CHAPTER XXXIII

THE NEW IDEALISM IN FRANCE AND GERMANY

A similar change of taste occurred in France. Just as the Impressionists had held modernity alone in high honour, so now awoke the longing after the faded lustre of a bygone age of beauty. The younger generation in literature began to do homage to their spiritual ancestors not in Zola but in Charles Baudelaire, that abstracter of the quintessence; and similarly in the province of art there came to the fore two of the older masters who until then had been relegated to the background.

In pictorial art _Gustave Moreau_ is equivalent to Charles Baudelaire. Certain of the strange and fascinating poems in the _Fleurs du Mal_ strike alone the same note of sentiment as the tortured, subtilised, morbid, but mysterious and captivating creations of Moreau; and his figures, like those of Baudelaire, live in a mysterious world, and stimulate the spirit like eternal riddles. Every one of his works stands in need of a commentary; every one of them bears witness to a profound and peculiar activity of mind, and every one of them is full of intimate reveries. Every agitation of his inward spirit takes shape in myths of hieratical strangeness, in mysterious hallucinations, which he sets in his pictures like jewels. He gives ear to dying strains, rising faintly, inaudible to the majority of men. Marvellous beings pass before him, fantastic and yet earnest; forms of legendary story hover through space upon strange animals; a fabulous hippogriff bears him far away to Greece and the East, to vanished worlds of beauty. Upon the journey he beholds Utopias, beholds the Fortunate Islands, and visits all lands, borne upon the pinions of a dream. An age which went wild over Cabanel and Bouguereau could not possibly be in sympathy with him. The Naturalists, also, looked upon him as a singular being; it was much as if an Indian magician whose robe shone in all the hues of the rainbow had suddenly made his appearance at a ball, amongst men in black evening dress. It is only since the mysterious smile of Leonardo's feminine figures has once more drawn the world beneath its spell that the spirit of Moreau's pictures has become a familiar thing. Even his schooling was different from that of his contemporaries. He was the only pupil of that strange artist Théodore Chassériau, and Chassériau had directed him to the study of Bellini, Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, and all those enchanting primitive artists whose enchanting female figures are seen to move through mysterious black and blue landscapes. He was then seized with an enthusiasm for the hieratical art of India. And he was also affected by old German copper-engraving, old Venetian pottery, painting upon vases and enamel, mosaics and niello work, tapestries and old Oriental miniatures. His exquisite and expressive style, which, at a time when the flowing Cinquecento manner was in vogue, made an unpleasant effect by its archaic angularity, was the result of the fusion of these elements.

When he appeared, the special characteristic of French art was its seeking after violent agitations of the spirit, _émotions fortes_. The spirit was to be roused by stormy vehemence, as a relaxed system is braced by massage. But the generation at the close of the nineteenth century wanted to be soothed rather than stirred by painting. It could not endure shrill cries, loud, emphatic speech, or vehement gestures. It desired subdued and refined emotions, and Moreau's distinction is that he was the first to give expression to this weary _décadent_ humour. In his work a complete absence of motion has taken the place of the striding legs, the attitudes of the fencing-master, the arms everlastingly raised to heaven, and the passionately distorted faces which had reigned in French painting since David. He makes spiritual expression his starting-point, and not scenic effect; he keeps, as it were, within the laws which rule over classical sculpture, where vehemence was only permitted to intrude from the period of decline, from the Pergamene reliefs, the Laocoön, and the Farnese Bull. Everything bears the seal of sublime peace; everything is inspired by inward life and suppressed passion. Even when the gods fight there are no mighty gestures; with a mere frown they can shake the earth like Zeus.

His spiritual conception of the old myths is just as peculiar as his grave articulation of form; it is a conception such as earlier generations could not have, one which alone befits the spiritual condition of the close of the nineteenth century. During the most recent decades archæological excavations and scientific researches have widened and deepened our conceptions of the old mythology in a most unexpected manner. Beside the laughter of the Grecian Pan we hear the sighs and behold the convulsions of Asia, in her anguish bearing gods, who perish young like spring flowers, in the loving arms of Oriental goddesses. We have heard of chryselephantine statues covered with precious stones from top to bottom; and we know the graceful terra-cotta figures of Tanagra. Before there was a knowledge of the Tanagra statuettes no archæologist could have believed that the Eros of Hesiod was such a charming, wayward little rascal. Before the discovery of the Cyprus statues no artist would have ventured to adorn a Grecian goddess with flowers, pins for the head, and a heavy tiara. Prompted by these discoveries, Moreau has been swayed by strangely rich inspirations. He is said to have worked in his studio as in a tower opulent with ivory and jewels. He has a delight in arraying the figures of his legends in the most costly materials, as the discoveries at Cyprus give him warrant for doing, in painting their robes in the deepest and most lustrous hues, and in being almost too lavish in his manner of adorning their arms and breasts. Every figure of his is a glittering idol, enveloped in a dress of gold brocade embroidered with precious stones. His love of ornamentation is even extended to his landscapes. They are improbable, far too fair, far too rich, far too strange to exist in the actual world, but they are in close harmony with the character of these sumptuously clad figures which wander in them like the mystic and melancholy shapes of a dream. The capricious generation that lived in the Renaissance occasionally handled classical subjects in this manner, but there is the same difference between Filippino Lippi and Gustave Moreau as there is between Botticelli and Burne-Jones: the former, like Shakespeare in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_, transformed the antique into a blithe and fantastic fairy world, whereas that fire of yearning romance which once flamed from poor Hölderlin's poet heart burns in the pictures of Moreau.

His "Orpheus" is one of his most characteristic and beautiful works. He has not borrowed the composition from antique tragedy. The drama is over. Orpheus has been torn asunder by the Mænads, and the limbs of the poet lie scattered over the icy fields of the hyperborean lands. His head, borne upon his lyre now for ever mute, has been cast upon the shore of Erebus. Nature seems to sleep in mysterious peace. Around there is nothing to be seen but still waters and pallid light, nothing to be heard but the tone of a small shrill flute, played by a barbarian shepherd sitting on the cliff. A Thracian girl, whose hair is adorned with a garland, and whose look is earnest, has taken up the head of the singer and regards it long and quietly. Is it merely pity that is in her eyes? A romantic Hellenism, a profound melancholy underlies the picture, and the old story closes with a cry of love. In his "Oedipus and the Sphinx" of 1864, and his "Heracles" of 1878, he treated battle scenes, the heroic struggle between man and beast, and in these pictures, also, there is no violence, no vehemence, no movement. In a terrible silence the two antagonists exchange looks in his "Oedipus and the Sphinx," while their breath mingles. Like a living riddle, the winged creature gazes upon the stranger, but the youth with his long locks stands so composedly before her that the spectator feels that he must know the decisive word.

