CHAPTER VIII

THE LEGACY OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM

It was reserved for two younger men to reach the aim that hovered in the far distance before Cornelius and the Düsseldorfians. And, by one of fortune's remarkable freaks, the greatest German monumental painter of the nineteenth century came from the Düsseldorf, the greatest Romanticist from the Munich school.

_Alfred Rethel_ was twenty-four years old when he received the commission to paint the frescoes in the _Kaisersaal_ at Aachen, and had previously worked in the Düsseldorf Academy, and then with Veit at Frankfort. But the pictures are suggestive neither of his Düsseldorfian nor of his Nazarene training. The deeds of Charlemagne, the ancestor of the German Imperial dynasties, are nobly, and, at the same time, vigorously embodied in them. Rethel had studied the harsh strength of his Albrecht Dürer, but only as a kindred spirit studies his kin. Neither Cornelius nor Schnorr has depicted the old German heroic might and the vanished imperial grandeur, the great past, the iron Middle Ages, with such notable traits. How plain in his heroic greatness stands the mighty conqueror of the Saxons by the overthrown pagan idols; how simply and majestically does he march into conquered Pavia. What an inexorable and irresistible warrior he seems, as he rages amongst the Moors who flock round the cars of their idols; and with what grave phantom dignity does he gaze in death upon the young Emperor Otto, who has forced his way into his vault, and kneels trembling before the lifeless frame of his great forefather. There is no vestige of pose, nothing superfluous; everywhere simplicity, compression, lucidity. Only what is necessary is inscribed here, in the lapidary style. No meaningless phrase interrupts his narrative; the inner meaning is never sacrificed to any external beauty of line; his forms like his thoughts are severe and precise. He draws with a sure hand in crisp lines, like a writer who aims at the utmost brevity and so lays especial emphasis on his sentences and words. The self-revelation in these pictures is admirable--the illuminating clearness with which they tell what they have to say without the aid of any commentator, the directness with which they present in an artistic aspect the substance to be given. And with this substance the painting corresponds.

It is to be deplored that Rethel himself could carry out in colour only four of his designs, and that the completion of the rest was entrusted to the painter Kehren, who spoilt by his effort after charm of colour the collective impression of the series. The pictures painted by Rethel himself are, in the simplicity of their colouring, in remarkable accordance with the powerful style of his drawing. Rethel's _painting_ has something stern and grey, bare and sombre. He belongs to the stylists whose implement is rather charcoal than the brush; but he had, although no colourist, a free command of colour, and never committed any fault of taste, but with a remarkably sure instinct used colour in the mass, simply, but yet with significant effect. He might have been the man to create a monumental German art. A tragic destiny! Heinrich von Kleist, the greatest German poet of the post-classical age, who was chosen for so high a vocation, the creation of a new dramatic style, shot himself; and the giant, Alfred Rethel, was to end in madness. Barely forty years old was he when he walked by the warder's side in the courtyard at Düsseldorf, picking up flint-stones, a poor, simple madman. Only two series of designs ensure, apart from the frescoes at Aix, the immortality of his name: "Hannibal's Passage over the Alps," and the "Dance of Death." As a draughtsman, just as a painter of frescoes, he is the same Titan, sounds the same stern, manly note.

Here the heroic hosts of the Carthaginians stand anxious, yet resolved, at the foot of the grim Alpine pass; steep, beetling cliffs, precipice, ice and snow, tower before them. Now the climb begins, and the struggle with the fierce, barbaric folk of the mountains, who swing themselves on leaping-pole like wild animals over the gaping crevices in the ice. Yonder are men, horses, an elephant, hurled into the abyss; some have spitted themselves on jagged branches of trees in their fall, others twine themselves together in horrible coils; at last the most advanced have reached the heights, and the heroic figure of the commander points out proudly to them, as they breathe once more, the plains of Italy.

