In the full possession of these powers, which he acquired amid the elementary simplicity and heroic majesty of Roman landscape by constant intercourse with the great painters of the past, he determined in the summer of 1873 to accept an invitation from the Vienna Academy. His friends rejoiced. At last this worker, who had been abandoned in a foreign land, seemed to have found in his native country a place which offered him a new life. He was but little more than forty: yet all was so soon to be over. From Rome he came to the restless capital which had just lived through the birththroes of a new epoch; from the side of Michael Angelo to the side of Makart! The sketches for a series on the wars of the Titans, which he began after his arrival, promised the greatest things. They display a sureness and majesty which find no parallel in the German art of those years. But they were destined never to be completed.

Feeling himself, like Antæus, strong only on Roman soil, he lost his power in Vienna. Reserved, innately delicate, a mystical, ideal nature like that of Faust, and one which only with reluctance permitted to a stranger a glimpse of its inner being; in his life, as in his art, high-bred and simple, hating both as painter and as man everything overstrained or sentimental; in his judgment harsh, severe, and uncompromising, lonely and proud, he was but little adapted to make friends for himself. The indifference with which his study for the “Fall of the Titans” was received in the Vienna Exhibition wounded him mortally. Vienna, which is so much disposed to laughter, laughed. Criticism was rough and unfavourable. He left Vienna and went to Venice. The tragical fate of a party of voyagers, drowned as they were playing and singing together on a night journey to the Lido, gave him the motive for his last picture, “The Concert,” which was found unfinished after his death, and came into the possession of the Berlin National Gallery. On 4th January 1882 he died, alone in a Venetian hotel.

“Hier ruht Anselm Feuerbach, Der im Leben manches malte, Fern vom Vaterlande, ach, Das ihn immer schlecht bezahlte.”

So runs the epitaph which he made for himself. And posterity might alter it into—

“Hier ruht ein deutscher Maler, Bekannt im deutschen Land; Nennt man die besten Namen, Wird auch der seine genannt.”

However, one must not go too far. In familiar conversation Feuerbach once said of himself that when the history of art in the nineteenth century came to be written, mention would be made of him as of a meteor. So isolated, and so much out of connection with the artistic striving of his contemporaries, did he believe himself to be, that he held himself justified in saying: “Believe me, after fifty years my pictures will possess tongues, and tell the world what I was and what I meant.” In truth, he owes his resurrection less to his pictures than to the Vermächtniss. A book has opened the eyes of Germany to Feuerbach’s greatness, and since that time the worship of Feuerbach has gone almost into extremes. Throughout his lifetime—like almost every great artist who has died before old age—he was handled by the Press without much comprehension. The critics blamed his grey tones, the connoisseurs complained of his unpatriotic subjects or missed the presence of anecdote. His admirers were the refined, quiet people who do not praise at the top of their voices. He never met with recognition, and that poisoned his life. It is generous of posterity to make up for the want of contemporary appreciation. But when he is set up as a pioneer, whose work pointed out the art of the future, the judgment becomes one which a later posterity will subscribe to only with hesitation.

FEUERBACH.MOTHER’S JOY.

