All this goes to show that Max is the opposite of artless. He knows how to calculate an effect on the nerves with extreme subtlety, and most skilfully at times to give his pictures the attraction of the freshly printed newspaper. He appeals to compassion rather than imagination. He would set the heart beating violently. He triumphs generally by his subjects, and his effects are much purer in those few works in which he renounces the piquant adjunct of the demoniacal, the tragical, and the mystical, and becomes merely a painter. Amongst those works is to be reckoned that beautiful “Madonna” on the altar, painted in 1886, and so tenderly illustrating the verses of Heine—

“Und wer eine Wachshand opfert, Dem heilt an der Hand die Wund, Und wer ein Wachsherz opfert, Dem wird das Herz gesund.”

And so too does that charming “Spring Tale” of 1873, which breathes only of gaiety, happiness, and peace; a young girl sits under the blossoming bushes, and listens enraptured to the warbling of a nightingale.

Hanfstängl.
MAX.THE LION’S BRIDE.

Those pictures, the “mood” of which grows out of the landscape around—“The Nun in the Cloister Garden,” “Adagio,” “The Spring Tale,” and “Autumn Dance”—give Max a very high and peculiar place in the work of his period. He appears in them as a tender poet who expresses his emotions through a pictorial medium; as an adorer of nature of a soft melancholy and subtle delicacy, which are to be found in like manner only in the works of the Englishmen Frederick Walker, George Mason, and George H. Boughton. Nature sings a hymn to the soul of the painter, and through his figures it is breathed forth in low, vibrating cadences. A tender landscape of earliest spring gave the ground-tone to his charming picture “Adagio.” Young trees with trembling stems raise their slender crowns into the pale blue sky flecked with clouds. As yet the branches are almost naked; only here and there appears the embroidery of fresh yellowish green. And in this soft, tender nature which shyly reveals itself as with a slight shudder after its long winter sleep, there are seated two beings: a boy and his young mother—she looks almost a child—dreamily meditating. Their eyes look strangely into vacancy, as though their thoughts are wandering. Nature works on them, and a melancholy Warte nur balde runs through their souls. A spring landscape of blissful gaiety, where nightingales warble, butterflies sip at the flowers, and sunbeams play coquettishly round the budding rosebushes, is the Setting of the “Spring Tale.” Everything laughs and rejoices, shines and scents the air in the early sunlight. Pearls of dew sparkle on the meadows, gnats hum and leaves murmur. She thinks of him. All the joy of a first love-dream sets her heart quivering with a delicious tremor. In her heart as in nature it is spring. Yet even as a landscape painter Max generally has that tender, suffering trait which runs through his creative work elsewhere. Twilight, autumn, pale sky and dead leaves have made the deepest impression on his spirit. Thin, half-stunted trees, in the leaves of which the evening wind is playing, grow upon an undulating, poverty-stricken soil. The landscape spreads around with a kind of lyrical melancholy: a region which gives no exuberant assurance of being beautiful, but which, in its poverty, attunes the mind to melancholy; a region, however, which knows not of storms and loneliness, but is the peaceful dwelling of quiet and resigned men. These beings belong to no age; their costume is not modern, but neither is it taken from any earlier period. They do not act and they tell no story; they dream their time away meditatively and gravely. Max has divested them of everything fleshly and vulgar, so that only a shadow of them remains, a soul that vibrates in exquisite, dying, elusive chords. “The Autumn Dance” is such an unearthly picture, and one of indefinable magic. Children and women are dancing, yet one feels them to be religious dreamers whom a melancholy world-weariness and a yearning after the mystical have drawn together to this secret and sequestered corner of the earth. The pale, transparent air, the tender tints of the dresses, delicate as fading flowers, the flesh tint giving the figures something ghostly and ethereal—it all strikes a note at once blythe and sentimental, happy and sad. “The Nun in the Cloister Garden” is in point of landscape one of his finest productions. In the cloister garden, despite the budding spring, there reigns a disconsolate dreariness. On the thin grass sits a young nun, who follows dreamily the gay fluttering of two butterflies, which flit around at her feet. A black dress, harshly and abruptly crossed by a white cape, envelops the youthfully delicate form. The dying sapling on which she is leaning bends helplessly against the stubborn paling to which it is fastened with iron clamps. The weather-stained wall stretches along in a dreary monotonous grey. An old sundial relentlessly indicates the slow dragging hours. But the deep blue heaven, in which a pair of larks poise exulting, looks in across the wall, from which a scrubby growth climbs shivering in the breeze.

Graphische Kunst.
MAX.LIGHT.

In such pictures, too, Max has a morbid inclination to a mystical delicacy of sentiment. He gives what is real an exquisite subtlety which transplants it into the world of dreams, and his tender sense of pain perhaps appeals only to spirits of an æsthetic temper. He is the antithesis of robust health; and yet there lies in the excess of nervous sensibility—in the pathological trait in his art—precisely the quality which inspires the characteristic delicacy of his earlier works. Here is no pupil of Piloty, but our contemporary. In their anæmic colour his pictures have the effect of a song of high, fine-drawn, and tremulous violin tones, at once dulcet and painful. With their refinement and polish, their subtle taste and intimate emotion, so wonderfully mingled, they reach the music of painting. They paint the invisible, they revel in dreams. In a period which played only fortissimo, and was at pains to drum on all the senses at once with a distorting passion, Max was, next to Feuerbach, the first who prescribed for his compositions dolce, adagio, and mezza voce; who sought for the refined, subdued emotions in place of the emotions fortes.