Over his second work there broods the shadow of that mental darkness which was to surround him. When, in the year 1848, the political storm burst over the soil of Europe, Rethel's fantasy reaped a rich harvest. He drew his "Dance of Death," represented Death the Leveller, who drives poor fools behind the barricades. The ghostly and spectral, that horror of death that breaks in upon us in the midst of life, had been the propensity of German art since Dürer and Holbein. Like them, Rethel loved the world of the diabolical, and similarly chose for his embodiment of it the sturdy, simple contours of the old German wood engravings. Death as the hero of revolution makes a commencement. There he rides as the town-executioner, a cigar between his lips, his scythe in his hand. He sits shambling in the saddle, his smock and tall boots dangle on his bony figure. Dressed like a charlatan, he excites the people before the tavern against the rulers, that he may earn his harvest at the barricade. He himself stands firm and proud, like a general on the field of battle, the flag in his hand, and the bullets of the soldiers whistling harmlessly through his bony ribs. But the artisans who follow him are not invulnerable as he is; the grape-shot sweeps them down off the barricade. The contest is over; triumphant, with a wreath of bay round his skull, mocking venom in his glance, Death rides with his banner unfurled across the barricade, where the dying writhe in their gaunt death-struggle, and children bewail their fallen fathers. The plate, "Death as the Assassin," takes up the story of the outbreak of cholera at a masked ball in Paris. In terrified haste the dancers and musicians leave the hall. Only one mummy-like spectre, the Cholera himself, a shape of horror, keeps his ground, as though turned to stone, and holds the triumphant scourge like a sceptre in his bony hand. Death, in a domino, with two bones for a fiddle, plays a call to the dance; and beneath the awful sounds of his tune the people, stretched on the ground, in sick convulsions, grinning with distorted features, behind their jesters' masks, twist and turn.

[Illustration: RETHEL. THE EMPEROR OTTO AT THE TOMB OF CHARLEMAGNE.]

There is something of Th. A. Hofmann's wild fantasy of the ague-fit in this picture,--something morbid, satanic, that suggests Félicien Rops; yet, at the same time, something so pithy and virile, and in form so compressed, well-balanced, and correct, that it brings the old Germans, too, to our recollection. And the reconciliation with which the series ends is pathetic. In the high steeple, lit by the rays of the setting sun, the grey old bellringer, his worn hands clasped in prayer, has fallen quietly asleep in his armchair. A calm peace rests upon his good, old, devout countenance. The thin hands, with their marks and furrows, tell a long tale of hard work, sorrow, and longing for rest. And the weary veteran has made a pilgrimage for the health of his poor soul, as prove the pilgrim's hat and staff by the wall; and now Death has really come, the well-known presence indeed, but this time with no grin of mockery, rather in profound pity. In his ingenious manner of giving an expression of mockery, cold indifference, or compassion to the head of the skeleton, Rethel stands on a level with Holbein. To the old ringer, Death, who before had grinned so diabolically, is a gentle and trusted friend. Quietly and pensively he performs the task that the old man has done so often when he attended the departure of some pilgrim of earth with the solemn notes of his bell. Rethel himself had still to drag through many years in an obscure night of the spirit before for him, too, Death, as the friend, rang the knell.

[Illustration: RETHEL. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE PAGAN IDOLS.]

And now for him who was the most admirable of them all, Lady Adventure's true knight.

"Master _Schwind_, you are a genius and a Romanticist." This stereotyped compliment was paid by King Ludwig to the painter on each occasion that, without buying anything of him, he visited his studio. And with equal regularity Schwind, when he had sat down again at his easel, after the royal visit, to smoke his pipe, is said to have muttered something extremely disloyal. In this trait the whole Schwind is already revealed,--free from all ambition, every inch an artist.

W. H. Riehl has described a series of such episodes, which one must know in order to understand Schwind, that highly gifted child of nature, who separates himself from the group of philosophical, "meditative" artists of his age, both as an individual and as an audacious, original genius of effervescent wit.