In "Helen upon the Walls of Troy" the figure of the enchantress, as she stands there motionless, clad in a robe glittering with brilliant stones and diamonds like a shrine, is seen to rise against the blood-red horizon as though it were a statue of gold and ivory. Like a queen of spades, she holds in her hand a large flower. Heaps of bodies pierced with arrows lie at her feet. But she has no glance of pity for the dying whose death-rattle greets her. Her wide, apathetic eyes are fixed upon vacancy. She sees in the gold of the sunset the smoke ascending from the Grecian camp. She will embark in the fair ship of Menelaus, and return in triumph to Hellas, where new love shall be her portion. And the looks of the old men fasten upon her in admiration. "It is fitting that the Trojans and the Achæans fight for such a woman." Helen in her blond voluptuous beauty is transformed beneath the hands of Moreau into Destiny stalking over ground saturated with blood, into the Divinity of Mischief--a divinity that, without knowing it, poisons everything that comes near her, or that she sees or touches.

In his "Galatea" Moreau's love of jewels and enamel finds its highest triumph. Galatea's grotto is one large, glittering casket. Flowers made from the sun, and leaves from the stars, and branches of coral stretch forth their boughs and open their cups. And as the most brilliant jewel of all, there rests in the holy of holies the radiant form of the sleeping Galatea, a kind of Greek Susanna, watched by the staring, adamantine eye of Polyphemus.

And just as he bathes these Grecian forms in the dusk of a profound romantic melancholy, so in Moreau's pictures the figures of the Bible are tinged with a shade of Indian Buddhism, a pantheistic mysticism which places them in a strange modern light. In his "David" he represents in a quiet and peaceful way the entry of a human soul into Nirvana. The aged king sits dreaming upon his gorgeous throne, and an angel watches in shining beauty beside this phantom, the flame of whose life is slowly sinking. A curious light falls upon him from the sky. The light of the evening horizon shines faint between the pillars, and the spectator feels that it is the end of a long day. His pictures of 1878 dealing with Salome, in their strange sentiment--suggestive of an opium vision--are like a paraphrase of Heine's poem in _Atta Troll_. In a sombre hall supported by mighty pillars, through which coloured lamps and stupefying pastil-burners shed a blue and red light, sits Herod the king, half asleep with hasheesh, wrapped in silk, and motionless as a Hindu idol. His face is pale and gloomy, and his throne is like a crystal confessional chair, fashioned with all the riches of the world. Two women lean at the foot of a pillar. One of them touches the strings of a lute, and a small panther yawns near a vessel of incense. Upon the floor of variegated mosaics flowers lie strewn. Salome advances. Tripping upon her toes as lightly as a figure in a dream, she begins to dance, holding a tremulous lotus-flower in her hand. A shining tiara is upon her head; her body is adorned with all the jewels which the dragons guard in the veins of the earth. Faster and faster and with a more voluptuous grace she twists and stretches her splendid limbs; but of a sudden she starts and presses her hand to her heart: she has seen the executioner as he smote the head of John from the body.--In the midst of an Oriental paradise, the body of the Baptist lies in the grass; the head has been set upon a charger, and Salome, like a bloodthirsty tigress, watches it with looks of ardent, famished love.

Different as they seem in technique, there are many points of contact between the visionary Gustave Moreau and _Puvis de Chavannes_, the original and fascinating creator of the decorative painting of the nineteenth century. Where one indulges in detail, the other resorts to simplification; where the former is opulent the latter is ascetic; and yet they are associated through inward sympathy.

Puvis de Chavannes is the Domenico Ghirlandajo of the nineteenth century. The most eminent mural works which have been achieved in France owe their existence to him. Wall-paintings from his hand may be found above the staircase of the museums of Amiens, Marseilles, and Lyons, in the Paris Panthéon and the new Sorbonne, in the town-halls of Poitiers and many other French towns--pictures which it is difficult to describe in detail, through the medium of pedestrian prose. The two works with which he opened the decorative series in the museum of Amiens in 1861 are entitled "Bellum" and "Concordia." In the former warriors are riding over a monotonous plain. Two smoking pillars, the gloomy witnesses to sorrow and devastation, cast their dark shadows over the still fields, whilst here and there burning mills rise into the sombre sky like torches. In "Concordia," the counterpart to this work, there are women plucking flowers, and naked youths urging on their horses amid a luxuriant grove of laurel. In the Paris Panthéon he painted, between 1876 and 1878, "The Girlhood of St. Geneviève." A laughing spring landscape, filled with the blitheness of May, spreads beneath the bright sky of the Isle de France. Calm figures move in it, men and women, children and greybeards. A bishop lays his hand upon the head of a young shepherdess; sailors are coming ashore from their barks. "The Grove sacred to the Arts and Muses" comes first in the decoration of the Lyons Museum. Upon one side is a thick forest, dark and profound, and upon the other the horizon is fringed by violet-blue hills and a large lake reflecting the bluish atmosphere; in the foreground are green meadows, where the flowers gleam like stars, and trees standing apart, oaks and firs, their strong, straight stems rising stiffly into the sky. At the foot of a pillared porch strange figures lie by the shore or stand erect amid the pale grass, one with her arm pointing upwards, another musing with her hand resting upon her chin, a third unrolling a parchment. Athletic youths are bringing flowers and winding garlands. The "Vision of Antiquity" and "Christian Inspiration" complete the series. The former of these pictures brings the spectator into Attica. Locked by a simple landscape of hills the blue sea is rippling, and bright islands rise from its bosom, while a clear sky sheds its full light from above. Trees and shrubs are growing here and there. A shepherd is playing upon the pan-pipes, goats are grazing, and five female figures, some of them nude, the others clothed, caress tame peacocks in the tall grass or lean against a parapet, breathing in the fresh, cool air. Farther back, at the foot of a height, is a young woman, holding herself erect like a statue, as she talks with a youth, whilst in the distance at the verge of the sea a spectral cavalcade, like that in Phidias' frieze of the Parthenon, gallops swiftly by. In the counterpart, "Christian Inspiration," a number of friars who are devoted to art are gathered together in the portico of an abbey church. The walls are embellished with naïve frescoes in the style of the Siennese school. One of the monks who is working on the pictures has alighted from the ladder and regards the result of his toil with a critical air. Lilies are blooming in a vase upon the ground. Outside, beyond the cloister wall, the flush of evening sheds its parting light over a lonely landscape, whence dark cypresses rise into the air, straight as a lance. In the decoration of the Sorbonne the object was to suggest all the lofty purposes to which the place has been dedicated upon the wall of the great amphitheatre used for the solemn sessions of the faculty, and facing the statues of the founders. Puvis de Chavannes did this by displaying a throne in a sacred grove, a throne upon which a grave matron arrayed in sombre garments is sitting in meditation. This is the old Sorbonne. Two genii at her side bring palm-branches and crowns as offerings in honour of the famous minds of the past. Around are standing manifold figures arrayed in the costumes which were assigned to the arts and sciences in Florence at the time of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. From the rock upon which they are set there bursts the living spring from which youth derives knowledge and new power. A thick wood divides this quiet haunt, consecrated to the Muses, from the rush and the petty trifles of life. In a painting entitled "Inter Artes et Naturam," over the staircase of the museum of Rouen, artists musing over the ruins of mediæval buildings are seen lying in the midst of a Norman landscape, beneath apple-trees whose branches are weighed down by their burden of fruit; upon the other side of the picture there is a woman holding a child upon her knees, whilst another woman is trying to reach a bough laden with fruit, and a group of painters look on enchanted with the grace of her simple, harmonious movement.

