Therefore does the peasant ridicule the city man who deceives himself to the extent of becoming enthusiastic over the beauties of a region which leaves the other quite cool. For he who has not something of the artist about him, who cannot paint beautiful landscapes in his head, will never see any outside. Beautiful nature, this most subjective of all works of art, which is painted on the retina of the eye instead of on wood or canvas, will differ every time according to the mental viewpoint of the onlooker; and as it is with individuals so it is with whole generations. The comprehension of the artistically beautiful is not half so dependent upon great cultural presuppositions as the comprehension of the naturally beautiful. With every great evolution of civilization a new "vision" is engendered for a different kind of natural beauty.
This goes so far that one might even be deceived into thinking that the different ages had gazed upon the beauty of nature not only with differing mental eyes but also with a different faculty of seeing. Most of the old masters have painted their landscapes with the eyes of a far-sighted person; we think, as a rule, that we can attain far greater natural truth if we paint our pictures, as it were, from the angle of vision of a near-sighted person. A far-sighted painter will usually be more inclined to paint a plastic landscape, while a near-sighted one would make a mood-picture out of the same scene. The very trees of the old Italians, on which the leaves are numbered, may serve to exemplify this comparison. The scenery of the landscapes of Van Eyck and his pupils is quite often painted as though the artist had looked at the background through a perspective glass and the foreground through a magnifying one. Jan Breughel paints his charming little landscapes with such detailed precision of outline, especially as regards foliage, he draws in his swarming little figures with such sharp lines, that the whole seems reflected in the eye of an eagle rather than in that of a man. On the other hand we miss the unity and the differentiation of the combined effect—the concentration of large groups, an eye for the landscape as an organic whole. Claude Lorraine and Ruysdael are the first who may be called epoch-making along these lines; they are also, in this sense, the ancestors of modern landscape painting. Where the old masters still counted the leaves, flowers, and blades of grass and laboriously imitated them, we have now adopted broad, general, and, to a certain extent, conventional forms of foliage, meadowland, and the like.
Taken separately, these are far less true to nature than the miniature imitation of detail. Taken collectively, on the other hand, they are far more profoundly true to nature and to art. Do we not at present sometimes see artists who almost seem to consider it their whole life's mission to paint landscapes which have scarcely any definite plastic forms, pure mood-pictures, as, for example, Zwengauer, who is never tired of portraying barren moorlands with some water in the foreground, a shapeless tract of land in the centre, and above the fiery glow of the sunset, which, with a considerable portion of atmosphere growing ever darker and darker, fills up the largest part of the whole picture. It is as though fire, water, air and earth, the four elements as such, were demonstrated before us on the Dachauer moor and combined to form a landscape harmony. For such pictures of mood, pure and simple, the old masters had absolutely no eye. If a painter of the fifteenth or sixteenth century should rise from his grave and gaze upon even our best landscape paintings he would certainly take very little pleasure in them; he would consider them daubs executed after a recipe according to which one can obtain the most beautiful foliage by throwing a sponge dipped in green paint against the wall.
It is not only the eye for natural scenery which has thus advanced in the last three centuries from the perception of the individual parts to the perception of the whole. We find the same phenomena in the case of historical painters, and no less in that of the poets, musicians, and scholars. A Bach suite, just like a Breughel landscape, has been, as it were, worked out under the microscope, and nowadays it is easier to find a hundred philosophers of history who are capable of constructing history as a "work of art"—exceedingly well on the whole—than one individual chronicler who would lose himself, with the dead leaf-counting diligence of bygone centuries, in endless detail-work. We look not only at landscapes but at the entire world more from the viewpoint of the harmony of the whole than from that of the divergence of the individual parts.
In helping us to gauge the eye for natural scenery of an age, the really artistic portrayals are often far less accurate than the fashionable articles manufactured, as it were, by the artistic handicraftsman, for the latter best disclose to us the eye of the entire public. Hence, for example, the popular passion for Rhine landscapes, Swiss pictures, Italian views, etc., mechanically executed after a fixed model—which periodically breaks forth only to vanish again—is more important for us in this respect than the conception of many a leader of genius in the art of landscape-painting, who may perhaps set the tone for the future but seldom for the present. There exist special directions for making a Rhine landscape and for infallibly bestowing upon it the genuine coloring of the Rhine, which appeared in the book-market about a hundred and fifty years ago, side by side with directions for preparing the best vinegar, the best sealing-wax, etc.—I do not know whether it was also sealed up as a secret recipe, as they were. By genuine Rhine coloring was meant that sentimental, mistily indistinct tone in the dullest possible half tints formerly so much in vogue. The fact that such a booklet could be written and sold with profit affords us instructive hints regarding the eye of the multitude for natural scenery in those days, and the tone of that infallible Rhine coloring is, in its way, also a color-tone of the age. Nowadays, when Alpine landscapes are painted even on the rough stones from the Alpine rivers (for paper-weights), it would be very easy to write out a recipe for genuine mountain coloring. Mountain peaks, rugged as possible, painted in thick Venetian white, must detach themselves from a sky of almost pure Berlin blue; with these again contrasts a centre-ground partly composed of clumps of dark green fir-trees and partly of a poisonous yellow-green meadow; finally the rocks of the foreground must be painted in glaring ochre tones, just as they are squeezed out of the paint tube. Such factory goods are, for the historian of culture, just as necessary a supplement to Zimmermann and Schirmer and Calame as that "genuine Rhine coloring" is to Koch and Rheinhard, to Schuetz and Reinermann.