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

RETHEL. HANNIBAL'S PASSAGE OVER THE ALPS.]

When an æsthetic once hailed him as "the creator of an original, German kind of ideal, romantic art," Schwind repeated very slowly, weighing each word: "'An original, German kind of ideal, romantic art.' My dear sir, to me there are only two kinds of pictures, the sold and the unsold; and to me the sold are always the best. Those are my entire æsthetics." Or a noble amateur comes to him with the request that he would take him just for a few days into his school, and instruct him especially in his masterly art of drawing in pencil. Whereupon Schwind: "It does not require a day for that, my dear Baron; I can tell you in three minutes how I do it, I can give you all the desired information at once. Here lies my paper,--kindly remark it, I buy it of Bullinger, 6 Residenz Strasse; these are my pencils, A. W. Faber's, I get them from Andreas Kaut, 10 Kaufinger Strasse; from the same firm I have this indiarubber too, but I very seldom use it, so that I use this penknife all the more, to sharpen the pencils; it's from Tresch, 10 Dienersgasse, and very good value. Now, I have all these things lying together on the table, and a few thoughts in my head as well; then I sit down here and begin to draw. And now you know all that I can tell you." Again he asks "to be decorated with an order," because he "is ashamed to mix in such a naked condition with his bestarred confrères," and after the bestowal of the desired decoration he says: "I wore it only once, at the last New Year's levée, but I vowed at the same time that six horses should not drag me there again. Before, there was at any rate a beautiful queen there, and then the court ladies laughed at one; but amongst men only, the stupidity of it is not to be endured." When he grumbles over commissions which have been given to others, and adds good-temperedly, "Indeed, I'm an envious fellow"; when he paints the most delicate pictures and then growls, "What am I to do with the things, if nobody buys them?" when he indulges in outbursts of wrath, and a minute later has forgotten again the abusive words which the others spitefully bring up against him years afterwards,--then here, too, his happy humour forces its way everywhere, that divine naïveté which forms the soul of his and of all true art.

[Illustration: RETHEL. DEATH AT THE MASKED BALL.]

[Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._

RETHEL. DEATH THE FRIEND OF MAN.]

Schwind remains a personality by himself--the last of the Romanticists, and one of the most amiable manifestations in German art. He was free from the malady of that sham Romanticism which sought the salvation of art in the resurrection of the Middle Ages, misunderstood, and grasped sentimentally, and as it were by stencil. He was spiritually permeated by that which had given Romanticism the capacity to exist: the sense of that forgotten and imperishable world of beauty which it has again discovered. The others sought for the "blue flower," Schwind found it; resuscitated in all its faëry beauty that "fair night of enchantment which holds the mind captive." He incorporated the romantic idea in painting as Weber did in music, and his works, like the _Freischütz_, will live for ever. Many a man listened to him holding forth upon water-nymphs, gnomes, and tricksy kobolds, as of beings of whose existence he appeared to have no doubt whatever. On one occasion, while out walking near Eisenach in the Annathal, a friend laughingly observed to him that the landscape really looked as if gnomes had made the pathway and had had their dwellings there. "Don't you believe it was so? _I_ believe it," answered Schwind in all seriousness. He _lived_ in the world of legend and fairy-tale. If ever a fairy stood beside the cradle of a mortal man, assuredly there was one standing by Schwind's; and all his life long he believed in her and raved about her. Born in the land where Neidhart of Neuenthal had sung and the Parson of the Kahlenberg had dwelt, to his eyes Germany was overshadowed with ancient Teutonic oaks: for him, elves hovered about watersprings and streams, their white robes trailing behind them through the dewy grass; a race of gnomes held their habitation on the mountain heights, and water-nymphs bathed in every pool. In him part of the Middle Ages came back to life, not in livid, corpse-like pallor, but fanned by the revivifying breath of the present day.