Puvis de Chavannes is not a virtuoso in technique; for a Frenchman, indeed, he is almost clumsy, and is sure in very little of the work of his hand,--in fact, it is quite possible that a later age will not reckon him among the great painters. But what it can never forget is that after a period of lengthy aberrations he restored decorative art in general to its proper vocation.

Before his time what was good in the so-called monumental painting of the nineteenth century was usually not new, but borrowed from more fortunate ages, and what was new in it, the narrative element, was not good, or at least not in good taste. When Paolo Veronese produced his pictures in the Doge's Palace or Giulio Romano his frescoes in the Sala dei Giganti in Mantua, neither of them thought of the great mission of instructing the people or of patriotic sentiments; they wanted to achieve an effect which should be pictorial, festal, and harmonious in feeling. The task of painters who were entrusted with the embellishment of the walls of a building was to waken dreams and strike chords of feeling, to summon a mood of solemnity, to delight the eye, to uplift the spirit. What they created was decorative music, filling the mansion with its august sound as the solemn notes of an organ roll through a church. Their pictures stood in need of no commentary, no exertion of the mind, no historical learning. But the painting which in the nineteenth century did duty upon official occasions and was encouraged by governments for the sake of its pedagogical efficiency was not permitted to content itself with this general range of sentiment; it had to lay on the colours more thickly, and to appeal to the understanding rather than to sentiment. Descriptive prose took the place of lyricism.

Puvis de Chavannes went back to the true principle of the old painters by renouncing any kind of didactic intention in his art. In the Panthéon of Paris, when the eye turns to the works of Puvis de Chavannes after beholding all the admirable panels with which the recognised masters of the flowing line have illustrated the temple of St. Geneviève, when it turns from St. Louis, Clovis, Jeanne d'Arc, and Dionysius Sanctus to "The Girlhood of St. Geneviève," it is as if one laid aside a prosy history of the world to read the _Eclogues_ of Virgil.

In the one case there are archæological lectures, stage scenery, and histrionic art; in the other, simple poetry and lyrical magic, a marvellous evocation from the distant past of that atmosphere of legend which banishes the commonplace. His art would express nothing, would represent nothing; it would only charm and attune the spirit, like music heard faintly from the distance. His figures perform no significant actions; nor are any learned attributes employed in their characterisation, such as were introduced in Greece and at the Renaissance. He does not paint Mars, Vulcan, and Minerva, but war, work, and peace. In translating the word _bellum_ into the language of painting in the Museum of Amiens he did not need academical Bellonas, nor sword-cuts, nor knightly suits of armour, nor fluttering standards. A group of mourning and stricken women, warlike horsemen, and a simple landscape sufficed him to conjure up the drama of war in all its terrible majesty. And he is as far from gross material heaviness as from academical sterility. The reapers toiling in his painting entitled "Summer" are modern in their movements and in their whole appearance, and yet they belong to no special time and seem to have been wafted into a world beyond; they are beings who might have lived yesterday, or, for the matter of that, a thousand years ago. The whole of existence seems in Puvis de Chavannes like a day without beginning or end, a day of Paradise, unchangeable and eternal. And very simple means sufficed him to attain this transcendental effect: like Millet, he generalises what is individual, and tempers what is presented in nature; antique nudity is associated in an unforced manner with modern costume; a designed simplicity, which has nothing of the academical painting of the nude, is expressed in the handling of form. Even his landscape he constructs upon its elementary forms, and by means of its essential, expressive features. But by a certain concordance of lines, by a distinct rhythm of form, he compasses a sentiment which is grave and solemn or idyllic.

The Quattrocentisti, especially Ghirlandajo, were his models in this epical simplicity, and beside Baudry, the deft and spirited decorator of the most modernised High Renaissance style, he has the effect of a primitive artist risen from the grave. His pictures have an archaic bloom--something sacerdotal, if you will, something seraphic and holy. Often one fancies that one recognises the influence of old tapestries, to say nothing of Fra Angelico, but one is at a loss to give the model copied. And what places him like Moreau in sharp opposition to the old masters is that, instead of their sunny, smiling blitheness, he too is under the sway of that heavy melancholy spirit which the close of the nineteenth century first brought into the world.

When he, a countryman of Flandrin and Chenavard, began his career under Couture over half a century ago, the world did not understand his pictures. People blamed the poverty of his palette, asserted that he was too simple and restricted in his methods of colouring, and he was called a Lenten painter, _un peintre de carême_, whose dull eye noted nothing in nature except ungainly lines and uniformly grey tones. Women were especially unfavourable to him, taking his lean figures as a personal insult to themselves. Moreover, the calm and immobility of his figures were censured, and when he exhibited his earliest pictures in 1854, at the same time as those of Courbet, he was called _un fou tranquille_, just as the latter was christened _un fou furieux_. In later years it was precisely through these two qualities, his grandiose quietude and his "anæmic" painting, that he brought the world beneath his spell, and diverted French art into a new course.

As his landscapes know nothing of agitated clouds, nor abruptness nor the strife of the elements, so his figures avoid all oratorical vehemence. They are eternally young, free from brutal passions, lost in oblivion. Let him conjure up old Hellas or the quiet life of the cloister, over figures and landscapes there always rests a tender sentiment of consecration and dreamy peace; no violent gesture and no loud tone disturb that harmony of feeling by any vehement action.

Nor does the colour admit any discord in the large harmony. It is exceedingly soft and light, although subdued; it has that faint, deadened indecisiveness to be seen in faded tapestries or vanishing frescoes. Tender and delicate in its chalky grey unity, which banishes reality and creates a world of dreams, it is spread around the shadowy figures. It is impossible to imagine his pictures without this light so pure and yet veiled, this silvery, transparent air, impregnated with the breath of the Divine, as Plato would say; it is impossible to imagine them without the delicate tones of these pale green, pale rose-coloured, and pale violet dresses, which are as delicate as fading flowers, and without this flesh-tint, which lends a phantomlike and unearthly appearance to his figures. It is all like a melody pitched in the high, finely touched, and tremulous tones of a violin; it invites a mood which is at once blithe and sentimental, happy and sad, banishes all earthly things into oblivion, and carries one into a distant, peaceful, and holy world.

"Mon coeur est en repos, mon âme est en silence, Le bruit lointain du monde expire en arrivant, Comme un son éloigné qu'affaiblit la distance, À l'oreille incertaine apporté par le vent.

J'ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie; Je viens chercher vivant le calme du Léthé: Beaux lieux, soyez pour moi ces bords où l'on oublie; L'oubli seul désormais est ma félicité.

D'ici je vois la vie, à travers un nuage, S'évanouir pour moi dans l'ombre du passé...

L'amitié me trahit, la pitié m'abandonne, Et, seul, je descends le sentier de tombeaux.

Mais la nature est là qui t'invite et qui t'aime; Plonge-toi dans son sein qu'elle t'ouvre toujours; Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même, Est le même soleil se lève sur tes jours."

