's body), "Wallenstein on the way to Eger," and "The News of the Battle at the White Mountain"; from English history, "The Death Sentence of Mary Stuart"; and from French history, "The Girondists on their Way to the Scaffold."

After these pictures were painted and had had their success the turn came, in the years immediately following, for subjects growing steadily more and more dreary. And as Goethe held the historical to be "the most ungrateful and dangerous field," so it now appeared as though laurels were to be gathered there only. From the political dismemberment of the present, German artists were glad to seek refuge as far back as possible in the past, and they flung themselves on the new province with such fiery zeal that, after a few decades, there was a really appalling number of historical pictures, illustrating every page of Schlosser's great history of the world. _Max Adamo_ painted "The Netherlandish Nobles before the Tribunal of Alva," "The Fall of Robespierre in the National Convention," "The Prince of Orange's Last Conversation with Egmont," "Charles I meeting Cromwell at Childerley," "The Dissolution of the Long Parliament," and "Charles I receiving the Visit of his Children at Maidenhead"; _Julius Benczur_: "The Departure of Ladislaus Hunyadi," and "The Baptism of Vajk," afterwards King Stephen the Holy of Hungary; _Josef Fluggen_: "The Flight of the Landgravine Elizabeth," "Milton dictating Paradise Lost," and "The Landgravine Margarethe taking leave of her Children"; by _Carl Gustav Hellquist_ there were "The Death of the wounded Sten Sture after the Battle of Bogesund in the Mälarsee," "The Embarkment of the Body of Gustavus Adolphus," and the forced contribution of "Wisby and Huss going to the Stake." _Ernst Hildebrand_ had the Electress of Brandenburg secretly taking the sacrament in both kinds, and Tullia driving over the corpse of her father; _Frank Kirchbach_ displayed "Duke Christopher the Warrior"; _Ludwig von Langenmantel_: "The Arrest of the French Chemist Lavoisier under the Reign of Terror," and "Savonarola's Sermon against the Luxury of the Florentines"; _Emanuel Leutze_: a "Columbus before the Council of Salamanca," "Raleigh's Departure," "Cromwell's Visit to Milton," "The Battle of Monmouth," and "The Last Festival of Charles I"; _Alexander Liezenmayer_: "The Coronation of Charles Durazzo in Stuhlweissenburg," and "The Canonisation of the Landgravine Elizabeth of Thüringen"; _Wilhelm Lindenschmit_: "Duke Alva at the Countess of Rudolstadt's," "Francis I at Pavia," "The Death of Franz Von Sickingen," "Knox and the Scottish Image-breakers," "The Assassination of William of Orange," "Walter Raleigh visited in his Cell by his Family," "Luther before Cardinal Cajetan," "Anne Boleyn giving her Child Elizabeth to the care of Matthew Parker," and "The Entrance of Alaric into Rome"; _Alexander Wagner_: "The Departure of Isabella Zapolya from Siebenbürgen," "The Entry into Aschaffenburg of Gustavus Adolphus," "The Wedding of Otto of Bavaria," "The Death of Titus Dugowich," "Matthias Corvinus with his Hunting Train," and many more of the same description.

MAX. MADONNA.]

Was it at all possible to make works of art out of such material? Perhaps it was. The real artist can do anything. What he touches becomes gold, for he has the hand of Midas. But just as certain it is that the "historical painting," carried on by a joint-stock company, almost never got any further than stage pathos, tailoring, and glittering splendour of material. Like many another thing which the nineteenth century brought to birth, it was an artistic error, which countless persons paid for by the waste of their lives. The older art knew nothing of such a reconstruction of the past. If historical subjects were painted, the artists were almost throughout contemporaries of the subject that was to be treated; seldom did the materials belong to an epoch already past. But in both cases the work was done by immediate intuition, since even in the treatment of matters long gone by the painters never dreamed of painting them in the spirit of past times. They might depict Jews, or Greeks, or Romans, but they always represented their own countrymen in the surroundings and costume of their own time. The scientific nineteenth century made the first demand for historical accuracy. In dress and furniture this could be attained with the assistance of a cabinet of engravings and a work on costume. Whoever went to work in a very scientific spirit could even borrow from a museum the genuine costumes of Egmont and Wallenstein. But it was all the harder artistically to quicken into life the men themselves who had felt, lived, and suffered in the past. The painter could not proceed otherwise than by draping a modern, professional model, having consulted portraits, drawings, or busts, and having sought the aid of a peruke and false beard. An entirely realistic reproduction of this masquerade, however, made only too evident the contrast between the splendid old garment and the member of the proletariat who was dressed up in it. For, granted that men of the present have much in common with those of the past, every period has none the less its own type, even its own gestures, which no costume can make one forget. And speaking merely of general humanity, there is no question that a statesman at all times looked different from a professional model. In a very bad suit of clothes, but in one which, at any rate, fitted him, and in which he was able to behave himself naturally, the poor fellow came to the studio, to feel, for a few hours, in satin hose and a velvet doublet, like a carnival figure. Who was to give him the easy knightly bearing to play his part suitably to the occasion? It was not possible in this way ever to attain the naturalness and fulness of life of the old painters. In Terborg's "Peace of Westphalia" everything is genuine and true and simple; here wig and woollen beard have got the upper hand. And if the painter proceeded not as a theatrical tailor, but as an historian of civilisation, the result was an archaic dryness. For then he was merely thrown back on the great masters of those periods in which the action took place, and, while he enlarged and coloured old busts or engraved portraits, his art was only second-hand.