For that is what is noteworthy about Schwind; he is a Romanticist, yet at the same time a genuine, modern child of Vienna. There are three things in each of which Vienna stands supreme: hers are the fairest women, the sweetest songs, and the most beautiful waltzes. The atmosphere of Vienna sends forth a soft and sensual breath which encircles us as though with women's arms; songs and dances slumber in the air, waiting only for a call to be awakened. Vienna is a place for enjoyment rather than for work, for pensive dreaming rather than for sober wakefulness of mind. Moritz Schwind was a child of this city of beautiful women, songs, and dances, as may be observed in the feminine nature of his art, in its melody and rhythm: in music, indeed, it had its source. In song-singing, bell-ringing Vienna it was difficult for him to guess in what direction his talents lay; but all his life long he kept an open eye for the charms of beautiful womanhood. No artist of that time has created lovelier forms of women, beings with so great a charm of maidenly freshness and modest grace. Instead of the goddesses, heroines, and nun-like female saints, whose appearance dated from the Italy of the Cinquecento, Schwind depicted modern feminine charm. The group of ladies in "Ritter Kurt" is, even to the movement of their gloved fingers, graceful in the modern sense. He was a painter of love--a breath of Walter von der Vogelweide's ideal perfection of womanhood pervades his pictures.

"Durchsüsset und geblümet sind die reinen Frauen, Es ward nie nichts so Wonnigliches anzuschauen, In Lüften, auf Erden, noch in allen grünen Auen."

Schwind, too, painted frescoes, and in them he is very unequal. All his life long he complained of the lack of important commissions; it was fortunate for him that he did not get more of them. Such a painter as he can execute no orders but his own,--just as good poems do not come to order. A long list of wall paintings--the Tieck room and the figure-frieze in the Habsburg Hall of the new palace at Munich, the frescoes in the Kunsthall and in the Hall of Assembly of the Upper House at Karlsruhe, those in the Castle of Hohenschwangau, even the theatre pieces in the loggia and in the foyer of the Vienna Opera House--could be easily struck out of Schwind's work, without detriment to his reputation. Only when the subject permitted him to strike a simple note of fairy music was he charming even in his wall-paintings, and therefore those which depict scenes from the life of St. Elizabeth in the Wartburg are rightly the most celebrated. Like Rethel in the field of the heroic, so Schwind in that of romantic legend reached the goal which the former kept before his eyes, for the revivifying of the time when there was an enthusiasm for fresco painting. His paintings are poor in colour, motley, magic-lantern views in the style of the heraldically treated figures seen in the frescoes and stained glass of the Romanesque and early Gothic Middle Ages, and yet in every line as delightful as the man himself. Nowhere do we find glaring contrasts, nowhere any violent agitation in the expression of the faces. It is by the avoidance of all landscape accessories, and by a hardly noticeable change in the simple plant-ornamentation in the background, that the events represented are made to lose touch with actual reality. In the first picture, bright-hued birds flit here and there among the rose-branches forming the decorative work; in that which treats of St. Elizabeth's expulsion, the Wartburg rises in the background, while little singing angels are perched upon the boughs of the bare winter-stripped trees that overlook the miserable cell in which St. Elizabeth dies. A touch of the true-heartedness of the ancient Teuton, a breath of peacefulness, permeates Schwind's Wartburg pictures like the waft of an angel's wings.

[Illustration: MORITZ SCHWIND. _Graphische Künste._]

