Here again as with Liebermann and Truebner the idea and the execution are in harmony, but with the Scholle painters the idea is apt to be a very simple one, depending upon straightforward representation for its impressiveness. Above all it reflects the national temper of mind, for all these individualists are German to the core and not to be mistaken for any other race.
One characteristic of this national temper is directness. Not necessarily simplicity, of course, since the German painter as well as the German writer has frequently complex thoughts to express and uses corresponding elaborations of expression. But he does not often say one thing while seeming to say another; he does not often give double and contradictory meanings to the same subject. He does not present for your contemplation the disheartening spectacle of sophistication masquerading as innocence, or duplicity masquerading as frankness. To that extent he is an optimist, however deep his native pessimism may go in other directions.
There is, for example, a picture by the French artist Jacques Blanche, entitled "Louise of Montmartre," and known to many Americans, in which the girl to whom Paris irresistibly calls is shown in her boyish blouse and collar, her youthful hat and plainly dressed hair, in a nonchalant attitude, pretty and plebeian, with honest eyes, yet revealing in every line of her frank and fresh young face the potentiality of response to all the appeals made by the ruthless spirit of the city. It is impossible to discern at what points the artist has betrayed that artless physiognomy in order to reveal the secrets of temperament, but the thing is done.
It is not what the German is interested in doing. His imagination works subjectively, giving form to his own conceptions, rather than objectively or as an interpreter of others. Hence the downright, and, in a sense, confiding aspect of so much of this brave art. Hence, also, its affinity with the American spirit, for the American still bends a rather unsuspecting gaze upon life and accepts character and temperament as they choose to present themselves. The German, however, is articulate and ratiocinating where we are more purely instinctive. We are not inclined to reason about our moods and we seldom are able to express them in our literature. In our art, on the other hand, especially in our landscape art, we manage to translate our subtlest emotion. We are able to suggest what is too delicate for analysis, and in this we stand almost alone in the painting of the present day.