Suddenly, all this is contradicted and reversed. Precisely where man's hand has been, everything is supposed to be polluted, unclean, and ugly; and rough, uncultivated nature, however rugged, however unkempt, is exalted above all that which the human spirit has shaped and trained.
How did this change come about?
To begin with, let it be said, that it was not quite so sudden as Friedländer would have us suppose. Long before the dawn of the eighteenth century, the very principles that were at the base of European life and aspirations—the principle of the depravity of man, the principle of liberty for liberty's sake, the principle of the pursuit of general truth; and finally, the principle that experience —that is to say, a direct appeal to nature—was the best method of furnishing the mind—all these principles had been leading steadily to one conclusion, and this conclusion Rousseau was the first to embody in his energetic and fulminating protest against culture, tradition, human power and society. And the fact that his doctrine spread so rapidly, that within fifty years of its exposition, with the help of men like Coxe, Ramond de Carbonnières, Étienne de Sénancour, Töppefer, Saussure and Bourit, it had practically become the credo and the passion of Europe, shows how ready the age must have been for the lessons Rousseau taught it.
All of you who have read the fulsome and bombastic praise of Nature, together with the bitter disparagement of the work of man, in such works as La Nouvelle Héloise, the Confessions, his letters to Monsieur de Malesherbes, and his Reveries of a lonely Rambler, will not require to be told the gospel Rousseau preaches.[20]
Suffice it to say, that he successfully created a love of the rough, of the rugged, the unhandseled and the uncultivated in the minds of almost all Europeans—especially Northerners, and that this love was rapidly reflected in landscape painting.
This new feeling for the romantic, for the unconstrained and for the savage in Nature, although it soon dominated art, was, in its essentials, quite foreign to art and to the artist. It had nothing in common with the motives that prompt and impel the artist to his creations. Its real essence was moral and not artistic; its fundamental feature was its worship of the abstract principles of liberty, anarchy and the absence of culture, which rude nature exemplifies on all sides; and it was a moral or scientific spirit that animated it, whether in Rousseau or in his followers.
Friedrich Schiller, who entirely supports Rousseau's particular kind of love for Nature, frankly admits this[21] in his able and profound analysis of the sentiment in question; whatever self-contempt, and contempt of adult manhood, may have lain behind Rousseau's valuations, Schiller brings all of it openly into the light of day, and in his efforts to support the Frenchman's school of thought, literally exposes it to ridicule.
One or two voices, such as Hegel's[22] and Chateaubriand's, were raised in protest against this thoroughly vulgar and sentimental attitude towards savage and wild phenomena; but they were unable to resist a movement, the strength of which had been accumulating for so many centuries in the hearts of almost all Europeans; and, ultimately, numbers triumphed.
Even the hand of man—of the artist—in a painted landscape, got to be a thing of the past. Realism—because it most conscientiously repeated that unconstrained and anarchical spirit which the romantic age loved to detect in matted weeds, in tangled and impenetrable coppices, in thick festoons of parasitic plants, in unhandseled brambles and in babbling brooks—became the ruling principle. Classical influence alone was able for a while to resist too rapid a decline; but soon we find Constable declaring in the early part of the nineteenth century, that "there is nothing ugly," and addressing aspiring artists in these words: "Observe that thy best director, thy perfect guide is Nature. Copy from her. In her paths is thy triumphal arch. She is above all other teachers; and ever confide in her with a bold heart:"[23] and a whole host of people following in his wake and applauding his principles.
Just as England by her influence had created Rousseau and his peculiar mode of thinking,[24] so, again, British influence was to show its power in the world of Art. The parallel is striking, but nevertheless true. In the years 1824, 1826 and 1829, Constable, whom Muther calls the father of landscape painting,[25] and whom Meier Graefe calls the father of modern painting,[26] exhibited in Paris, and his style soon became a dominant force.[27] Stendhal, though very much too moderate, was one of the first to raise, his voice against the lack of idealism (transfiguration, simplification) in these English pictures; but his efforts were of no avail, and he might just as well have shouted in the face of a hurricane.