Schwind, like Rethel, is numbered among the few artists of that period who were able to preserve their absolute simplicity against the great painters of Italy. "I went into the Sistine Chapel," he says of his journey to Rome, "gazed upon Michael Angelo's work, and sauntered back home to work at my 'Ritter Kurt.' I take the greatest possible pleasure in my present picture, although the subject is absolutely crazy. I love to paint trees and rocks and old walls, and I have put plenty of them into it, besides a fellow on horseback and in full armour. What does it matter? _One must work according to one's natural capacity. Even at the time when I was studying at Munich I came to the conclusion that that of which the mind of itself takes hold, and that which takes hold of it, is the one only right thing for every man who has a vocation. Art consists of this unconscious taking hold and being taken hold of. Deus in nobis._ And therefore the young artist will do well to be careful in visiting the museums. You go to the galleries where the works of the great masters are to be seen. There you see, all at once and all together in confusion, works of every school and of every era. It is extremely likely that you are overwhelmed by the mass, and beauties of every kind, belonging to tendencies and epochs altogether diverse, shake the ground under your budding vocation, and like fifty various climates influencing a single plant, arrest a growth which is possible only in one, and that a favourable one. _The imitation of the Italians in especial can as a rule have only the effect of estranging us from our own individuality_, a fact which was once again fully borne in upon me when I saw Overbeck's new altar-piece in the Cathedral of Cologne. It may sound severe and uncalled-for from me, but _every man who has forgotten his mother-tongue is tottering on his feet. The imitation of foreigners is the dangerous blind alley into which our art has betaken itself_. When I exhibited 'Ritter Kurt' people said, 'It is Old German,' and forthwith it stood condemned, as if that were a disgrace, and as if one should not rather have saluted the fact with joy, as the right thing for us Germans. The art of painting which I follow is the German, and glass-painting must be taken as its foundation."

[Illustration: SCHWIND. FROM THE WARTBURG FRESCOES.]

In Schwind one might imagine an old German master of the race of Albrecht Altdorfer come to life again. In the small, simple pictures of landscape and fairy-tale, which Count Schack has collected in his private gallery for the quiet and devout enjoyment of thousands, he has given us his best work as a painter.

Yet even _his_ pictures have the failings of his time. Compared with Dürer, he seems like a gifted amateur; there are manifold empty, dead spaces to be observed among his figures; their action is at times misconceived and puppet-like; and his sense of colour was always limited. One may be permitted to look forward to some master, at the head of a coming epoch in art, who shall combine with Schwind's German fairy imagination the sensuous, dashing colour-elf that possessed Boecklin. There might a school of art arise, to follow for the future the path which Franz Stuck has struck out. As to technique, Schwind was a child of the cartoon era; as regards tenderness of feeling, he is a modern. It is difficult to persuade a non-German of Schwind's greatness, in presence of the _pictures_; but when they are reduced to black-and-white they appeal to every one. The heliogravure enables one to imagine what the original does not show; it incites the soul to further poetic creation, it announces what Schwind would be were he alive to-day. An elfland kingdom of enchantment, full of genuine poetry and beauty, opens out before us; a fairy garden, where the "blue flower" pours forth the whole of its sense-benumbing perfume. Count von Gleichen; the boy's miraculous horn; the mountain spirit Rübezahl, wandering along through the wild mountain forest; the hermits; the elves' dance; the erlking; the knight and the water nymph,--they are flooded with all the enchantment of Romanticism, they possess deep feeling without mawkishness, the old-German note of fairy legend and Hans Memlinc's childlike simplicity, yet at the same time the life of the present day, full of feeling and rich in delicate shades. How strong and brave are the men; how tender, noble, and charming the women! What a modest, maidenly art it is! just as its master was an innocent, harmless, and joyous being.

[Illustration: SCHWIND. FROM THE WARTBURG FRESCOES.]

His works, in comparison with those of his contemporaries, who were devising systems by means of which art should be brought back to the classical, bear the stamp of naïve creations in which no hypocrisy, no decorative nothingness finds expression. As against the erudite treatises of the Cornelius school, they preached for the first time the doctrine, that in works of art what is important is not the quantity of learning displayed therein, but the quality of the feeling exhibited. With all their inequalities, all their incorrectness, all their weak points, they are inspired, sung, dreamed, and not put together in cold blood according to recipes: in them is the pulsation of a human heart, a tender human heart full of delicate feeling. This it is which constitutes his magical attraction to-day, which makes him the firm bond of connection between the moderns. He was no imitator, no soulless calligraphist performing laborious school exercises after the manner of the old masters; he spoke the language of his time.

