For centuries it was fitting that progress should advocate exclusively the rights of the field; now, however, it is fitting that progress should advocate the rights of the wilderness together with the rights of the cultivated land. And no matter how much the political economist may oppose and rebel against this fact, the folk-lorist economist must persevere, in spite of him, and fight also for the rights of the wilderness.
THE EYE FOR NATURAL SCENERY[13]
By WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL
TRANSLATED BY FRANCES H. KING
In topographical books of the pigtail age one may read that cities like Berlin, Leipzig, Augsburg, Darmstadt, Mannheim are situated in "an exceedingly pretty and agreeable region," whereas the most picturesque parts of the Black Forest, the Harz Mountains, and the Thuringian Forest are described as being "exceedingly melancholy," desolate and monotonous, or, at least, "not especially pleasing." That was by no means merely the private opinion of the individual topographer but the opinion of the age; for each century has not only its own peculiar theory of life—it has also its own peculiar theory o£ natural scenery.
Numberless country-seats were built a hundred years ago in barren tedious plains, and the builders thought that by so doing they had chosen the most beautiful situation imaginable; whereas the old baronial castles, in the most charming mountainous regions, were allowed to decay and go to ruin because they were not situated "delectably enough." The Bavarian Electors at that time not only laid out splendid summer residences and state gardens in the dreary woody and marshy plains of Nymphenburg and Schleissheim, but Max Emanuel even went so far as to have another artificial desert expressly constructed in the middle of one of these gardens—whose walls are already surrounded by the natural desert. Karl Theodor of the Palatinate built his Schwetzinger garden two hours away from the magnificent dales of Heidelberg, in the midst of the most monotonous kind of plain. Only let a region be fairly level and treeless, and immediately men were bold enough to imagine that it would be possible to conjure up there, the most delightful of landscapes.
Even fifty years ago the upper Rhine valley—which is by no means without charm but is nevertheless monotonous in its flatness—was considered a real paradise of natural scenic beauty, while the middle course of the river from Ruedesheim to Coblenz, with its rich splendor of gorges, rocks, castles and forests, was appreciated rather by way of contrast. In the upper Rheingau at that time they strung out one villa after another; these are now for the most part deserted, while on the formerly neglected tracts of country confined between the mountains a new summer castle is being stuck again on the summit of every rock, or at least the ruins already, hanging there are being made habitable once more. Our fathers, who thought the upper Rheingau the most beautiful corner of Germany, decorated their rooms with engravings so much in vogue at that time, similar to Claude Lorraine's broad, open landscapes of far reaching perspective filled with peace and charm. From this classical ideal of landscape we have come back again to the romantic, and the cupolas of the high mountains have supplanted the leafy temples of Claude's sacred groves with their background of the infinite sea sparkling in the sunshine.
In the seventeenth century the watering-places situated in the narrow, steep mountain valleys—many of which have now fallen into decay—were considered, for the greater part, the most frequented and most beautiful; in the eighteenth century the preference was given to those lying more toward the plain; while in our day the watering-places in the steepest mountains, as in the Black Forest, the Bohemian Mountains, and the Alps, are being sought out on account of their situation. The court physician of Hesse-Cassel, Weleker, in his description of Schlangenbad, which appeared in 1721, describes the place as situated in a dreary, desolate, forbidding region, in which nothing grows but "leaves and grass," but he adds that by ingeniously planting straight rows and circles of trees carefully pruned with the shears they had at least imparted to the spot some sort of artistic raison d'être. Today, on the contrary, Schlangenbad is considered one of the mast beautifully situated baths in Germany; the "dreariness" and "desolation" we now call romantic and picturesque, and the fact that in this spot nothing grows but "grass and leaves"—that is to say, that the fragrant meadow-land starts right before the door, and that the green boughs of the forest peep in everywhere at the windows—this perhaps attracts as many guests at present as the efficacy of the mineral spring.
The artists of the Middle Ages thought that they could give no more beautiful background to their historical paintings and half-length portraits than by introducing mountains and rocks of as fantastic and jagged a form as possible, although the latter often contrast strangely enough beside a mild, calmly serene Madonna face, or even beside the likeness of a prosaically respectable commonplace citizen of some free Imperial town. At that time, therefore, savagely broken-up, barren mountain scenery was considered the ideal type of natural scenic beauty, while, a few centuries later, such forms were found much too unpolished and irregular to be considered beautiful at all. Even old historical painters of the Netherlands, who had perhaps never in their lives seen such deeply fissured masses of rock, liked to make use of them in their backgrounds. The rugged mountain-tops in many of the pictures of Memling and Van Eyck certainly never grew in the vicinity of Bruges. This type of natural beauty was therefore established by custom even in countries where it was not indigenous. In a picture by a Low-German artist which depicts the legend of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, the city of Cologne is to be seen in the background surrounded by jagged clusters of rocks. A portrayal, true to nature, of the flat country did not satisfy the sense of beauty of the artist, who surely knew well enough that Cologne does not lie at the foot of the Alps. On the contrary, if an historical painter of the pigtail age had been obliged to paint the real Alps in the background of an historical painting, he would have rounded them off, leveled them, and smoothed them down as much as possible.
Is it a mere accident that, in the whole long period of landscape painting from Ruysdael almost up to recent times, high mountains have so very seldom formed the subject of important landscape compositions? The eye for natural scenery at that period had turned away from the conceptions of the Middle Ages, and satiated itself with the milder forms of the hills and the plain. Even when an artist like Everdingen presents to us the rocky chasms and waterfalls of Norway he moderates the fantastic forms, and, as far as possible, tries to lend to the northern Alpine world the character of the hills of middle Germany. Joseph Koch, although he was a native of the high Tyrolese Mountains, could not get along half so well with the portrayal of the Alpine world as with that of the classicly proportioned regions of Italy which lay within closer range of the eye for natural scenery of the age; and Ludwig Hess would hardly have come upon his characteristic conception of the Swiss mountains by studying Claude Lorraine and Poussin, if he had not been obliged to climb up to the mountain pastures in order to purchase the cattle to be killed in his father's shambles. On these occasions he reckoned up on one page of his account-book the oxen bought, and on the other side sketched them, together with the meadows, mountains, and glaciers. It was also at this same time when the Romantic School began to pave the way for itself with the historical painters in Munich, that Johann Jakob Dorner abandoned the "heroic" style of landscape, as it was then called, and went over to the "romantic." That is to say, Dorner and his companions, who up to that time had imitated the forms of Claude Lorraine[14] as the best possible model, now went off into the high mountains of Bavaria and were the first to reveal once more this wild magnificent nature to the eye for natural scenery of their time, thus preparing the way gradually for a new canon of natural scenic beauty which approached that of the Middle Ages, just as everywhere the modern Romantic School went back to the Middle Ages for inspiration. The Genevese Calame in his Alpine wildernesses typifies so completely the eye for natural scenery of the present day that it is impossible to imagine that these pictures belong to a former age. In the startling contrasts of powerful, often rough, forms and extreme tones, a species of natural beauty is created that has equally little in common with the plastic dignity of a mountain prospect by Poussin or with the quiet peacefulness of a forest thicket by Ruysdael. In what a very different manner from that of Calame was this same Swiss scenery treated by the numerous artists who painted Alpine views at the beginning of this century! They tried almost everywhere to depress the high mountains into hilly country, and they furnish a lanscape commentary to Gessner's Idyls rather than to the gigantic scenery of the Alps as we conceive it at present. Nature, however, has remained the same, and also the outer eye of man; it is the inner eye which has changed.