It was not long before the doctrine of the two souls in _Faust_ was exemplified in Germany also: from the fertile manure of Naturalism there sprang the blue flower of a new Romanticism. In Germany there had once lived Albrecht Dürer, the greatest and most profound painter-poet of all time; and there, too, even in an unpropitious age that genial visionary Moritz Schwind succeeded in flourishing. When the period of eclectic imitation had been overcome by Naturalism, was it not fitting that artists should once more attempt to embody the world of dreams beside that of actual existence, and beside tangible reality to give shape to the unearthly foreboding which fills the human heart with the visions and the cravings of fancy? In that age of hope arose the cult of _Boecklin_, and Germany began to honour in him who had been so long blasphemed the founder of a new and ardently desired art.

Burne-Jones, Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Arnold Boecklin make up the four-leaved clover of modern Idealism. To future generations they will bear witness to the sentiment of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century. All four are more or less of the same age; they all four began their work in the beginning of the fifties; and they were all different from their contemporaries and from those who had gone before them. They embodied the spirit of the future. Boecklin had gone through a process of change as little as the others. His spirit was so rich that it comprised a century in itself, and leads us now towards the century to come. He was the contemporary of Schwind, he is our own contemporary, and he will be the contemporary of those who come after us. And it were as impossible to derive his art from that of any previous movement as to explain how he, our greatest visionary, came to be born in Basle, the most prosaic town in Europe.

His father was a merchant there, and he was born in the year 1827. In 1846 he went to Schirmer in Düsseldorf, and upon Schirmer's advice repaired to Brussels, where he copied the old Dutch masters in the gallery. By the sale of some of his works he acquired the means of travelling to Paris. He passed through the days of the Revolution of June in 1848, studied the pictures in the Louvre, and returned home after a brief stay to perform his military duties. In the March of 1850, when he was three-and-twenty, he went to Rome, where he entered the circle of Anselm Feuerbach; and in 1853 he married a Roman lady. In the following year he produced the decorative pictures in which he represented the relations of man to fire; these had been ordered for the house of a certain Consul Wedekind in Hanover, but were sent back as being "bizarre." In 1856 he betook himself--rather hard up for money--to Munich, where he exhibited in the Art Union "The Great Pan," which was bought by the Pinakothek. Paul Heyse was the medium of his making the acquaintance of Schack. And in 1858 he was appointed a teacher at the Academy of Weimar, by the influence of Lenbach and Begas. During this time he produced "Pan startling a Goat-herd" in the Schack Gallery, and "Diana Hunting." After three years he was again in Rome, and painted there "The Old Roman Tavern," "The Shepherd's Plaint of Love," and "The Villa by the Sea." In 1866 he went to Basle to complete the frescoes over the staircase of the museum, and in 1871 he was in Munich, where "The Idyll of the Sea" was exhibited amongst other things. In 1876 he settled in Florence, in 1886 at Zürich. From 1895 until the day of his death, January 16, 1901, he lived like a patriarch of art in his country house on the ridge of Fiesole.

Any one who would interpret a theory based upon the idea that an artist is the result of influences might, while he is about it, speak of Boecklin's apprentice period in Düsseldorf and Schirmer's biblical landscapes. That "harmonious blending of figures with landscape," which is the leading note in Boecklin's work, was of course from the days of Claude Lorraine and Poussin the essence of the so-called historical landscape which found its principal representatives at a later period in Koch, Preller, Rottmann, Lessing, and Schirmer. Yet Boecklin is not the disciple of these masters, but stands at the very opposite pole of art. The art of all these men was merely a species of historical painting. Old Koch read the Bible, Æschylus, Ossian, Dante, and Shakespeare; found in them such scenes as Noah's thank-offering, Macbeth and the witches, or Fingal's battle with the spirit of Loda; and sought amid the Sabine hills, in Olevano and Subiaco, for sites where these incidents might have taken place. Preller made the _Odyssey_ the basis of his artistic creation, chose out of it moments where the scene might be laid in some landscape, and found in Rügen, Norway, Sorrento, and the coast of Capri the elements of nature necessary to his epic. Rottmann worked upon hexameters composed by King Ludwig, and adhered in the views he painted to the historical memories attached to the towns of Italy. Lessing sought inspiration in Sir Walter Scott, for whose monks and nuns he devised an appropriately sombre and mysterious background. Schirmer illustrated the Books of Moses by placing the figures in Schnorr's Picture Bible in Preller's Odyssean landscape. Whether they were Classicists appealing to the eye by the architecture of form, or Romanticists addressing the spirit by the "mood" in their landscapes, it was common to all these painters that they set out from a literary or historical subject. They gave an exact interpretation of the actions prescribed by their authors, surrounding the figures with fictitious landscapes, corresponding in general conception to one's notion of the surroundings of heroes, patriarchs, or hermits. Their pictures are historical incidents with a stage-setting of landscape.

In Boecklin all this is reversed. Landscape painter he is in his very essence, and he is, moreover, the greatest landscape painter of the nineteenth century, at whose side even the Fontainebleau group seem one-sided specialists. Every one of the latter had a peculiar type of landscape, and a special hour in the day which appealed to his feelings more distinctly than any other. One loved spring and dewy morning, another the clear, cold day, another the threatening majesty of the storm, the flashing effects of sportive sunbeams, or the evening after sunset, when colours fade from view. But Boecklin is as inexhaustible as infinite nature herself. In one place he celebrates the festival of spring with its burden of beauty: it is ushered in by snowdrops, and greeted with joy by the veined cups of the crocus; yellow primroses and blue violets merrily nod their heads, and a hundred tiny mountain streams leap precipitately into the valley to announce the coming of spring. In another, nature shines and blooms and chimes, and breathes her balm in all the colours of summer. Tulips freaked with purple rise at the side of paths; flowers in rows of blue, white, and yellow--hyacinths, daisies, gentians, anemones, and snapdragon--fill the sward in hordes; and down in the valley blow the narcissus in dazzling myriads, loading the air with an overpowering perfume. But, beside such lovely idylls, he has painted with puissant sublimity as many complaining elegies and tempestuous tragedies. Here, the sombre autumnal landscapes, with their tall black cypresses, are lashed by the rain and the howling storm. There, lonely islands or grave, half-ruined towers, tangled with creepers, rise dreamily from a lake, mournfully hearkening to the repining murmur of the waves; and there, in the midst of a narrow rocky glen, a rotten bridge hangs over a fearful abyss. Or a raging storm, beneath the might of which the forests bow, blusters round a wild mountain land which rises from a blue-black lake. Boecklin has painted everything: the graceful and heroic, the solitude and the waste, the solemnly sublime and the darkly tragic, passionate agitation and demoniacal fancy, the strife of foaming waves and the eternal rest of rigid masses of rock, the wild uproar of the sky and the still peace of flowery fields. The compass of his moods is as much greater than that of the French Classicists as Italy is greater than Fontainebleau.

