CHAPTER VIII

THE LEGACY OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

It was reserved for two younger men to reach the aim that hovered in the far distance before Cornelius and the Düsseldorfians. And, by one of fortune’s remarkable freaks, the greatest German monumental painter of the nineteenth century came from the Düsseldorf, the greatest Romanticist from the Munich school.

Alfred Rethel was twenty-four years old when he received the commission to paint the frescoes in the Kaisersaal at Aachen, and had previously worked in the Düsseldorf Academy, and then with Veit at Frankfort. But the pictures are suggestive neither of his Düsseldorfian nor of his Nazarene training. The deeds of Charlemagne, the ancestor of the German Imperial dynasties, are nobly, and, at the same time, vigorously embodied in them. Rethel had studied the harsh strength of his Albrecht Dürer, but only as a kindred spirit studies his kin. Neither Cornelius nor Schnorr has depicted the old German heroic might and the vanished imperial grandeur, the great past, the iron Middle Ages, with such notable traits. How plain in his heroic greatness stands the mighty conqueror of the Saxons by the overthrown pagan idols; how simply and majestically does he march into conquered Pavia. What an inexorable and irresistible warrior he seems, as he rages amongst the Moors who flock round the cars of their idols; and with what grave phantom dignity does he gaze in death upon the young Emperor Otto, who has forced his way into his vault, and kneels trembling before the lifeless frame of his great forefather. There is no vestige of pose, nothing superfluous; everywhere simplicity, compression, lucidity. Only what is necessary is inscribed here, in the lapidary style. No meaningless phrase interrupts his narrative; the inner meaning is never sacrificed to any external beauty of line; his forms like his thoughts are severe and precise. He draws with a sure hand in crisp lines, like a writer who aims at the utmost brevity and so lays especial emphasis on his sentences and words. The self-revelation in these pictures is admirable—the illuminating clearness with which they tell what they have to say without the aid of any commentator, the directness with which they present in an artistic aspect the substance to be given. And with this substance the painting corresponds.

It is to be deplored that Rethel himself could carry out in colour only four of his designs, and that the completion of the rest was entrusted to the painter Kehren, who spoilt by his effort after charm of colour the collective impression of the series. The pictures painted by Rethel himself are, in the simplicity of their colouring, in remarkable accordance with the powerful style of his drawing. Rethel’s painting has something stern and grey, bare and sombre. He belongs to the stylists whose implement is rather charcoal than the brush; but he had, although no colourist, a free command of colour, and never committed any fault of taste, but with a remarkably sure instinct used colour in the mass, simply, but yet with significant effect. He might have been the man to create a monumental German art. A tragic destiny! Heinrich von Kleist, the greatest German poet of the post-classical age, who was chosen for so high a vocation, the creation of a new dramatic style, shot himself; and the giant, Alfred Rethel, was to end in madness. Barely forty years old was he when he walked by the warder’s side in the courtyard at Düsseldorf, picking up flint-stones, a poor, simple madman. Only two series of designs ensure, apart from the frescoes at Aix, the immortality of his name: “Hannibal’s Passage over the Alps,” and the “Dance of Death.” As a draughtsman, just as a painter of frescoes, he is the same Titan, sounds the same stern, manly note.

Here the heroic hosts of the Carthaginians stand anxious, yet resolved, at the foot of the grim Alpine pass; steep, beetling cliffs, precipice, ice and snow, tower before them. Now the climb begins, and the struggle with the fierce, barbaric folk of the mountains, who swing themselves on leaping-pole like wild animals over the gaping crevices in the ice. Yonder are men, horses, an elephant, hurled into the abyss; some have spitted themselves on jagged branches of trees in their fall, others twine themselves together in horrible coils; at last the most advanced have reached the heights, and the heroic figure of the commander points out proudly to them, as they breathe once more, the plains of Italy.

Over his second work there broods the shadow of that mental darkness which was to surround him. When, in the year 1848, the political storm burst over the soil of Europe, Rethel’s fantasy reaped a rich harvest. He drew his “Dance of Death,” represented Death the Leveller, who drives poor fools behind the barricades. The ghostly and spectral, that horror of death that breaks in upon us in the midst of life, had been the propensity of German art since Dürer and Holbein. Like them, Rethel loved the world of the diabolical, and similarly chose for his embodiment of it the sturdy, simple contours of the old German wood engravings. Death as the hero of revolution makes a commencement. There he rides as the town-executioner, a cigar between his lips, his scythe in his hand. He sits shambling in the saddle, his smock and tall boots dangle on his bony figure. Dressed like a charlatan, he excites the people before the tavern against the rulers, that he may earn his harvest at the barricade. He himself stands firm and proud, like a general on the field of battle, the flag in his hand, and the bullets of the soldiers whistling harmlessly through his bony ribs. But the artisans who follow him are not invulnerable as he is; the grape-shot sweeps them down off the barricade. The contest is over; triumphant, with a wreath of bay round his skull, mocking venom in his glance, Death rides with his banner unfurled across the barricade, where the dying writhe in their gaunt death-struggle, and children bewail their fallen fathers. The plate, “Death as the Assassin,” takes up the story of the outbreak of cholera at a masked ball in Paris. In terrified haste the dancers and musicians leave the hall. Only one mummy-like spectre, the Cholera himself, a shape of horror, keeps his ground, as though turned to stone, and holds the triumphant scourge like a sceptre in his bony hand. Death, in a domino, with two bones for a fiddle, plays a call to the dance; and beneath the awful sounds of his tune the people, stretched on the ground, in sick convulsions, grinning with distorted features, behind their jesters’ masks, twist and turn.

RETHEL.THE EMPEROR OTTO AT THE TOMB OF CHARLEMAGNE.

There is something of Th. A. Hofmann’s wild fantasy of the ague-fit in this picture,—something morbid, satanic, that suggests Félicien Rops; yet, at the same time, something so pithy and virile, and in form so compressed, well-balanced, and correct, that it brings the old Germans, too, to our recollection. And the reconciliation with which the series ends is pathetic. In the high steeple, lit by the rays of the setting sun, the grey old bellringer, his worn hands clasped in prayer, has fallen quietly asleep in his armchair. A calm peace rests upon his good, old, devout countenance. The thin hands, with their marks and furrows, tell a long tale of hard work, sorrow, and longing for rest. And the weary veteran has made a pilgrimage for the health of his poor soul, as prove the pilgrim’s hat and staff by the wall; and now Death has really come, the well-known presence indeed, but this time with no grin of mockery, rather in profound pity. In his ingenious manner of giving an expression of mockery, cold indifference, or compassion to the head of the skeleton, Rethel stands on a level with Holbein. To the old ringer, Death, who before had grinned so diabolically, is a gentle and trusted friend. Quietly and pensively he performs the task that the old man has done so often when he attended the departure of some pilgrim of earth with the solemn notes of his bell. Rethel himself had still to drag through many years in an obscure night of the spirit before for him, too, Death, as the friend, rang the knell.

RETHEL.THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PAGAN IDOLS.