That is what distinguishes him from his contemporaries. The other idealists of those years painted their pictures without hesitation and with the facility of a professor of calligraphy; they remembered, arranged their reminiscences, and rubbed their hands with self-complacency when they came near their model. They did not yet feel the throb of the nineteenth century, and impersonality was their note. Feuerbach, the neurotic brooder, was a personality. After a long mortification, the human spirit, the living, suffering, human spirit, celebrated its renaissance in his works. Under its influence the jejune painting of prettiness practised by others was changed to modern pessimism and sorrowful resignation. The more he gave way to these moods the more modern he became, the more he was Feuerbach and the further he departed from the works of art which were regarded by his contemporaries and himself as eternal exemplars. He has been reproached with oddities and strange eccentricities. The critics reminded him how far he departed from the lines of his models; indignantly they asked him why he, the pale, delicate, sick, neurotic, and overstrained man, the uncertain, faltering, and tortured spirit, did not paint like the blithe, improvising Raphael, like the jubilant and convivial Veronese, like the sensuous, exuberant Rubens. And Feuerbach himself becomes perplexed. Like Gros in France, he is conscious both of his strength and his weakness. He does not stand sovereign above the old painters, like Boecklin and those other idealists of the present. He runs through life in ever fresh astonishment at the novelty which is revealed to him in the works of earlier centuries. The nerves of this latter day vibrate, the blood of the nineteenth century throbs in him—yet he has the wish to imitate. The history of every one of his works is a fight, a desperate struggle, between the individuality of the artist, his own inward feeling, and the “absolute Beauty” which hovered beyond him cold and unpliable.

In his first drawings he begins boldly; one knows his hand and says: “Only Feuerbach can have done that.” And then one is able to trace, step by step, and from sketch to sketch, what pains he takes that the finished picture may be as little of a Feuerbach as possible. The personal and individual element in the drawings is lost, what is Feuerbachian in the composition, the personal contribution of the artist, is effaced, and finally there is produced in the picture the marvellous look of having been painted by a genuine old Venetian as a ghost. And Feuerbach felt the dissonance. He feels that he fully expresses himself no more, and also that he does not reach the level of the old masters. He adds borrowed, conventional figure, like the Boucher Cupids in the “Judgment of Paris”—figures against which every fibre of his being revolts—just to arrive at an outward resemblance to the old pictures, an impression of exultation and joyousness and the spirit of the Renaissance. And when he stands opposite his work he seems to himself like a gravedigger in a harlequin’s jacket. He scrutinises himself in despair, and one day comes to feel that his power of production is exhausted. Splendid and unapproachable, from the walls of the galleries, the art of the classic masters stares him in the face; and he enters into a dramatic life-and-death struggle with it. He will not be Feuerbach, and cannot become a Classic. The curtain falls and the tragedy is over. Such destinies have been before in the world, no doubt; but in our time they have multiplied, and seem so much the sadder because they never come to the average man, but only to great and peculiarly gifted natures.

Albert, Munich.
FEUERBACH.DANTE WALKING WITH HIGH-BORN LADIES OF RAVENNA.

These matters—a silent historical sermon—one reads, with the help of the Vermächtniss, out of Feuerbach’s works. There “his pictures possess tongues”; there comes out of them a sound like the cry of a human heart; the whole tragedy of his career becomes present—what he succeeded in doing and what remained unapproachable. Yet later generations, which will judge him no longer psychologically, but only as an artist, generations with which he no longer stands in touch through his ethical greatness, will they also feel this in the presence of his finished pictures? To them will he be pioneer or imitator, forerunner or continuator? Will he take his place by Boecklin and Watts, or by Couture and Ingres? It is perhaps a happy chance that in the history of art one sometimes stumbles upon personalities that mock at all chemical analysis. Feuerbach, at any rate, is a great figure in the German art of these years. His is a high-bred, aristocratic art, free from any illustrative undertone, and from loud and motley colour. It is true that his figures also pose, but never clumsily or without expression, never theatrically. At a time when declamation was universal he did not declaim, at least he never did so with a forced pathos; and it is principally this which gives him a very high and special place amongst the German painters of the transitional period. He is always simple, grave, majestic. Everything that he does has style, and that makes him so peculiar in an art which is so often petty.