For Italy is Boecklin's home as a landscape painter, and the moods of nature there are more in number than Poussin ever painted. Grave and sad and grandiose is the Roman Campagna, with the ruins of the street of sepulchres, and the grey and black herds of cattle looking mournfully over the brown pastures. Hidden like the Sleeping Beauty lie the Roman villas in his pictures, in their sad combination of splendour and decay, of life and death, of youth and age. Behind weather-beaten grotto-wells and dark green nooks of yew, white busts and statues gleam like phantoms. From lofty terraces the water in decaying aqueducts trickles down with a monotonous murmur into still pools, where bracken and withered shrubs overgrown with ivy are reflected. Huge cypresses of the growth of centuries stand gravely in the air, tossing their heads mournfully when the wind blows. Then at a bound we are at Tivoli, and the whole scenery is changed. Great fantastic rocks rise straight into the air, luxuriantly mantled by ivy and parasitic growths; trees and shrubs take root in the clefts; the floods of the Anio plunge headforemost into the depths with a roar of sound, like a legion of demons thunder-stricken by some higher power. Then comes Naples, with its glory of flowers and its moods of evening glowing in deep ruby. Blue creepers twine round the balustrades of castles; hedges of monthly roses veil the roads, and oranges grow large amid the dark foliage. Farther away he paints the Homeric world of Sicily, with its crags caressed or storm-beaten by the wave, its blue grottoes, and its deep glowing splendours of changing colour. Or he represents the inland landscape of Florence with its soft graceful lines of hill, its fields and flowers, buds and blossoms, and its numbers of white dreaming villas hidden amid rosy oleanders and standing against the blue sky with a brightness almost dazzling.

Boecklin has no more rendered an exact portrait of the scenery of Italy than the Classic masters of France sought to represent in a photographic way districts in the forest of Fontainebleau. His whole life, like theirs, was a renewed and perpetual wooing of nature. As a boy he looked down from his attic in Basle upon the heaving waters of the Rhine. When he was in Rome, in 1850, he wandered daily in the Campagna to feast his eyes upon its grave lines and colours. After a few years in Weimar he gave up his post to gather fresh impressions in Italy. And the moods with which he was inspired by nature and the phenomena he observed were stored in his mind as though in a great emporium. Then his imagination went through another stage. That "organic union of figures and landscape" which the representatives of "heroic landscape" had surmised and endeavoured to attain by a reasoned method through the illustration of passages in poetry took place in Boecklin by the force of intuitive conception. The mood excited in him by a landscape is translated into an intuition of life.

In many pictures, particularly those of his earlier period, the ground-tone given by the landscape finds merely a faint echo in small accessory figures. In such pictures he stands more or less on a level with _Dreber_, that master who died in Rome in 1875, and was forgotten in the history of German art more swiftly than ought to have been the case. Franz Dreber was not one of those Classicists dispersed over the face of Europe, men who were content with setting heroic actions in the midst of noble landscapes in the fashion of Preller; on the contrary, he was the lyricist of this movement, the first man who did not touch the epical material of old myths in a manner that was merely scholarly and illustrative, but developed his picture from the original note of landscape. In his pictures nature laughs with those who are glad, mourns with those who weep, sheds her light upon the joyful, and envelops tortured spirits in storm and the terror of thunder. If the golden age is to be represented, the scene is a soft summer landscape, where everything breathes peace and innocence and bliss. And the life of those who inhabit this happy region runs by in blissful peace also. Fair women and children rest upon the meadow, and gather fruits and pluck roses. If he paints Ulysses upon the shore of the sea, looking with yearning towards his distant home, a dull, sultry haze of noon broods over the district, wide and grey like the hero's yearning. A spring landscape of sunny blitheness, with butterflies sipping at the blossoms of the trees and sunbeams sportively dallying on the sea, are the surroundings of the picture where Psyche is crowned by Eros. And if Prometheus is represented chained to the rock and striving to burst his fetters, all nature fights the fight of the Titan. Lurid clouds move swiftly through the sky, ghostly flashes of lightning quiver, and a wild tempest rakes the mountains.

In Boecklin's earlier pictures the accessory figures are placed in close relation with the landscape in a manner entirely similar. The mysterious keynote of sentiment in nature gives the theme of the scene represented. In the picture called "The Penitent," in the Schack Gallery, a hermit is kneeling half-naked before the cross of the Saviour upon the slope of a steep mountain. Troops of ravens fly screaming above his head, and a strip of blue sky shines with an unearthly aspect between the trees, which are bent into wild shapes. The character of the scene is terribly severe, and severe and heavy is the misery in the heart of the man chastising himself with the scourge in his hand as he kneels there in prayer. A deep melancholy rests over the picture named "The Villa by the Sea." The failing waves break gently on the shore with a mournful whisper, the wind utters its complaint blowing through the cypresses, and a few sunbeams wander coyly over the deep grey of the sky. At the socle of a niche a young woman dressed in black stands, and, with her head resting upon her hand, looks out of deeply veiled eyes over the moving tide. In "The Spring of Love" the landscape vibrates in lyrically soft and flattering chords. The budding splendour of blossoms covers the trees luxuriantly, and a rivulet ripples over the laughing grassy balk. A young man touches the strings of a lyre and sings; and, joining in his song, a maiden stands beside him leaning against a bush laden with blossom. In "The Walk to Emmaus" the ground-tone is given by a grave evening landscape. The storm ruffles the tops of the great trees, and chases across the sky the heavy clouds, over which strange evening lights are flitting. All nature trembles in shivering apprehension. "Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent."

But Boecklin's great creations reach a higher level. Having begun by extending the lyrical mood of a landscape to his figures, he finally succeeded in peopling nature with beings which seem the final condensation of the life of nature itself, the tangible embodiment of that spirit of nature whose cosmic action in the water, the earth, and the air, he had glorified in one of his youthful works, the frescoes of the Basle Museum. In such pictures he has no forerunners whatever in the more recent history of art. His principle of creation rests, it might be said, upon the same overwhelming feeling for nature which brought forth the figures of Greek myth. When the ancient Greek stood before a waterfall he gave human form to what he saw. His eye beheld the outlines of beautiful nude women, nymphs of the spot, in the descending volume of the cascade; its foam was their fluttering hair, and in the rippling of the water and spattering froth he heard their bold splashing and their laughter. The elemental sway of nature, the secret interweaving of her forces took shape in plastic forms--

"Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken, Alles eines Gottes Spur ... Diese Höhen füllten Oreaden, Eine Dryas lebt in jedem Baum, Aus dem Urnen lieblicher Najaden Sprang der Ströme Silberschaum. Jener Lorbeer wand sich einst um Hilfe, Tantals Tochter schweigt in diesem Stein, Syrinx Klage tönt aus jenem Schilfe, Philomelas Schmerz aus diesem Hain."