Let us linger a moment longer in the region of the Rhine, which was in Germany, for nearly two centuries, the subject of the most salable landscape fancy articles. In the seventeenth century it was already a sort of industry to turn out mechanically so-called "Rhine rivers." In the same way that we now reproduce Rhine scenes on plates, cups, tin-ware and pocket-handkerchiefs, in those days folding-screens, fire-places, bay-windows, even door-cases, but more especially the space over the doorway (though the latter were executed in the fresco style of the cooper), were decorated with "Rhine rivers." But these "Rhine rivers" are totally unlike those which the manufacturers of views of the Rhine furnish us with today. The eye revealed by the one is very different from that which we find in the other; at the most they have the water in common.
[Illustration: AT THE SICK BED actually a painting by BENJAMIN VAUTIER]
In the old "Rhine rivers" there are, for the most part, rounded-off mountainous formations, whereas we now make the angularity of the real Rhine mountains still more angular if possible; the castles, as indicative of a too barbaric taste, are often omitted or changed into a sort of Roman ruin; the portrayal is so free that it ceases to be a portrait, and yet they believed that they had adhered all the more strictly to the peculiar motive of Rhine scenery. The most lively activity of men and animals, ships and rafts, and all sorts of land conveyances, formed the principal ornament; there had to be a sort of antlike swarming to and fro on a river Rhine of this description if it was to be considered really beautiful. In Saftleewen's views of the Rhine this fondness is already discernible. Although in his pictures there is still evidence of a very clear eye for mountainous formation and the architectonic adornment of the region, yet the monotonous, unnaturally tender and misty coloring indicates the effort to soften and equalize the contrast of forms, while life is introduced into the landscape only by means of the immeasurably rich accessories which make every rock, every valley, and especially the entire river, swarm with people. These are, in truth, cultural landscapes, in which we perceive the greatest charm of the region to lie in the pathway of human work, just as the whole age in which they were painted longed to get away from the devastation of the Thirty Years' War into the crowded activity of work and festive pleasures, which, however, were far less apt to be found on the real Rhine than on the painted "Rhine rivers" of the seventeenth century. Johannes Griffier affords us an even clearer idea than Saftleewen of the model pictures of the mechanical old "Rhine rivers." Griffier paints from imagination an idyllic river valley, adorned with Roman ruins such as never stood on the Rhine, animated by all kinds of jolly people, such as it would have been hard, in that day, to find gathered in our devastated provinces. That was then dubbed a river Rhine. Griffier, however, certainly believed that he had beheld the genuine scenery of the Rhine; he did not laboriously evolve his pictures shut up in a room, but painted his imaginative pieces in a skiff, direct from nature. And it really was the actual Rhine that he saw, only he looked at it with the idealistic eye of the seventeenth century.
If one confronts productions of this kind with the later works of a Schuetz or Reinermann which treat of the same subject, and then again compares both with our modern views of the Rhine, one can often scarcely comprehend how even the same character of scenery is supposed to be reproduced in these widely differing conceptions, much less the identically same landscape. While in Saftleewen, for example, we always see the Rhine country veiled in a soft mist, seventy years ago it was accounted as a merit of the elder Schuetz that he always gave his pictures of the Rhine and the Main the clearest possible air, and that there was never a trace of mist in the atmosphere! Let us now compare both of these conceptions with the Rhine views executed in the modern style of a steel engraving, with their heavy, tropically stormy sky, dark masses of clouds, between which thick dazzling streams of light break forth, and similar violent light-effects. One might think that sun, air, and clouds, water and mountains and trees and rocks, had altered in the course of the centuries, that nature itself had been transformed, if we did not know only too well that it is the eye of man alone which has altered in the mean time, that every generation sees in a different style.
The masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries looked at natural scenery in a very much more objective manner than we do. Wherever there is bright springtime or summer, wherever all the trees are green and the flowers blooming, wherever the cloudless sky is glittering in deepest blue, and all forms stand out detached from one another in the luminous clearness of the full, joyous, midday sunlight—there for them is genuinely beautiful natural scenery. It was not lack of technique that prevented the artists of that period from painting faded yellow autumn pictures, or thunder-storms and rain landscapes as we do. With regard to more difficult points they were technically so far advanced that they could surely have produced a gray sky instead of a blue, and yellow-red trees instead of green, if they had seriously tried to do so. But with their far brighter eyes they saw the landscape far brighter than we do, and therefore, of necessity, they painted it so. Whoever compares medieval lyrics, where the same sunny, springlike tone plays through all the verses, with modern lyrics, will become more deeply conscious of this necessity.