He was one of the first who at that time laid aside the prejudice against modern costume, and in his "Symphony" turned to artistic account, in one fantastic whole, even Franz Lachner's frockcoat and Fräulein Hetzenecker's modern society toilette. "If you may paint a man hidden in an iron stove--what is called a knight in armour--you may still more permissibly paint a man in a frockcoat. In general, one can paint what one will, provided always that one wills what one can." And it was only by means of this present-day temper that Romanticism could find so full-toned an expression in his works. Only because he was truly a citizen of the present day and felt its blood beating in his veins, could he feel the congenial elements of the past. To him the old-time legends were no antiquarian, erudite, pedantic lumber; they were a part of himself, and he interpreted them in more childlike simplicity of manner and with more delicate feeling than any artist of former times, because he observed them with the eye of the present age, with an eye made keen with longing. Just as in his "Wedding Journey" he raised all reality into the poetry of purest romance, so is his Romanticism saturated with a sense of reality charged with memories of home. Out of his fairy-tale pictures is breathed a charming fragrance of the long-vanished days of earth's first springtide, and yet for that very reason a breath of the most modern Décadence. He is distinguished from Marées and Burne-Jones, from Puvis de Chavannes and Gustave Moreau, by a very unmodern attribute--he is bursting with health. He is still naïvely childlike, free from that elegiac melancholy, that temper of weary resignation, which the end of the nineteenth century first brought into the world.

[Illustration: SCHWIND. WIELAND THE SMITH.]

[Illustration: _Neft, Helio._

SCHWIND. FROM THE STORY OF THE SEVEN RAVENS.]

Yet Schwind was one of the first to feel and give expression to that modern sense of longing desire which turns back from a nervous, colourless age, from the prosiness of everyday life, towards a vanished Saturnian era, when man still lived at peace and undisturbed in happy union with nature. For even this proclaims him our contemporary, that the temper of his pictures develops itself from the landscape. A landscape painter through and through--almost in Boecklin's sense, who transformed the temper of Nature into the contemplation of living beings--he spoke of the rest and peace of German forests, of that hour of summer's night when no wind blows, no leaflet moves, when to the solitary wanderer in the woods the mists rising from the meadows are transformed into white veils of the elves, and the gold-rimmed waves of the sea into the yellow hair of mermaids frolicking in the moonlight to the magic notes of their golden harps. He felt and loved his landscapes rather than studied them, yet they are saturated with an entirely modern sentiment for Nature. No German, at that time, had caught and understood the interweaving of the forest boughs with such intimate familiarity. The fresh sunshine of the morning breaks through the light green of the young beeches, and leaps from bough to bough, transforming the glittering dewdrops into diamonds, and the beetle, creeping comfortably over the soft moss, into gold and precious stones. "_Da gehet leise nach seiner Weise der liebe Herrgott durch den Wald_" ("The dear God holy, He passeth slowly, as His wont is, through the wood"). With a few boldly drawn lines and light colours we are transported into the midst of the forest world, and all around us opening buds and verdurous green, sweet scents, and the murmur of leaves. "When one has set one's love and joy on a beautiful tree so fully," he said to Ludwig Richter, "one depicts all one's love and joy with it, and then the tree looks quite different from an ass's fine daub of what he thinks it should be."

[Illustration: _Albert, Helio._

SCHWIND. A HERMIT LEADING HORSES TO A POOL.]