HENNEBERG.THE RACE FOR FORTUNE.
(By permission of the Berlin Photographic Co., the owners of the copyright.)

But a different judgment is formed when one compares him with the French and the old masters. A meteor Feuerbach was not; for he stood on the ground of the Couture school, and raised himself later to yet greater simplicity, going back to purer sources, to the Venetians and the Romans. He is more austere and manly than Couture, but he is, as he stands in his finished pictures, a Roman of the Cinquecento, who has been in Venice; not an original genius of the nineteenth century, like Boecklin. Boecklin paints the antique figures in their eternal fulness and youth; but he is quite modern in sentiment and in his highly developed technique. Feuerbach in regard to technique stands now on French soil, now on Venetian or Roman; and in his sentiment he is an imitator of the Cinquecentists, or, if you will, a phenomenon of atavism. His writings and drawings show him concerned with the present, his paintings with the past. The modern temperament, artistically restrained, breaks out no more, the nerves have no rôle, no human sound is forced from his figures. He learnt through the spectacles of the great old masters to look away from everything petty in life, but he never laid those spectacles down. This modern man, who was so neurotic as a writer, sought as a painter, for the sake of the ideal, to have no nerves at all. Before many of his pictures one wishes for a fire; they make an effect so cold that one shivers. The quality in them which calls for boundless admiration is his splendid artistic earnestness. There speaks out of them a sacred peace. Yet, when he is set up as a pioneer, it must never be forgotten that he is not self-sufficient as, shall we say, Millet, but has attained his majesty of conception only in the leading-strings of masterpieces of a great period, and precisely in the leading-strings of those masterpieces from the numbing influence of which modern art was forced to set itself free, before it could come to the consciousness of itself.

GUSTAV RICHTER.   PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.

Together with Feuerbach—and having, like him, previously received enlightenment as to colouring at the Antwerp Academy—Victor Müller, of Frankfort, had gone to Couture in 1849. He resided until 1858 on the banks of the Seine, and was especially influenced by Delacroix, and perhaps also a little affected by Courbet. At least his “Wood Nymph”—a voluptuous woman lying in a wood—which first made him known in Germany in 1863, seems but little removed from the healthy realism and exuberant vigour of the master of Ornans. Otherwise, like Delacroix, he has occupied himself almost exclusively with Shakespeare. “Hamlet at the Grave of Yorick,” “Ophelia,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hero and Leander,” were pictures of a deep, sonorous glow of colour; the characters in them were seized with great intellectual concentration, and the surrounding landscape filled with that sombre poetry of nature which in the hands of Delacroix so mystically heightens the impression of human tragedies. Victor Müller was of a bold, uncompromising talent, full of southern glow and wild Romanticism; a powerful, forcible realist, who never sought the empty, sentimental, ideal beauty known to his age. In a period dominated almost from end to end by a jejune and rounded beauty, he gives pleasure by a healthy, refreshing “ugliness.” All the heads in his pictures were painted after nature with a religious devoutness; painted by a man who openly loved the youthful works of Riberas and Caravaggio. And just as surprising is the power of expression, the deep and earnest sentiment, which he attained in gestures and physiognomy. While Makart, in his balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, never got away from a hollow, theatrical affectation, Müller’s picture glows throughout with a sensuous passion that saps the blood. A new Delacroix seemed to have been born; an extraordinary talent seemed to be rising above the horizon of our art, but Germany had to follow to the grave her greatest offshoot of Romanticism before he had spoken a decisive word, just as she lost Rethel, the greatest son of the cartoon era, in the flower of his age.

Of the others who made the pilgrimage to Paris with Feuerbach and Müller, not one has a similar importance as an artist. Their merit was that they made themselves comparatively able masters of technique, and taught the new gospel when they returned to Germany. To their superiority in technique and colour, given them by a sound French schooling, they owed their brilliant success in the fifties. They were, at the time, the best German painters, and great at a time when ability was novel and infrequent. As soon as it became customary and commonplace, there remained little to raise them above the average.

RICHTER.   A GIPSY.