The beings which live in Boecklin's pictures owe their origin to a similar action of the spirit. He hears trees, rivers, mountains, and universal nature whisper as with human speech. Every flower, every bush, every flame, the rocks, the waves, and the meadows, dead and without feeling as they are to the ordinary eye, have to his mind a vivid existence of their own; and in the same way the old poet conceived the lightning as a fiery bird and the clouds as the flocks of heaven. The stones have a voice, white walls lengthen like huge phantoms, the bright lights of the houses upon a mountain declivity at night change into the great eyes with which the spirit of the fell glares fixedly down; legions of strange beings circle and whir round in the fantastic region. In his imagination every impression of nature condenses itself into figures that may be seen. As a dragon issues from his lair to terrify travellers in the gloom of a mountain ravine, and as the avenging Furies rise in the waste before a murderer, so in the still brooding noon, when a shrill tone is heard suddenly and without a cause, the Grecian Pan lives once again for Boecklin--Pan, who startles the goat-herd from his dream by an eerie shout, and then whinnies in mockery at the terrified fugitive. The cool, wayward splashing element of water takes shape as a graceful nymph, shrouded in a transparent water-blue veil, leaning upon her welling urn as she listens dreamily to the song of a bird. The fine mists which rise from the fountain-head become embodied as a row of merry children, whose vaporous figures float hazily through the shining clouds of spring. The secret voices that live amid the silence of the wood press round him, and the phantom born of the excited senses becomes a ghostly unicorn advancing with noiseless step, and bearing upon his back a maiden of legendary story dressed in a white garment. In the thundercloud lying over the broad summit of a mountain and abundant in blessing rain he sees the huge body of the giant Prometheus, who brought fire from heaven and lies fettered to the mountain top, spreading over the landscape like a cloud. The form of Death stumbling past cloven trees in rain and tempest, as he rides his pale horse, appears to him in a waste and chill autumnal region, where stands a ruined castle in lurid illumination. A sacred grove, lying in insular seclusion and fringed with venerable old trees that rise straight into the air, rustling as they bend their heads towards each other, is peopled, as at a word of enchantment, with grave priestly figures robed in white, which approach in solemn procession and fling themselves down in prayer before the sacrificial fire. The lonely waste of the sea is not brought home to him with sufficient force by a wide floor of waves, with gulls indolently flying beneath a low and leaden sky; so he paints a flat crag emerging from the waves, and upon its crest, over which the billows sweep, the shy dwellers of the sea bathe in the light. Naiads and Tritons assembled for a gamesome ride over the sea typify the sportive hide-and-seek of the waves. Yet there is nothing forced, nothing merely ingenious, nothing literary in these inventions. The figures are not placed in nature with deliberate calculation: they are an embodied mood of nature; they are children of the landscape, and no mere accessories.

Boecklin's power of creating types in embodying these beings of his imagination is a thing unheard of in the whole history of art. He has represented his Centaurs and Satyrs, and Fauns and Sirens and Cupids, so vividly and impressively that they have become ideas as currently acceptable as if they were simple incomposite beings. He has seen the awfulness of the sea at moments when the secret beings of the deep emerge, and he allows a glimpse into the fabulous reality of their heretofore unexplored existence. For all beings which hover swarming in the atmosphere around have their dwelling in the trees or their haunts in rocky deserts, he has found new and convincing figures. Everything which was created in this field before his time--the works of Dürer, Mantegna, and Salvator Rosa not excepted--was an adroit sport with forms already established by the Greeks, and a transposition of Greek statues into a pictorial medium. With Boecklin, who instead of illustrating mythology himself creates it, a new power of inventing myths was introduced. His creations are not the distant issue of nature, but corporeal beings, full of ebullient energy, individualised through and through, and stout, lusty, and natural; and in creating them he has been even more consistent than the Greeks. In their work there is something inorganic in the combination of a horse's body with the head of Zeus or Laocoön grafted upon it. But in the presence of Boecklin's Centaurs heaving great boulders around them and biting and worrying each other's manes, the spectator has really the feeling which prompts him to exclaim, "Every inch a steed!" In him the nature of the sea is expressed through his cold, slimy women with the dripping hair clinging to their heads far more powerfully than it was by the sea-gods of Greece. How merciless is the look in their cold, black, soulless eyes! They are as terrible as the destroying sea that yesterday in its bellowing fury engulfed a hundred human creatures despairing in the anguish of death, and to-day stretches still and joyous in its blue infinity and its callous oblivion of all the evils it has wrought.

And only a slight alteration in the truths of nature has sufficed him for the creation of such chimerical beings. As a landscape painter he stands with all his fibres rooted in the earth, although he seems quite alienated from this world of ours, and his fabulous creatures make the same convincing impression because they have been created with all the inner logical congruity of nature, and delineated under close relationship to actual fact with the same numerous details as the real animals of the earth. For his Tritons, Sirens, and Mermaids, with their awkward bodies covered with bristly hair and their prominent eyes, he may have made studies from seals and walruses. As they stretch themselves upon a rocky coast, fondling and playing with their young, they have the look of sea-cows in human form, though, like men, they have around them all manner of beasts of prey and domestic pets which they caress,--in one place a sea-serpent, in another a seal. His obese and short-winded Tritons, with shining red faces and flaxen hair dripping with moisture, are good-humoured old gentlemen with a quantity of warm blood in their veins, who love and laugh and drink new wine. His Fauns may be met with amongst the shepherds of the Campagna, swarthy strapping fellows dressed in goat-skins after the fashion of Pan--lads with glowing eyes and two rows of white teeth gleaming like ivory. It is chiefly the colour lavished upon them which turns them into children of an unearthly world, where other suns are shining and other stars.

In the matter of colour also the endeavours of Romanticists of the nineteenth century reach a climax in Boecklin. When Schwind and his comrades set themselves to represent the romantic world of fairyland an interdict was still laid upon colour, and it was lightly washed over the drawing, which counted as the thing of prime importance. But Boecklin was the first Romanticist in Germany to reveal the marvellous power in colour for rendering moods of feeling and its inner depth of musical sentiment. Even in those years when the brown tone of the galleries prevailed everywhere, colour was allowed in his pictures to have its own independent existence, apart from its office of being a merely subordinate characteristic of form. For him green was thoroughly green, blue was divinely blue, and red was jubilantly red. At the very time when Richard Wagner lured the colours of sound from music, with a glow and light such as no master had kindled before, Boecklin's symphonies of colour streamed forth like a crashing orchestra. The whole scale, from the most sombre depth to the most chromatic light, was at his command. In his pictures of spring the colour laughs, rejoices, and exults. In "The Isle of the Dead" it seems as though a veil of crape were spread over the sea, the sky, and the trees. And since that time Boecklin has grown even greater. His splendid sea-green, his transparent blue sky, his sunset flush tinged with violet haze, his yellow-brown rocks, his gleaming red sea-mosses, and the white bodies of his girls are always arranged in new glowing, sensuous harmonies. Many of his pictures have such an ensnaring brilliancy that the eye is never weary of feasting upon their floating splendour.

A master who died in Rome some nineteen years ago might have been in the province of mural painting for German art what Puvis de Chavannes has become for French. In the earlier histories of art his name is not mentioned. Seldom alluded to in life, dead as a German painter ten years before his death, he was summoned from the grave by the enthusiasm of a friend who was a refined connoisseur four years after the earth had closed over him. Such was _Hans von Marées'_ destiny as an artist.