Only so intimate a connection with Nature could enable Schwind to imagine landscapes, which in their virginal old-world mood form at once the echo of the figures and of their actions. These green meadows and flower-besprent hills, these gloomy wooded slopes, these smooth valleys through which glittering waters glide murmuring along, are fit and suitable dwelling-places for the delicate fabulous beings of the flower-entwined old fairy legends. Schwind _lived_ with Nature. He gave the name of Tanneck (Fir-tree Corner) to the little country house which he built for himself on the Starnberger See, and the fresh scent of pinewood, the rustling sound of German forests, pour forth from his pictures. Like young Siegfried, he understood the language of birds, and went eavesdropping to hear what the pine trees whispered to one another.

[Illustration: SCHWIND. THE WEDDING JOURNEY.]

Still freer, more spontaneous, and lighter than in his oil paintings was his touch in his water-colours, in which the colour is only breathed over the forms like a delicate vapour; and quite especially in his illustrations--so far as the word may be employed with respect to him, for he never illustrated, he gave shape to his own thoughts, and that only which moved his innermost being he brought fully formed before one's eye. The _Bilderbogen_ and the _Fliegende Blätter_ of Munich obtained from him witty and humorous inventions, such as "The Almond Tree," "Puss in Boots," "The Peasant and the Donkey," "Herr Winter," and "The Acrobat Games." His fairest legacy consists of three cyclic works: "Cinderella," "The Seven Ravens," and "The Beautiful Melusina"; wherein he glorified with praise the beauty and fidelity of women, and their capacity for self-sacrifice. "Cinderella," which appeared in 1855, at the Munich Exhibition, is a fairy-tale, than which poet has seldom, indeed, narrated a chaster, tenderer, or more fragrant. In 1858 followed the touching story of the good sister who releases her brothers by dint of unspeakable suffering and endurance, to-day the priceless pearl among the gems of the Weimar collection. For twenty years, as he said, the work had been in his thoughts. So far back as in 1844 he wrote to Genelli: "I believe that it will give something which may please people who have a sense for love and faithfulness, and for a touch of the power of enchantment." When an acquaintance of his gazed upon it with dismay, and ingenuously asked for whom the thing was intended, and whither it was to go, Schwind turned his penetrating, flashing little eyes upon him, and then said: "Do you know, I painted that for myself; it is the dream of my life; no one shall buy it; some day I shall give it to a friend." It is an imperishable work, full of grace, modesty, and charm.

Schwind takes the story up at the fateful moment when the lonely maiden, who is determined to release her enchanted brothers by assiduous spinning and constant silence, is discovered by a hunting party. There, amid the enchantment of the forest solitude, she sits in the hollow of a tree and spins away at the seven shirts, to free her seven brothers. Thus the king's son catches sight of her. The fire of love kindles in his eyes. In one long kiss the maiden gives herself to him. The wedding takes place, and like another St. Elizabeth she is seen standing, soon afterwards, distributing alms to starving beggars. Yet, meanwhile, she has fallen under suspicion owing to her continuous silence; even her husband becomes distrustful, because in the quiet of night he has observed that she is not resting by his side, but is quietly up and spinning. And the catastrophe comes when the silent queen gives birth to twins, who, to the horror of all around, fly off in the form of ravens. Tranquil and affectionate, the young mother awaits her fate. Then follow the sentence of the Vehm-tribunal, the pathetic parting from her husband, the preparation for death. There is only one hour more to pass by before the seven years are over and the spellbound brothers set free. The good fairy appears in the air, hour-glass in hand, and brings solace to the hard-pressed heroine. The beggars, too, whose benefactress she had been, bring help, and hold the gate of the dungeon in force. So the time runs out, the spell is broken, and the brothers hasten, on milk-white horses, to save their sister from the stake. In Schwind's marvellous drawings the story passes quickly on, stroke by stroke, deeply moving and soul-stirring in its dramatic force.

The "Beautiful Melusina" was the kiss of the water-nymph, with which Romanticism led her faithful knight to his death, only to disappear together with him out of German art. "The winter has dealt me a sore blow; I shall never be able to do anything more." Carl Maria von Weber and Uhland had already gone before; Schwind was lying on his sick-bed when the German victories created a German fatherland. He learned, however, all the long series of glorious tidings that came from the field of war, saw the tumultuous joy and the dazzling sea of fire which surged through Munich in January 1871, and heard the joyful news that Germany was at last united. Then he had a glass of champagne poured out for him, and drank it to the new empire and the future of the nation.

