Was it at all possible to make works of art out of such material? Perhaps it was. The real artist can do anything. What he touches becomes gold, for he has the hand of Midas. But just as certain it is that the “historical painting,” carried on by a joint-stock company, almost never got any further than stage pathos, tailoring, and glittering splendour of material. Like many another thing which the nineteenth century brought to birth, it was an artistic error, which countless persons paid for by the waste of their lives. The older art knew nothing of such a reconstruction of the past. If historical subjects were painted, the artists were almost throughout contemporaries of the subject that was to be treated; seldom did the materials belong to an epoch already past. But in both cases the work was done by immediate intuition, since even in the treatment of matters long gone by the painters never dreamed of painting them in the spirit of past times. They might depict Jews, or Greeks, or Romans, but they always represented their own countrymen in the surroundings and costume of their own time. The scientific nineteenth century made the first demand for historical accuracy. In dress and furniture this could be attained with the assistance of a cabinet of engravings and a work on costume. Whoever went to work in a very scientific spirit could even borrow from a museum the genuine costumes of Egmont and Wallenstein. But it was all the harder artistically to quicken into life the men themselves who had felt, lived, and suffered in the past. The painter could not proceed otherwise than by draping a modern, professional model, having consulted portraits, drawings, or busts, and having sought the aid of a peruke and false beard. An entirely realistic reproduction of this masquerade, however, made only too evident the contrast between the splendid old garment and the member of the proletariat who was dressed up in it. For, granted that men of the present have much in common with those of the past, every period has none the less its own type, even its own gestures, which no costume can make one forget. And speaking merely of general humanity, there is no question that a statesman at all times looked different from a professional model. In a very bad suit of clothes, but in one which, at any rate, fitted him, and in which he was able to behave himself naturally, the poor fellow came to the studio, to feel, for a few hours, in satin hose and a velvet doublet, like a carnival figure. Who was to give him the easy knightly bearing to play his part suitably to the occasion? It was not possible in this way ever to attain the naturalness and fulness of life of the old painters. In Terborg’s “Peace of Westphalia” everything is genuine and true and simple; here wig and woollen beard have got the upper hand. And if the painter proceeded not as a theatrical tailor, but as an historian of civilisation, the result was an archaic dryness. For then he was merely thrown back on the great masters of those periods in which the action took place, and, while he enlarged and coloured old busts or engraved portraits, his art was only second-hand.
And so the only way out of the difficulty was to use the model, but to idealise him by generalising and sinking the individual in the universally human, noble, and heroic. In this way the remarkable family likeness of all these heads becomes comprehensible, and it is still further heightened by that preference for a monotonous type of beauty which, from the period of Classicism, entered, as it were, into the blood of these painters. The human physiognomy, in reality so various, had then only one mask for the many characters which life creates. There was a fear of “ugliness,” as if it were a spot of dirt, and the personages portrayed received, one and all, an icy trait of “the Beautiful.” The various Egmonts, Wallensteins, and Charles the Firsts of Gallait and Bièfve, Delaroche, and Piloty have not the blood of human beings, they have not the scars which are made by fate, but are all alike in their Byronic turn of the head. One knows the so-called character-heads—Luther gazing upwards with the look of one strong in faith, Columbus discovering America, and Milton in whose head are seething all the thoughts which dying men are wont to have in their last moments,—one knows them as thoroughly by heart as one knows all the opened folios and overturned settles, the picturesquely draped tapestry reserved for tragic funereal service, and that little box, covered with brass and catching the flashing lights, which constitutes in Belgium, France, and Germany the iron casket of all historical pieces. In the place of the inward Shakespearian truth of the figures, peculiar to the old masters, is the outward truth of costume; and the historical “property man,” whose highest aim is to “dress” the great moments of universal history in the prescribed manner, has stepped into the place of the artist. In the works of the old masters the historical figures stand out with sincerity as characters of flesh and blood, despite the want of “local colour,” whilst in the moderns the costumes certainly are correct, but the figures are so much the less credible and vital. “Beautiful may be the folds of the garment, but more beautiful must be that which they contain.”
Clothes do not make people, and costumes heighten no passions. Thus difficulties were heaped on difficulties, when impassioned situations and moments of dramatic intensity were to be painted. Whoever has reached that height of artistic power where the artist may with impunity put his model out of his head—like Delacroix, grand, volcanic, stormy, and excited to a fever heat by his inspiration,—that man will be capable of giving the effect of truth to such scenes, and of running through the whole gamut of emotion with a crushing power of conviction. But the joint-stock historical painter had to get his models to pull faces, and then no less laboriously to render with his oils those grimaces so laboriously produced. Hence the monotonous and petrified histrionic ecstasy of these pictures, the noble indignation put on for show, and that distressing gesticulation. As the actor gives emphasis to his words far more by gestures than is the case in ordinary life, so here also the artificially impassioned air of the heads was conventionally interpreted by corresponding motions of the arms. And thus the closing tableau was made ready: the dancers lay their hands on their hearts with tender and deep feeling; the tenor heroes sing that they are prepared to die; the tyrants let their deep basses vibrate, and the orchestra rages, to close with a shattering chord at the moment when the hero sets his foot upon the chest of the traitor; then come the Bengal lights, and then the curtain falls. What a spectacle!—but, alas, a spectacle and nothing more. All the emotions are artificial; they are opera emotions: the painters are only clever fellows, manufacturers of librettos and gay canvas; they show a great deal of knowledge and dexterity, but they have only a head and no heart. Stage requisites and professional models can never take the place of the free, creative force of imagination.
And if German pictures of this sort have an effect almost more insincere and theatrical than the French, the reason probably is that gesture—that external aid to the expression of feeling—is always more natural to the Latin than the Teutonic races, and has therefore, of itself, an effect of affectation in every German picture. We know that Bismarck, the Teuton incarnate, even in the most excited of parliamentary speeches, never made any other movement than to rap nervously with his pencil. “The German only becomes impassioned when he lies.” The most genuine masters of German blood have felt that right well, and they have been honest enough to say it out. A pervading trait of old German art is simplicity, the avoidance of everything impassioned even in the grandest conception, such as Dürer has. If in Leonardo’s “Last Supper” terror, indignation, curiosity, and sorrow are reflected by twelve heads and twenty-four hands in movements of agitation which are always new, in Dürer’s woodcut all the limbs and senses of the disciples are paralysed at the sorrowful revelation of the Saviour; it seemed to them desecration to break the solemn, oppressive stillness by noisy utterances of opinion and hasty gestures. And the same thing is to be remarked in every similar picture of Rembrandt’s; here too are only quiet and subdued movements, delicate suggestions and silence. The effect is great and sublime, the features of the Saviour earnest and expressive, but His mien is without any ecstatic emphasis such as a painter of Romance blood would have given Him. Only in the nineteenth century—partly through imitation of the Italians in Cornelius and Kaulbach, and then through imitation of the French in Piloty and his disciples—has this impassionedness, so opposed to German nature, entered into German art; and it has borrowed from the opera the distortions by which it has expressed the agitations of the spirit. No one works with impunity against the grain of his temperament. Exaggerated and violent movements, “ostentatious gestures of false dignity,” have replaced the natural expressions of life.
Less pose, parade, and theatricality, more ease, truth, and quietude; less insipid, generalised “beauty,” more forcible, characteristic “ugliness”: if art was not to be drowned in a surge of phrases, this was the path to be taken; and the transition was accomplished in “the historical picture of manners.”
CHAPTER XV
THE VICTORY OVER PSEUDO-IDEALISM