Marées was born in Elberfeld in 1837. In beginning his studies he had first betaken himself to Berlin, and then went for eight years to Munich, where he paid his tribute to the historical tendency by a "Death of Schill." But in 1864 he migrated to Rome, where he secluded himself with a few pupils, and passed his time in working and teaching. Only once did he receive an order. He was entrusted in 1873 with the execution of some mural paintings in the library of the Zoological Museum in Naples, and lamented afterwards that he had not received the commission in riper years. When he had sufficient confidence in himself to execute such tasks he had no similar opportunity, and thus he lost the capacity for the rapid completion of a work. He began to doubt his own powers, sent no more pictures to any exhibition, and when he died in the summer of 1887, at the age of fifty, his funeral was that of a man almost unknown. It was only when his best works were brought together at the annual exhibition of 1891 at Munich that he became known in wider circles, and these pictures, now preserved in the Castle of Schleissheim, will show to future years who Hans von Marées was, and what he aimed at.

"An artist rarely confines himself to what he has the power of doing," said Goethe once to Eckermann; "most artists want to do more than they can, and are only too ready to go beyond the limits which nature has set to their talent." Setting out from this tenet, there would be little cause for rescuing Marées from oblivion. Some portraits and a few drawings are his only performances which satisfy the demands of the studio--the portraits being large in conception and fine in taste, the drawings sketched with a swifter and surer hand. His large works have neither in drawing nor colour any one of those advantages which are expected in a good picture; they are sometimes incomplete, sometimes tortured, and sometimes positively childish. "He is ambitious, but he achieves nothing," was the verdict passed upon him in Rome. Upon principle Marées was an opponent of all painting from the model. He scoffed at those who would only reproduce existing fact, and thus, in a certain sense, reduplicate nature, according to Goethe's saying: "If I paint my mistress's pug true to nature, I have two pugs, but never a work of art." For this reason he never used models for the purpose of detailed pictorial studies; and just as little was he at pains to fix situations in his mind by pencil sketches to serve as notes; for, according to his view, the direct use of motives, as they are called, is only a hindrance to free artistic creation. And, of course, creation of this kind is only possible to a man who can always command a rich store of vivid memories of what he has seen and studied and profoundly grasped in earlier days. This treasury of artistic forms was not large enough in Marées. If one buries oneself in Marées' works--and there are some of them in which the trace of great genius has altogether vanished beneath the unsteady hand of a restless brooder--it seems as if there thrilled within them the cry of a human heart. Sometimes through his method of painting them over and over again he produced spectral beings with grimacing faces. Their bodies have been so painted and repainted that whole layers of colour lie upon separate parts, and ruin the impression in a ghastly fashion. Only too often his high purpose was wrecked by the inadequacy of his technical ability; and his poetic dream of beauty almost always evaporated because his hand was too weak to give it shape.

If his pictures, in spite of all this, made a great effect in the Munich exhibition, it was because they formulated a principle. It was felt that notes had been touched of which the echo would be long in dying. When Marées appeared there was no "grand painting" for painting's sake in Germany, but mural decoration after the fashion of the historical picture--works in which the aim of decorative art was completely misunderstood, since they merely gave a rendering of arid and instructive stories, where they should have simply aimed at expressing "a mood." Like his contemporary Puvis de Chavannes in France, Marées restored to this "grand painting" the principle of its life, its joyous impulse, and did so not by painting anecdote, but because he aimed at nothing but pictorial decorative effect. A sumptuous festal impression might be gained from his pictures; it was as though beautiful and subdued music filled the air; they made the appeal of quiet hymns to the beauty of nature, and were, at the same time, grave and monumental in effect.

In one, St. Martin rides through a desolate wintry landscape upon a slow-trotting nag, and holds his outspread mantle towards the half-naked beggar, shivering with the cold. In another, St. Hubert has alighted from his horse, and kneels in adoration before the cross which he sees between the antlers of the stag. In another, St. George, upon a powerful rearing horse, thrusts his lance through the body of the dragon with solemn and earnest mien. But as a rule even the relationship with antique, mythological, and mediæval legendary ideas is wanting in his art. Landscapes which seem to have been studied in another world he peoples with beings who pass their lives lost in contemplation of the divine. Women and children, men and grey-beards live, and love, and labour as though in an age that knows nothing of the stroke of the clock, and which might be yesterday or a hundred thousand years ago. They repose upon the luxuriant sward shadowed by apple-trees laden with fruit, abandoning themselves to a thousand reveries and meditations. They do not pose, and they aim at being nothing except children of nature, nature in her innocence and simplicity. Nude women stand motionless under the trees, or youths are seen reflected in the pools. The motive of gathering oranges is several times repeated: a youth snatches at the fruit, an old man bends to pick up those which have dropped, and a child searches for those which have rolled away in the grass. Sometimes the steed, the Homeric comrade of man, is introduced: the nude youth rides his steed in the training-school, or the commander of an army gallops upon his splendid warhorse. Everything that Marées painted belongs to the golden age. And when it was borne in mind that these pictures had been produced twenty years back or more, they came to have the significance of works that opened out a new path; there was poetry in the place of didactic formula; in the place of historical anecdote the joy of plastic beauty; in the place of theatrical vehemence an absence of gesticulation and a perfect simplicity of line. At a time when others rendered dramas and historical episodes by colours and gestures, Marées composed idylls. He came as a man of great and austere talent, Virgilian in his sense of infinite repose on the breast of nature, monastic in his abnegation of petty superficial allurements, despite special attempts which he made at chromatic effect. Something dreamy and architectonic, lofty and yet familiar, intimate in feeling and yet monumental holds sway in his works. Intimacy of effect he achieved by the stress he laid upon landscape; monumental dignity by his grandiose and earnest art, and his calm and sense of style in line. All abrupt turns and movements were avoided in his work. And he displayed a refinement entirely peculiar to himself through the manner in which he brought into accord the leading lines of landscape and the leading lines in his figures. A feeling for style, in the sense in which it was understood by the old painters, is everywhere dominant in his work, and a handling of line and composition in the grand manner which placed him upon a level with the masters of art. A new and simple beauty was revealed. And if it is true that it is only in the field of plastic art that he has had, up to the present, any pupil of importance--and he had one in Adolf Hildebrandt--it is, nevertheless, beyond question that the monumental painting of the future is alone capable of being developed upon the ground prepared by Marées.

In this more than anything, it seems to me, lies the significance of all these masters. We must not lay too much stress upon the fact that they dealt with ideal and universal themes; a healthy art cannot be nourished on bloodless ideals, but only on the living essence of its own epoch. We must bear in mind, however, that a sound artistic principle has been formulated. A glance at the productions of classic art shows us that the old masters carefully considered the relation of a picture to its environment. Take, for instance, the Ravenna mosaics or Giotto's frescoes. They must needs resound in solemn harmony the whole church through; looked at from any point of view they must make their presence felt right away in the farthest distance: so both Giotto and the mosaic artists worked only in broad expressive lines, their forcible colour-schemes were fitted together in accordance with strict decorative laws. All naturalistic effects are avoided, all petty detail is left out in the flow of the drapery as well as in the structure of the landscape. Then the clear outlines tell out. The pictures must, when viewed from a distance, simultaneously, in all their lines, carry on the lines of the building.