Feuerbach presents a problem for psychological rather than artistic analysis. Whoever has read the Vermächtniss feels the personal element in these works, sees in them the confessions of a proud, unsatisfied, and suffering soul, and in their author no son of the Renaissance born out of due season, but a modern who has been agitated through and through by the décadent fever. In his book Feuerbach appears as one of the first who felt to his inmost fibre all the intellectual and spiritual contradictions which are bred by the nineteenth century, and who cherished them even with a sort of tenderness, as contributing to a high and more subtilised condition of soul. He was one of the first who, in the same way as Bourget and Verlaine, studied moral pathology under the microscope, and who, with a tired soul and worn-out feelings, sought for the last refinement of simplicity. And this weary resignations seems also to speak from his pictures. Not one of the old painters has this modern melancholy, this air of dejection which hovers over his works. Even the ladies round Dante are filled with that sadness which comes over youth on the evenings of sultry summer days, when it is struck by a presentiment of the transitoriness of earthly things. It is as if these figures would all some day or other vanish into the cloister, or, like Iphigenia, sit lonely upon the shore of a sea, whither no ship should ever come to release them. And it is certainly not by chance that Iphigenia had such a hold upon the artist; he repeatedly set himself to render her figure afresh, and, later, Medea steps beside her as the impersonation of the still more intense sense of desertion which filled the artist’s spirit. The woman of Colchis, who sits shivering on the shore of the sea, chilled through and through by the consciousness of her abandonment; the daughter of Agamemnon, who in spirit is seeking the land of the Greeks, with the boundless sea spreading wide and grey before her, like her own yearning,—both are images of the lonely Feuerbach, who, like Hölderlin, the Werther of Greece, flies to a dreamy Hellas as to a happy shore, to find peace for his sick spirit. His “Symposium of Plato” has not that exuberant sensuousness, that mixture of esprit and voluptuousness, of temperance and intemperance, which marks the Athenian life under Pericles; nor has it the Olympian blitheness with which Raphael would have executed the subject. A breath of monkish asceticism is over every joy, subduing it. These Greeks have tasted of the pains which Christianity brought into the world. Or take his “Judgment of Paris” in Hamburg. Nude women life-size, Loves, southern landscape, gay raiment, golden vessels, brilliant ornament, beauty—those are the elements of the picture; and how little have such words the power to render the impression! But Feuerbach’s three goddesses have an uneasiness, as if each one of them knew beforehand that she would not receive the apple; Paris is sitting just as cheerlessly there. And by borrowing his loves from Boucher, Feuerbach has shown the more sharply the opposition between the Hellenic legend which he interprets and the funereal mien with which he does it. The blitheness of the antique spirit is tempered by the sadness of the modern mind. He tells these old myths as never a Greek and never a master of the Renaissance would have told them. Olympus is filled with mist, with the colouring of the North, with the melancholy of a later and more neurotic age, the moods of which are for that very reason more rich in nuances—an age which is at once graver and more disturbed by problems than was the old Hellas. Feuerbach’s pictures are octaves in the language of Tasso, but of a repining lyrical mood which Tasso would not have given them. The brightest sunshine laughed over the Greece of the Renaissance; over that of Feuerbach there rests a rainy, overcast November mood. Even works of his like the “Children on the Sea-shore” and the “Idyll” reveal a pained and suffering conception of nature, that tender and subdued spirit that Burne-Jones has; it is as if these blossoms of humanity were there to waste away in buds that never come to fruition, as if it were no longer possible to breathe into creation the true joyousness of youth. Even the five girls, making music out of doors, in the picture “In Spring,” look like young widows, putting the whole tenderness of their souls into elegiac complaints for their lost husbands.

Hanfstängl.
FEUERBACH.MEDEA.

To this resigned and mournful expression must be added the uncomfortable motionlessness of his figures. They do not speak, and do not laugh, and do not cry; they know no passions and sorrows which express themselves by the straining of the limbs. Everything bears the impress of sublime peace, of that same peace by which the works of Gustave Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, and Burne-Jones are to be distinguished from the ecstatic and sentimental tirades of the Romanticists. In Feuerbach’s works this is the stamp of his own nature. The antique beauty becomes shrouded in a mysterious veil; and life is illuminated as by a mournful light, which rests over bygone worlds. What heart-rending keenness is often in the effect of the melancholy tinge of these subdued bluish tones! That colour is the genuine expression of the temperament reveals itself clearly enough in Feuerbach. When he began his career, his head full of ideals and his heart full of hopes, his pictures exulted in a Venetian splendour, in full and luxuriant golden harmonies; as “joy after joy was shipwrecked in the stream of time” they became leaden, sullen, and corpse-like. As Frans Hals in his last days, when his fellow-creatures allowed him only the bare necessities of life, accorded to the figures in his pictures only so much colour as would give them the appearance of living human beings; as Rembrandt’s magical golden tone changed in the sad days of his bankruptcy into a sullen, monotonous brown, so a deep sadness broods over the pictures of Feuerbach,—something that savours of memory and remorse, the mournful atmosphere and dark mood of evening which the bat loves. Even as a colourist he has the melancholy lassitude of the end of the century.