In fact, the attitude of sensible mankind in general towards landscape, as landscape, seems to have been pretty well summarized by the writer of the 104th Psalm, from whom, according to W. H. Rhiel, the Christian world, and especially the Teutonic part of it, seems to have derived much of their love of the beauties of Nature.[13]
What constitutes the artistic beauty in a painted landscape, then, is the mood, the particular human quality, that the artist throws into it. As the French painters say, a landscape is a state of the soul; and unless the particular mood or idea with which the artist invests a natural scene have some value and interest, and be painted in a commanding or ruler manner, it is a mere piece of superfluous foolery, which may, however, find its proper place on a great railway poster or in an estate agent's illustrated catalogue.
There is, on the other hand, another kind of love of nature, which dates only from the eighteenth century, and which is thoroughly and unquestionably contemptible. This also, like the above, is the result of association, and has nothing artistic in its constitution; but this time it is an association which is misanthropic and negative. I refer to what is generally known as the love of the Romantic in Nature, the love of mountains, torrents, unhandseled copses, virgin woods, and rough and uncultivated country.
In this love a new element enters the appreciation of Nature, and that is a dislike and mistrust of everything that bears the stamp of man's power or his labour, and therefore an exaltation of everything untutored, uncultured, free, unconstrained and wild.
This attitude of mind seems to have been unknown not only to the Greeks and to the Romans,[14] but, practically, to all European nations up to the time of Rousseau. As Friedländer says, it would be difficult to find evidence of travellers going to mountain country in quest of beauty, before the eighteenth century,[15] and the majority of those who were forced to visit such country, before that time, in their Journeys to foreign cities, describe it as horrible, ugly and depressing. Oliver Goldsmith is a case in point. Riehl declares that in guidebooks, even as late as 1750, Berlin, Leipzig, Augsburg, Darmstadt, Mannheim, etc., are spoken of as lying in nice and cheerful surroundings, whilst the most picturesque parts (according to modern notions) of the Black Forest, of the Harz, and the Thuringian woods are described as "very gloomy," "barren," and "monstrous," or at least as not particularly pleasant. And then he adds: "This is not the private opinion of the individual topographists: it is the standpoint of the age."[16]
Even in the Bible illustrations of the eighteenth century, we also find the same spirit prevailing. Paradise—that is to say, the original picture of virgin glory in natural beauty—is made to look like what moderns would call a monotonously flat garden, devoid of any indication of a hill, in which the Almighty, or Adam, or somebody, has already clipped all the trees and hedges, and carefully trimmed the grass.
You may argue with Riehl[17] that mediæval painters must have thought rough, wild and barren country beautiful; otherwise, why did they put it in their pictures? One low-German painter of the Middle Ages, for instance, painted a picture of Cologne, and, contrary to the genuine nature of the surrounding country, introduced a background of jagged and rocky mountains. Why did he do this, if he did not think jagged and rocky mountains beautiful?
In reply to this I cannot do better than quote Friedländer again, who on this very question writes as follows—
"At least the lack of a sense for the beauty of mountain scenery, which is noticeable in the poetry and travels of the Middle Ages, viewed as a whole, ought to lead us to suspect that this same sense could have been only very slightly apparent in the realm of pictorial art. But ought we not to ascribe the fantastic and romantic art ideal of the old masters, in landscape, rather to their endeavour to transfer the scene and figures of their pictures from reality to an imaginary world?... Even if historical painters like John van Eyck and Memling eagerly introduced jagged rocks and sharp mountain (which apparently they had never seen) into their backgrounds ... it is difficult to recognize any real understanding or even knowledge of the nature of mountains in all this; but simply an old and therefore very conventional form of heroic landscape which was considered as the only suitable one for a large number of subjects."[18]
But there is other evidence, besides that to be found in mediæval poetry and travels, which shows to what extent the particular sense for natural beauty, which I am now discussing, was lacking in the Middle Ages. Its absence is also illustrated by the arrangement of castles and other buildings. Mr. d'Auvergne, in his work The English Castles, more than once calls attention to this, and instances a tower at Dunstanburgh Castle,[19] which, though commanding a wildly romantic prospect, was selected for the vilest domestic uses.