Later on, in the Netherlands, there arose another style of painting. In abrupt contrast to the monumental works of the Italian school we have Jan van Eyck's tiny little pictures painted with a fine point, stroke by stroke, with the most minute exactitude. Every hair in the head, every vein in the hands, every ornament in the costume is drawn true to life. Jan van Eyck knew what he was about with this fine-point style of art, for his pictures did not lay claim to any effect from a distance; they were meant to be looked at, like miniatures in the prayer-books, from the closest point of view possible. They were little domestic altar-pieces: when anyone wanted to look at them, he drew the curtain aside and knelt or stood just in front of them. The style of painting of the later Dutch cabinet pictures is accounted for in the same way. These paintings were generally placed on an easel, as if to give the spectator a gentle hint, "If you wish to fully appreciate the beauties of this little picture, please stand right in front." Even when the pictures were meant to adorn the walls, the minute and dainty style of a Don or a Mieris was appropriate, for the narrowness of the old Dutch rooms precluded all possibility of the spectator's being able to stand far away from the picture.

If by chance one of these Dutch artists, Weenix for instance, had to do work for a Flemish palace, he changed his style forthwith. He recognised the fact that a picture, to be effective in a large state-room, must differ not only in size, but in composition and style of painting from one that is meant for a small parlour. It is undoubtedly this lack of appreciation of the fact that a picture must be suitable to its surroundings that has robbed the nineteenth century of any claim to style. What abominable daubs mural painters have foisted upon us in our public buildings! The literary trend of the time drew away people's attention from the beauty of form and colour, and centred it upon the didactic value of the works. Instead of starting from the idea that a picture should "adorn," they covered the walls with historical genre painting, never troubling themselves about decorative effect, and offered the beholder instructive stories in picture cards. As to art in the home, well, we can all of us remember the time when small photographs and etchings, instead of being kept in an album or a portfolio, were put on the wall, where they looked like mere spots of dead black and white. It was the same sort of thing in galleries and exhibitions, confusion worse confounded. On one and the same wall you got the most heterogeneous collection, cabinet pictures by Brouwer or Ostade next to an enormous altar-piece by Rubens, a gigantic Delacroix flanked by neat little Meissoniers. In this way the power of appreciating the significance of a work of art as part of the decoration of a room was totally lost. Surely it is not to be wondered at that a picture seen close to in an exhibition, bought, taken home, hung on the wall and looked at from a distance, turns out a meaningless chaos of dirty-brown.

In the province of mural painting the tendency towards an improvement set in earliest. In England, France, and Germany, almost simultaneously efforts began to be made with the object of restoring to mural painting once more its decorative element. In England Burne-Jones was the first to pay attention to harmony of style between picture and building. Before his time English churches were provided with stained-glass windows in a spurious sort of Cinquecento style that was absolutely unsuited to the building, but Burne-Jones satisfied the most exacting demands of the English Neo-Gothic architecture. All his subjects are brought into style with the slender pillars, the curves of the landscape as well as of the figures harmonise with the pointed arches of the building. Everything, colour as well as line, is so simplified that the pictures retain the clearness of their composition when seen from the farthest possible standpoint. In France, Puvis de Chavannes travelled by another road to the same goal. The decoration of the Pantheon was placed in his hands. Before him many artists had done work there, but the policy of all of them had been to adopt the old style of oil-painting to mural decoration, and so they adorned the Pantheon as well, though it was called a Grecian temple, with oil-paintings founded on Raphael or Caravaggio, mural pictures that would have been far better suited to a church of the Cinquecento or the _baroque_ period. Puvis was the first to realise that in the decoration of a building the artist must be strictly controlled by the style of the architecture; so in his frescoes he avoided all projections, all roundness, all wavy lines, bends, and curves, and dealt exclusively with groups of vertical and horizontal lines, that followed the characteristic lines of pillar and architrave. Similarly in the colours as well as the lines he excluded all detail that would distract the attention, all confusion of colours that would disturb the eye, and thereby gave his works the stately and dominant effect that they produce. Had Fate been kind, poor Hans von Marées might have won the same significance for Germany as Puvis did for France. Though individually his works are faulty, they are all informed with a marvellous feeling for style; one observes how beautifully the lines of the landscape are made to harmonise with the lines of the figures, and with what a finely decorative quality the colours are combined.

In a similar manner we must bring our minds to bear upon the problem of the framed picture in connection with the decoration of a room. Our rooms are not only lighter but more spacious than the old-fashioned Dutch parlours, with their leaded panes; so it was merely a hereditary taint in our painters that made them cling so long to the ancestral style of painting, in spite of the altered conditions of the lighting and size of modern rooms. Impressionism did at any rate bring colour more into harmony with the improved lighting of our rooms; yet in every art the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children. The Impressionists discovered atmosphere, and so they denied the existence of lines, and the outlines vanished into thin air; they discovered light, and therefore they likewise denied the existence of colours. Then by means of light the colours were analysed, and patches of colour were decomposed into a heterogeneous conglomeration of luminous points. The Impressionists simply revelled in the most delicate nuances of vague tones of indefinite colour, and as they eliminated from their work all significant lines and all strong and frank colours, they spoilt to a great extent the decorative effect of their pictures when viewed at a distance: their paintings from that standpoint are often nothing more than a daub of violet and yellow, without form and void.

Thus towards the close of the nineteenth century there came under discussion a new problem again in the matter of picture painting. The question arose as to how decorative qualities might be arrived at in painting pure and simple. The way seems to be pointed out in the works of Moreau and Boecklin; the way in which they placed side by side beautiful strong colours in broad masses, and invariably so as to avoid all discord, and combined the most conflicting tones into a harmonious whole in a manner which words fail one to describe. It was delightful, after having looked so long at nothing but the subtle, delicate nuances of the Impressionists, to turn again to these full-toned colours ringing out their deep and mighty harmonies.

It is scarcely to be wondered at that the younger generation of the present day refused to be bound by the principles of art laid down by their predecessors, notwithstanding the fact that Moreau, as well as Boecklin, was indebted to the Quattrocento for the mosaic-like brilliancy of his colours. Impressionism has discovered a whole range of new colour values by careful and intelligent study of the influence of light upon colour, and where formerly we saw ten we now find a hundred. Red, green, blue have lost their meaning in the category of complex and infinitely differentiated tones. So, as we advance from a realistic transcript of impressions taken direct from nature to free, symphonic compositions of the colours to which Impressionism has opened our eyes, we shall evolve harmonies richer than were ever imagined before, more melting than we ever dreamed of. This is the goal to which the efforts of the younger generation are primarily tending. Building upon the foundations laid by the Impressionists, they seek to ensure for their pictures both clearness and harmony, by simplification of form, by beauty of technique, and by subordination of colour to the decorative scheme. Their confession of faith is comprised in the words of Paterson: "A picture must be something more than garbled Nature: it must please the educated eye; and only so far as nature gives the painter his material can he or dare he follow her."