In the middle of a wood of lofty beeches in Bernrieder Park, on the Starnberger See, there stands a small rotunda, within is a prattling fountain, right round the walls runs a frieze, depicting the legend of the “Beautiful Melusina.” It is Schwind’s monument. With him German Romanticism perished; reality itself had now become so marvellous. When, in 1850, Hübner had to paint a figure of Germania for a page in King Ludwig’s album, he depicted a queenly woman, prone on the ground, with her face in the dust, amidst a desolate landscape and under a cloudy sky. The crown has fallen from her head and a skull lies by her side, while on the frame are inscribed these words from the Book of Lamentations: “Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people; the crown of our head is fallen.” When Schwind died, Germany had re-arisen. In the very year of his death, Lenbach painted his first Bismarck pictures: in Bismarck was embodied that power by means of which the dream of a nation was fulfilled.

Albert, Helio.
SCHWIND.NYMPHS AND STAG.SCHWIND.RUBEZAHL.

Thus Schwind’s works are not only the sign of a completed period in German history, but also at the same time both the climax and the conclusion of an art-epoch. Schwind had lived through the entire revolution which German painting had at that time undergone. At his death the sound of the hunting horns of Romanticism had died away. He had lived long enough to have the opportunity of criticising neatly, as follows, the dry, unpoetical school of historical painting then making its appearance, as if introduced by gaudily costumed models, a school which made its first hit with Lessing’s “Ezzelino”: “I will explain the picture to you. Ezzelino is seated in his dungeon, and two monks are attempting to convert him. One of them recognises that all pains are thrown away upon the old sinner, and takes himself off, regretfully desisting from all further endeavour; the other still has hopes, and continues his exhortations. But Ezzelino only keeps his angry gaze fixed before him, muttering, ‘Leave me alone! Don’t you see that I am—posing as a model!’” He had had occasion to write to his friend Bauernfeld: “I have seen so many schools of so-called painting in my time that it is an absolute horror to me”; he had asked Piloty: “What calamity are you preparing for us now?” and had thought it his duty to address to one of the younger painters the question: “Are we then an academy of the Fine or of the Ugly Arts?” “A man like me, with his ideas, walks like a ghost amid the battle of the virtuosi, in which the whole life of art has gone astray,” he used sadly to say. His last wonderful works stand alone in a time which was dazzled by the flash of arms characterising the Franco-Belgian school of art. It was not till much later that Hans Thoma took up the threads which connect the work of Schwind with the present epoch. When he died he was a solitary, isolated man taking leave of a generation in which he had no part. The period of historical painting which followed him produced no single work distinguished by Schwind’s sense of fragrant legendary poetry. The charming forest fairy who had appeared to him showed herself to no other; like the betrayed Melusina, she had returned to rest again, solitary, in her fountain home. Fantasy, tender soul that she is, had taken wings, whither none can tell. “That is why nobody has a single idea,” as Schwind said in his drastic way. The Muse of Schwind, the last Romanticist, was a chaste, pensive, soulful maiden; while that of Piloty, the first colourist, was a noisy, bloodthirsty Megæra. Yet one can have no doubt as to the necessity of this evolutionary change.

Schwind himself is among the masters “who have been, and are, and shall be.” He was different from all that was arising around him; he embodied the spirit of the future, and exercises over the art of the present day so great an influence that where two or three painters are gathered together in the name of the beautiful, he has his place in the midst of them, and is present, invisible, at every exhibition. But he exercises this influence only spiritually. Young artists study him as if he were a primitive master. Enraptured, they find in him all those qualities for which there is to-day so ardent a longing—innocent purity and touching simplicity, a mystic, romantic submersion in waves of old-time feeling and a charming youthful fervour. They do not study him in order to paint like him.

“Our heads are full of poetry, but we cannot give it expression,” are the words with which Cornelius himself characterised this period. Germany had original geniuses indeed, but no fully matured school to compare with the French; as yet the Germans did not know how to paint. Up to this time the course of painting in Germany had been a bold but imprudent flight through the air; in its Kaulbach-like cloud-heights it had melted away to a shadow, only to fall again, somewhat roughly, to the ground. It died of an incurable disease—idealism. The painters of that time, one and all, had never become real artists; strictly speaking, they had always remained amateurs. He alone is a great artist in whom the will and the performance, the substance and the form, are in complete accordance. Painters who never knew exactly what is meant by painting, artists whose most noticeable characteristic was that they had no art-capacity, were only possible in the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany, where for that very reason they were admired and praised.

What now began was a necessary making good what had been so long neglected. For craftsmanship is the necessary presupposition of all art, which can no longer suffer any one to be called a master who has not learnt his business. In the atmosphere of incense which surrounded Cornelius in Munich, the dogma that salvation was to be found in German art alone, and that the German nation was the chosen people of art, had reached a height of self-adoration which came near to megalomania. In the proud enthusiasm of those times, great in their aims as in their errors, the Germans had as false an opinion as possible of the art of foreign countries.

In the very years when the first railways were ousting the old mail-coaches the mutual interchange of endeavour and ability between the various nations was slower and scantier than ever before. How German artists had wandered abroad in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in that great age when Dürer crossed the Alps on Pirkheymer’s pony, and when Holbein obtained from Erasmus letters of introduction for England! With what joy Dürer, in his letters and in his journal, gives an account of the recognition accorded him in artistic circles in Italy and the Dutch cities! Nearly all the German painters had, in the course of their long wanderings, made acquaintance with either the Netherlands or Italy. They knew exactly what was going on in the world around them. Dürer and Raphael used to send drawings to each other, “so as to know each other’s handwriting.” It was only in the first half of the nineteenth century that the Germans, once proud in the consciousness of possessing the finest comprehension of, and the greatest receptivity for, foreign intellectual wares, lived apart in timid isolation. Into the suburban still-life of the German schools of art not a sound made its way of what was taking place elsewhere. Only thus was it possible for the Germans to imagine that among all modern nations they alone had a vocation for Art. No one had the least idea that in England, the land of machines and beefsteaks, there were men who painted; and people went so far as to proclaim piety, morality, thoroughness, accurate draughtsmanship, and diligent execution the monopoly of German art; and superficiality, frivolity, and “empty straining after effect” the ineradicable national failing of that of France.

SCHWIND.THE FAIRIES’ SONG.

With some such ideas in their heads the majority of the German painters, in the autumn of 1843, found themselves confronted by Gallait’s “Abdication of Charles V” and Bièfve’s “Agreement of the Dutch Nobility”; two Belgian pictures which at that time were going the round of the exhibitions in all the larger towns of Germany. And it was not long before the belief in the old gods, which had for thirty years held sway in the city of King Ludwig, was completely undermined by the younger generation. “Even for the great gods, day comes to an end. Night of annihilation, descend with the dusk!” Diogenes expelled from his philosophic tub could not have felt more uncomfortable than the German painters in presence of the Belgian pictures. As till then the incapacity to paint had been belauded as one of the strongest possible proofs of the higher artistic nature and of genuine greatness, so now it was perceived that nevertheless, on the banks of the Scheldt and of the Seine, a much greater school of painting was in full bloom, and producing splendid fruit.