And so the only way out of the difficulty was to use the model, but to idealise him by generalising and sinking the individual in the universally human, noble, and heroic. In this way the remarkable family likeness of all these heads becomes comprehensible, and it is still further heightened by that preference for a monotonous type of beauty which, from the period of Classicism, entered, as it were, into the blood of these painters. The human physiognomy, in reality so various, had then only one mask for the many characters which life creates. There was a fear of "ugliness," as if it were a spot of dirt, and the personages portrayed received, one and all, an icy trait of "the Beautiful." The various Egmonts, Wallensteins, and Charles the Firsts of Gallait and Bièfve, Delaroche, and Piloty have not the blood of human beings, they have not the scars which are made by fate, but are all alike in their Byronic turn of the head. One knows the so-called character-heads--Luther gazing upwards with the look of one strong in faith, Columbus discovering America, and Milton in whose head are seething all the thoughts which dying men are wont to have in their last moments,--one knows them as thoroughly by heart as one knows all the opened folios and overturned settles, the picturesquely draped tapestry reserved for tragic funereal service, and that little box, covered with brass and catching the flashing lights, which constitutes in Belgium, France, and Germany the iron casket of all historical pieces. In the place of the inward Shakespearian truth of the figures, peculiar to the old masters, is the outward truth of costume; and the historical "property man," whose highest aim is to "dress" the great moments of universal history in the prescribed manner, has stepped into the place of the artist. In the works of the old masters the historical figures stand out with sincerity as characters of flesh and blood, despite the want of "local colour," whilst in the moderns the costumes certainly are correct, but the figures are so much the less credible and vital. "Beautiful may be the folds of the garment, but more beautiful must be that which they contain."

Clothes do not make people, and costumes heighten no passions. Thus difficulties were heaped on difficulties, when impassioned situations and moments of dramatic intensity were to be painted. Whoever has reached that height of artistic power where the artist may with impunity put his model out of his head--like Delacroix, grand, volcanic, stormy, and excited to a fever heat by his inspiration,--that man will be capable of giving the effect of truth to such scenes, and of running through the whole gamut of emotion with a crushing power of conviction. But the joint-stock historical painter had to get his models to pull faces, and then no less laboriously to render with his oils those grimaces so laboriously produced. Hence the monotonous and petrified histrionic ecstasy of these pictures, the noble indignation put on for show, and that distressing gesticulation. As the actor gives emphasis to his words far more by gestures than is the case in ordinary life, so here also the artificially impassioned air of the heads was conventionally interpreted by corresponding motions of the arms. And thus the closing tableau was made ready: the dancers lay their hands on their hearts with tender and deep feeling; the tenor heroes sing that they are prepared to die; the tyrants let their deep basses vibrate, and the orchestra rages, to close with a shattering chord at the moment when the hero sets his foot upon the chest of the traitor; then come the Bengal lights, and then the curtain falls. What a spectacle!--but, alas, a spectacle and nothing more. All the emotions are artificial; they are opera emotions: the painters are only clever fellows, manufacturers of librettos and gay canvas; they show a great deal of knowledge and dexterity, but they have only a head and no heart. Stage requisites and professional models can never take the place of the free, creative force of imagination.

And if German pictures of this sort have an effect almost more insincere and theatrical than the French, the reason probably is that gesture--that external aid to the expression of feeling--is always more natural to the Latin than the Teutonic races, and has therefore, of itself, an effect of affectation in every German picture. We know that Bismarck, the Teuton incarnate, even in the most excited of parliamentary speeches, never made any other movement than to rap nervously with his pencil. "The German only becomes impassioned when he lies." The most genuine masters of German blood have felt that right well, and they have been honest enough to say it out. A pervading trait of old German art is simplicity, the avoidance of everything impassioned even in the grandest conception, such as Dürer has. If in Leonardo's "Last Supper" terror, indignation, curiosity, and sorrow are reflected by twelve heads and twenty-four hands in movements of agitation which are always new, in Dürer's woodcut all the limbs and senses of the disciples are paralysed at the sorrowful revelation of the Saviour; it seemed to them desecration to break the solemn, oppressive stillness by noisy utterances of opinion and hasty gestures. And the same thing is to be remarked in every similar picture of Rembrandt's; here too are only quiet and subdued movements, delicate suggestions and silence. The effect is great and sublime, the features of the Saviour earnest and expressive, but His mien is without any ecstatic emphasis such as a painter of Romance blood would have given Him. Only in the nineteenth century--partly through imitation of the Italians in Cornelius and Kaulbach, and then through imitation of the French in Piloty and his disciples--has this impassionedness, so opposed to German nature, entered into German art; and it has borrowed from the opera the distortions by which it has expressed the agitations of the spirit. No one works with impunity against the grain of his temperament. Exaggerated and violent movements, "ostentatious gestures of false dignity," have replaced the natural expressions of life.

Less pose, parade, and theatricality, more ease, truth, and quietude; less insipid, generalised "beauty," more forcible, characteristic "ugliness": if art was not to be drowned in a surge of phrases, this was the path to be taken; and the transition was accomplished in "the historical picture of manners."