Schwind, too, painted frescoes, and in them he is very unequal. All his life long he complained of the lack of important commissions; it was fortunate for him that he did not get more of them. Such a painter as he can execute no orders but his own,—just as good poems do not come to order. A long list of wall paintings—the Tieck room and the figure-frieze in the Habsburg Hall of the new palace at Munich, the frescoes in the Kunsthall and in the Hall of Assembly of the Upper House at Karlsruhe, those in the Castle of Hohenschwangau, even the theatre pieces in the loggia and in the foyer of the Vienna Opera House—could be easily struck out of Schwind’s work, without detriment to his reputation. Only when the subject permitted him to strike a simple note of fairy music was he charming even in his wall-paintings, and therefore those which depict scenes from the life of St. Elizabeth in the Wartburg are rightly the most celebrated. Like Rethel in the field of the heroic, so Schwind in that of romantic legend reached the goal which the former kept before his eyes, for the revivifying of the time when there was an enthusiasm for fresco painting. His paintings are poor in colour, motley, magic-lantern views in the style of the heraldically treated figures seen in the frescoes and stained glass of the Romanesque and early Gothic Middle Ages, and yet in every line as delightful as the man himself. Nowhere do we find glaring contrasts, nowhere any violent agitation in the expression of the faces. It is by the avoidance of all landscape accessories, and by a hardly noticeable change in the simple plant-ornamentation in the background, that the events represented are made to lose touch with actual reality. In the first picture, bright-hued birds flit here and there among the rose-branches forming the decorative work; in that which treats of St. Elizabeth’s expulsion, the Wartburg rises in the background, while little singing angels are perched upon the boughs of the bare winter-stripped trees that overlook the miserable cell in which St. Elizabeth dies. A touch of the true-heartedness of the ancient Teuton, a breath of peacefulness, permeates Schwind’s Wartburg pictures like the waft of an angel’s wings.

MORITZ SCHWIND.   Graphische Künste.

Schwind, like Rethel, is numbered among the few artists of that period who were able to preserve their absolute simplicity against the great painters of Italy. “I went into the Sistine Chapel,” he says of his journey to Rome, “gazed upon Michael Angelo’s work, and sauntered back home to work at my ‘Ritter Kurt.’ I take the greatest possible pleasure in my present picture, although the subject is absolutely crazy. I love to paint trees and rocks and old walls, and I have put plenty of them into it, besides a fellow on horseback and in full armour. What does it matter? One must work according to one’s natural capacity. Even at the time when I was studying at Munich I came to the conclusion that that of which the mind of itself takes hold, and that which takes hold of it, is the one only right thing for every man who has a vocation. Art consists of this unconscious taking hold and being taken hold of. Deus in nobis. And therefore the young artist will do well to be careful in visiting the museums. You go to the galleries where the works of the great masters are to be seen. There you see, all at once and all together in confusion, works of every school and of every era. It is extremely likely that you are overwhelmed by the mass, and beauties of every kind, belonging to tendencies and epochs altogether diverse, shake the ground under your budding vocation, and like fifty various climates influencing a single plant, arrest a growth which is possible only in one, and that a favourable one. The imitation of the Italians in especial can as a rule have only the effect of estranging us from our own individuality, a fact which was once again fully borne in upon me when I saw Overbeck’s new altar-piece in the Cathedral of Cologne. It may sound severe and uncalled-for from me, but every man who has forgotten his mother-tongue is tottering on his feet. The imitation of foreigners is the dangerous blind alley into which our art has betaken itself. When I exhibited ‘Ritter Kurt’ people said, ‘It is Old German,’ and forthwith it stood condemned, as if that were a disgrace, and as if one should not rather have saluted the fact with joy, as the right thing for us Germans. The art of painting which I follow is the German, and glass-painting must be taken as its foundation.”

SCHWIND.FROM THE WARTBURG FRESCOES.SCHWIND.FROM THE WARTBURG FRESCOES.

