Chapter III: Introduction

The historian who wishes to relate the history of painting in the nineteenth century is confronted with quite other demands than await him who undertakes the art of an earlier period. The greatest difficulty with which the latter has to cope is the deficiency of sources. He manifestly gropes in the dark with regard to the works of the masters as well as to the circumstances of their lives. After he has searched archives and libraries in order to collect his biographical material, the real critical problem awaits him. Even amongst the admittedly authentic works, those which are undated confront those whose chronology is certain. To these must be added those nameless ones, as to whose history there is a doubt; to these again, those whose origin is to be ascertained. It needs a quick eye to separate the schools and groups, and finally to recognise the notes which are peculiar to the master.

With none of these difficulties is the historian of modern art confronted. The painters of the nineteenth century have very seldom forgotten to attach a name and date to their works, and the circumstances of their lives are related with an accuracy that was, earlier, rarely the lot of the foremost men in history. It is all the more difficult, face to face with such a chaos of pictures, to discover the spiritual bond which connects them all, to construct a building out of the immense supply of accumulated bricks, the piled-up mass of rough material. The evolution of modern painting is more complicated and varied than that of the art of an earlier period, just as modern life itself is more complicated and varied than that of any previous age.

How quietly, slowly, and surely was the evolution of that older period carried out. One simple proportion was maintained between art and the universal life of culture. Customs, views of life and art, were so intimately bound up together, that the knowledge of the age in general naturally comprises that of art. Standing before some old altar-piece of the school of Cologne, it is as though one were watching in some broad high dome; everything is quiet all round, and the august figures in the picture lead their calm, grave existence in illustrious grandeur. The message of Christianity, "My kingdom is not of this world," meets in art, too, with a clear expression. Humility and devotion are joined together, making for a refinement in the feeling of life that is unsurpassed in its hieratic tenderness and gracious innocence. In the fifteenth century, the age of discoveries, a new spirit entered the world. Commerce and navigation discovered new worlds, painting discovered life. The human spirit grew freer and more joyous; it was no longer satisfied with yearning for the other world alone, it felt itself at home also in this world, in the glory of the earth. Pictures, too, were inspired with some of those joyous perceptions with which the citizens of the fifteenth century issued from their narrow walls out under God's free heaven, something of that Easter Day mood in _Faust_. People still went on painting Madonnas and saints, subjects of a religion which had spread from the far East over the whole West; but with the severe simplicity of the heavenly, there was universal awakening of all the charm and roguery and energy of the earthly. It is the first virginal contact of the spirit with nature. On men's works there rests the first morning-dew of spiritual life; they remind one of woodlands in spring: Botticelli, Van Eyck, Schongauer.

After the Italians had become vigorous realists in the fifteenth century, they rose in the sixteenth, the century of inspired humanism, to majesty. The time of hard grappling with the overwhelming fulness of actuality is over. Those great masterpieces ensue in which the unlaboured effort shines forth in the most felicitous achievement: Raphael, Michael Angelo, Titian. At the same time the German manner is most directly opposed to the Romance. They disdain to ingratiate themselves into men's minds by outward grace of form, but win the heart by their deep religious feeling and intimate sensibility. They are German to the core, racial even to the stiffness of the German character, but full of feeling and truth to life. Dürer in his woodcuts and copper engravings is "_inwendig voller figur_"; in them he offers the "concentrated, homely treasure of his heart." Holbein is great by the incomparably real art of his portraits. The century of that joyous revival of Paganism, the Olympian vivacity of the Renaissance, is followed by the age to which the Jesuits gave life and character. For those stately churches in the Jesuit style, with their _fortissimo_ effect, their huge, sculptured ornaments and their gleaming, gold decorations, the classic quietness of the old masters ceases to be appropriate. It is a question of a more stirring and impressive treatment of sacred subjects, wherein the whole passion of renewed Catholicism should be brought to expression. Spain, the country of the Inquisition, set the classic stamp on this enhanced religious feeling. Here all that monarchical and sacerdotal impulse which founded and aggrandised the Spanish nation, founded too its true representative in painting. Painters endowed their church pictures with a passionate fervour and a flush of extravagant sensuousness of the national, Spanish, local colour, such as are found united in the art of no other age or country. Necessarily, moreover, such a feudal system as that of Spain, with its grandees and princes of the Church, involved also an art of portrait painting which ranks with the highest that has issued in this kind from any country whatever: Murillo, Velasquez. In Flanders, the second stronghold of the Jesuits, we have the titan Rubens. A joyously fleshly Fleming, he seizes nature by the throat and drags her there where he stands erect, as though he were lord of the world. Freedom had found its way into victorious and Protestant Holland. Here there flourished an art neither courtly nor fostered by the Church. It stood in the closest connection with the burgesses, showed clear signs of the struggle through which country and people had won independence. In the first place, painting celebrated as its worthiest subject the free burgher, the tighter in the heroic struggle for freedom. At no time was portrait-painting practised to such an extent, and the sitters not aristocratic courtiers, but proud burgesses of a free community; the men grave, strong, self-reliant; the women faithful, pure, and modest. The workmanship is correspondent: simple, solid, domestic; and soon there followed the glorification of that which they prized the more after their struggles had been accomplished: the quiet, comfortable delight of hearth and home.

During the War of Independence the Dutch had learnt to love their fatherland, and they were the first, as artists, fully to grasp the poetry of landscape. Art now no longer shines only upon the eyes of Mary and the Hosts of Heaven: it settles upon arid country hills, streams upon the sea waves, is at home in peasants' houses and the dark woods, wanders through the streets and alleys, makes a temple of every market. The religious sentiments, however, which stirred Protestant Holland had to find appropriate expression; the living essence of biblical subjects was to be released from a narrow, ecclesiastical sphere, and approached anew with all the deep, German inwardness. These tendencies were all united in Rembrandt--perhaps of all masters, since the Christian era, the mightiest proclaimer of the great Pan; to him the cosmic powers of light and air signified the divinity that Michael Angelo had painted under a beautiful human form.

