Job grieves at the downfall of his house; Hübner’s “Ruth,” because her weeping mother-in-law entreats her to depart; Stilke’s “Pilgrim in the Desert,” because his horse has died of thirst; Plüddeman’s “Columbus,” because he knows himself to be unworthy of the grace of God which enabled him to discover America; Kiederich’s “Charles V”, because he has retired too early to his monastery, and is plagued by the ticking of his watch. The Hohenstaufens, of course, appealed more to the pity of the public: the misfortunes of the beautiful Enzin, of Manfred and Conrad, gave birth to a sentiment of profoundest sadness. Even brigands mourn at the depravity of the world. The age had come to despise its own Philistine situation so deeply that it looked up to the brigands, the adversaries of civil order, as to representatives of justice. All depravity, it was said, originated with the public functionaries, and to the noble brigands was allotted the task of revolutionising existing things. Their ally in this was to be the poacher. At a time when a revision of the game-laws was the sole timid wish the people ventured to lay before its princes, it was only logical that the poacher should be looked upon as the victim of injustice, as the rescuer of the small man from the claws of feudal despotism. The numerous pictures that glorify him, as he falls weltering in his blood beneath the guns of the gamekeepers, make pendants to Raupach’s “Smugglers,” and to the rest of the highly esteemed literature which turned the life of the poacher into sentimental dramas or novels.

Fortunately we, in our days, find great difficulty in entering into the spirit which gave birth to these productions. A world lies between it and the present, just as between the Germany of to-day and the Germany of 1830. Men of the younger generation, who were still at school when Bismarck spoke his word of blood and iron, can hardly understand how this modern, realistic Germany can have been, two generations ago, a sentimental Germany. Now the significance of the Düsseldorf school in the history of civilisation lies in the fact that they are the real representatives of that age of sentimentality. A generation that melted away in tearful dreamings must needs enthusiastically recognise its own flesh and blood in those knights and damsels, squires and pages, monks and nuns, who, infinitely amorous or infinitely religious, were all infinitely sentimental; and things that now only evoke a smile or a shrug must needs have moved them to tears. Look where you will, you meet the same world. It hung on the walls, it displayed itself in engravings, lithographs, and coloured prints; if one lay down for a siesta, one found a lovelorn knight and damsel or a praying nun stitched on the cushion; if one put one’s foot on a carpet, one trod upon noble hunting-dames on horseback, falcon on wrist; one carried them in one’s pockets on cigar-cases and handkerchiefs; the traveller and the cheap tripper took them abroad on their knapsacks.

Seemann, Leipzig.
BENDEMANN.THE LAMENT OF THE JEWS.

Technically, the pictures of this school were not without their merits. “The greatness of Michael Angelo” may not have been Bendemann’s, and Sohn’s carnations are far removed from “the melting colouring of Titian.” But as opposed to the one-sidedness to which fresco painting at Munich was given up, the encouragement of oil-painting at Düsseldorf must be looked upon as praiseworthy. These painters were the first in Germany to try again to learn how to paint in oils. The extreme artistic clumsiness that had reigned under Cornelius was followed by a period in which, under Schadow, earnest studies and serious work were devoted to an effort again to master a technical medium. Their friendly emulation led to surprising progress, which assured to the Düsseldorf school a technical superiority over all the other German schools of the period.

SOHN.   THE RAPE OF HYLAS.

If, nevertheless, their pictures have not maintained their position as vital works of art, it is due to the fact that they were produced under the pressure of that mechanical idealism which makes all their productions so utterly unattractive to us. The ideal “line of beauty” has turned the figures into bloodless shadows and washed-out theatrical forms. As philosophy was to Cornelius, so to the Düsseldorfers was poetry their Noah’s Ark. The interest aroused by the poet was their ally; the breath of the wind that set their boat afloat; the general poetical tendency made up for the deficiency in artistic interest. Had it not been for the support of the poets, their sugary, insipid figures would have from the beginning been unable to hold their own. For after having been retouched by “Idealism,” nothing vital remained in those romantic kings, fantastic knights, Jews, and stage princesses; nothing particular and characteristic in their generalisation, nothing generally human. With them a king is always an heroic prince in black harness, a woolly beard, and a scarlet cloak. A queen is represented as proud and dark, or tender and fair-haired. In the much-beloved “couples” from poems, characterisation goes no further than general contrasts: the brunette in red attire with white sleeves; the tender blonde with the complementary garment of pale violet; the one with luxurious embonpoint, the other languidly slender—men brown, women white, youths rosy. Knights wear silvery helmets with or without plumes; now with open, now with shut visor; sometimes they sit on poetic palfreys, now of slender, now of sturdy build. The only impressions they are subject to may be interpreted with the assistance of the plaster bust: honour, fidelity, love. And as sentiment and heroism are national virtues of the Germans, they are bound to show sentimental expression whilst killing their adversaries. Even the brigands are generalised lay figures. The Düsseldorf ideal of beauty aimed at a certain tender, vaguely graceful swing of outline that anxiously avoided all manly and strong, energetic and characteristic expression, all that could remind one of nature. They rejected Leonardo da Vinci’s advice, to tug at the nipple of Mother Nature, but looked upon her merely as their aunt; and for this, despised Nature took her revenge by making their figures shapeless and phantom-like. And as their “dread of painted stupidities” did not once bring them to make bold mistakes, we can neither praise nor censure their pictures, cannot enjoy them or take offence at them, but look at them sine ira et studio, with a lukewarm feeling of utter indifference.

[1] As is still the case in most of the German theatres, the programme changed every night. Two or three consecutive performances of one play remain a rarity.