In Schwind one might imagine an old German master of the race of Albrecht Altdorfer come to life again. In the small, simple pictures of landscape and fairy-tale, which Count Schack has collected in his private gallery for the quiet and devout enjoyment of thousands, he has given us his best work as a painter.

Yet even his pictures have the failings of his time. Compared with Dürer, he seems like a gifted amateur; there are manifold empty, dead spaces to be observed among his figures; their action is at times misconceived and puppet-like; and his sense of colour was always limited. One may be permitted to look forward to some master, at the head of a coming epoch in art, who shall combine with Schwind’s German fairy imagination the sensuous, dashing colour-elf that possessed Bœcklin. There might a school of art arise, to follow for the future the path which Franz Stuck has struck out. As to technique, Schwind was a child of the cartoon era; as regards tenderness of feeling, he is a modern. It is difficult to persuade a non-German of Schwind’s greatness, in presence of the pictures; but when they are reduced to black-and-white they appeal to every one. The heliogravure enables one to imagine what the original does not show; it incites the soul to further poetic creation, it announces what Schwind would be were he alive to-day. An elfland kingdom of enchantment, full of genuine poetry and beauty, opens out before us; a fairy garden, where the “blue flower” pours forth the whole of its sense-benumbing perfume. Count von Gleichen; the boy’s miraculous horn; the mountain spirit Rübezahl, wandering along through the wild mountain forest; the hermits; the elves’ dance; the erlking; the knight and the water nymph,—they are flooded with all the enchantment of Romanticism, they possess deep feeling without mawkishness, the old-German note of fairy legend and Hans Memlinc’s childlike simplicity, yet at the same time the life of the present day, full of feeling and rich in delicate shades. How strong and brave are the men; how tender, noble, and charming the women! What a modest, maidenly art it is! just as its master was an innocent, harmless, and joyous being.

SCHWIND.   WIELAND THE SMITH.

His works, in comparison with those of his contemporaries, who were devising systems by means of which art should be brought back to the classical, bear the stamp of naïve creations in which no hypocrisy, no decorative nothingness finds expression. As against the erudite treatises of the Cornelius school, they preached for the first time the doctrine, that in works of art what is important is not the quantity of learning displayed therein, but the quality of the feeling exhibited. With all their inequalities, all their incorrectness, all their weak points, they are inspired, sung, dreamed, and not put together in cold blood according to recipes: in them is the pulsation of a human heart, a tender human heart full of delicate feeling. This it is which constitutes his magical attraction to-day, which makes him the firm bond of connection between the moderns. He was no imitator, no soulless calligraphist performing laborious school exercises after the manner of the old masters; he spoke the language of his time.

He was one of the first who at that time laid aside the prejudice against modern costume, and in his “Symphony” turned to artistic account, in one fantastic whole, even Franz Lachner’s frockcoat and Fräulein Hetzenecker’s modern society toilette. “If you may paint a man hidden in an iron stove—what is called a knight in armour—you may still more permissibly paint a man in a frockcoat. In general, one can paint what one will, provided always that one wills what one can.” And it was only by means of this present-day temper that Romanticism could find so full-toned an expression in his works. Only because he was truly a citizen of the present day and felt its blood beating in his veins, could he feel the congenial elements of the past. To him the old-time legends were no antiquarian, erudite, pedantic lumber; they were a part of himself, and he interpreted them in more childlike simplicity of manner and with more delicate feeling than any artist of former times, because he observed them with the eye of the present age, with an eye made keen with longing. Just as in his “Wedding Journey” he raised all reality into the poetry of purest romance, so is his Romanticism saturated with a sense of reality charged with memories of home. Out of his fairy-tale pictures is breathed a charming fragrance of the long-vanished days of earth’s first springtide, and yet for that very reason a breath of the most modern Décadence. He is distinguished from Marées and Burne-Jones, from Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, by a very unmodern attribute—he is bursting with health. He is still naïvely childlike, free from that elegiac melancholy, that temper of weary resignation, which the end of the nineteenth century first brought into the world.