Finally, in the eighteenth century, comes _rococo_, with its rustling _frou-frou_ and its delicate charm. The whole life of that noble society, which exchanged court costume for silken pastoral garments, formality and rank for charm and grace, was a lively play, an extravagant game. The king played with his crown, the priest with his religion, the philosopher with his wisdom, the poet with the art of rhyme. They did not hear as yet the hoarse threatening voice of the disinherited, "_Car tel est notre plaisir_." What this age possessed of beauty and charm, its peculiar grace and wanton vivacity, its reckless, inassailable frivolity, was proper also to its art. Light and gracious as the whole life of that harmless, merry generation, it glided through the age untroubled, led by Cupidons, and kissed by the wandering winds. It is only to-day that we understand once more the charming masters of that elegant century.

The painters of every epoch looked at nature with their own eyes, and also with the eyes of their age and of their country. So the art of every period appears as "the mirror and abstract chronicle" of its age. With irresistible majesty, and conscious of its inspiration, it lays hold of the external world, and gives back to it its own picture infinitely exalted. It is the enlightened expression of the age, as upright, as fresh, as fanatic, or as unnatural as its generation. Therein lies the strength of the painters of _rococo_, that they painted the artificiality of the time with such unsurpassable naturalness. It is just these infinitely various manners of paying court to nature--unceasingly throughout the course of centuries, now violently, now softly and tenderly, at times, too, not without passing infidelity,--it is just these which determine the beauty and value, the mystery and essence of art, and are in the history of art all that tends to its variety and unsurpassable charm.

The nineteenth century not only shows a new age, but probably begins a new section of universal history. It is probable that in contrast with this epoch of stirring movement, during which the readjustment of all political and social relations, the new discoveries in the instruments of commerce, trade, and industry have given an entirely new aspect to the world, the next thousand years will sum up all the previous centuries as the "old world." New men require a new art. One would be inclined to surmise from this that the art of the nineteenth century presented itself as something essentially personal, with a sharply distinctive style. Instead of this it offers at first view, in contrast with those old ages of uniform production, a condition like that of Babylon. The nineteenth century has no style--the phrase that has been so often quoted as to have become a commonplace. In architecture the forms of all the past ages live again. The day before yesterday we built Greek, yesterday Gothic; here _Baroque_, there Japanese: but amidst all these products of imitative styles there rise up stations and market-places which, with the robust elegance of their iron colonnades, herald the greatness of fresh conquests. In the province of painting there are similar extremes. In no other age have minds so diverse flourished side by side as Carstens and Goya, Cornelius and Corot, Ingres and Millet, Wiertz and Courbet, Rossetti and Manet. And the existing histories excite a belief that the nineteenth century is a chaos into which it is possible only for some later age to bring order.

Perhaps, however, it is already quite possible, if one only resolves uncompromisingly to apply to the new age those principles which have been tested in the treatment of the _old_ histories of art, if one endeavours to study those artists who are in part still our contemporaries as objectively as though they were masters long dead. That is to say: one is wont, in a review of an older period in art, not to inquire what it had caught from an earlier age, but rather what it had introduced that was new. It was not because they imitated in their turn that the old masters became great; not because they looked backwards, but rather because they went forwards, that they made the history of art. We are not grateful, for instance, to the Dutchmen of the middle of the sixteenth century--Frans Floris and his contemporaries--that they forsook Dutch naturalism, and bootlessly exerted themselves in the way of Michael Angelo and Raphael. We can see no remarkable merit in the fact that the Bolognese at the beginning of the seventeenth century gathered their honey from the flowers of the Cinquecento. And we are even less inclined to see in the contemporaries of Adrian van der Werff, who endeavoured to refine the rugged, primeval Dutch art by the study of the Italians, more than clumsy imitators.

Just as much will the interest of the historian of the art of the nineteenth century be bestowed in the first degree upon the works which have really created something independent and transcending all the earlier ages. He will not give especial prominence to those domains which had their flowering-time in other days than our own, but he will ask: Where is that distinctive element which appertains to the nineteenth century only? What are the new forms which it has found, the new sentiments to which it has given expression? Not those whose activity lay in clothing--however cleverly--the artistic necessities of the age in the store of already transmitted forms, but the pathfinders, who went forwards and created anew, require our attention. Even if, after the old masters, they can only be granted a place in the third or fourth class, they must nevertheless always take precedence of those others, because they exhibited themselves as they were, instead of making themselves large by standing on the shoulders of the dead. Many of those who were once valued highly, who, thriving on the inheritance of the past, accomplished what was apparently of importance, measured by this standard will arouse little interest, because their artistic speech, depending on a foundation of the established canonical works of old, is not their own but borrowed. In others, on the contrary, who, apart from the dominating tendency, had the courage rather to be insignificant, and yet remain themselves, observing with their own eyes nature which surrounded them, or naïvely abandoning themselves to the disposition of their artistic fantasy, in them will be seen the essential vehicles of the modern spirit. And then it will be apparent that the art of the nineteenth century as well as that of every earlier period had its peculiar garment, even if for official occasions it preferred to unpack from its wardrobe the state costumes of earlier ages. It is only because this distinction between the eclectic and the personal, the derived and the independent, has not yet been carried out with sufficient strictness, that it has hitherto, in my opinion, been found so difficult to discover the distinctive _style_ of modern art, and to make clear the logic and sequence of its evolution.