In the middle of a wood of lofty beeches in Bernrieder Park, on the Starnberger See, there stands a small rotunda, within is a prattling fountain, right round the walls runs a frieze, depicting the legend of the "Beautiful Melusina." It is Schwind's monument. With him German Romanticism perished; reality itself had now become so marvellous. When, in 1850, Hübner had to paint a figure of Germania for a page in King Ludwig's album, he depicted a queenly woman, prone on the ground, with her face in the dust, amidst a desolate landscape and under a cloudy sky. The crown has fallen from her head and a skull lies by her side, while on the frame are inscribed these words from the Book of Lamentations: "Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people; the crown of our head is fallen." When Schwind died, Germany had re-arisen. In the very year of his death, Lenbach painted his first Bismarck pictures: in Bismarck was embodied that power by means of which the dream of a nation was fulfilled.

[Illustration: SCHWIND. NYMPHS AND STAG.]

Thus Schwind's works are not only the sign of a completed period in German history, but also at the same time both the climax and the conclusion of an art-epoch. Schwind had lived through the entire revolution which German painting had at that time undergone. At his death the sound of the hunting horns of Romanticism had died away. He had lived long enough to have the opportunity of criticising neatly, as follows, the dry, unpoetical school of historical painting then making its appearance, as if introduced by gaudily costumed models, a school which made its first hit with Lessing's "Ezzelino": "I will explain the picture to you. Ezzelino is seated in his dungeon, and two monks are attempting to convert him. One of them recognises that all pains are thrown away upon the old sinner, and takes himself off, regretfully desisting from all further endeavour; the other still has hopes, and continues his exhortations. But Ezzelino only keeps his angry gaze fixed before him, muttering, 'Leave me alone! Don't you see that I am--posing as a model!'" He had had occasion to write to his friend Bauernfeld: "I have seen so many schools of so-called painting in my time that it is an absolute horror to me"; he had asked Piloty: "What calamity are you preparing for us now?" and had thought it his duty to address to one of the younger painters the question: "Are we then an academy of the Fine or of the Ugly Arts?" "A man like me, with his ideas, walks like a ghost amid the battle of the virtuosi, in which the whole life of art has gone astray," he used sadly to say. His last wonderful works stand alone in a time which was dazzled by the flash of arms characterising the Franco-Belgian school of art. It was not till much later that Hans Thoma took up the threads which connect the work of Schwind with the present epoch. When he died he was a solitary, isolated man taking leave of a generation in which he had no part. The period of historical painting which followed him produced no single work distinguished by Schwind's sense of fragrant legendary poetry. The charming forest fairy who had appeared to him showed herself to no other; like the betrayed Melusina, she had returned to rest again, solitary, in her fountain home. Fantasy, tender soul that she is, had taken wings, whither none can tell. "That is why nobody has a single idea," as Schwind said in his drastic way. The Muse of Schwind, the last Romanticist, was a chaste, pensive, soulful maiden; while that of Piloty, the first colourist, was a noisy, bloodthirsty Megæra. Yet one can have no doubt as to the necessity of this evolutionary change.

[Illustration: _Albert, Helio._

SCHWIND. RUBEZAHL.]

Schwind himself is among the masters "who have been, and are, and shall be." He was different from all that was arising around him; he embodied the spirit of the future, and exercises over the art of the present day so great an influence that where two or three painters are gathered together in the name of the beautiful, he has his place in the midst of them, and is present, invisible, at every exhibition. But he exercises this influence only spiritually. Young artists study him as if he were a primitive master. Enraptured, they find in him all those qualities for which there is to-day so ardent a longing--innocent purity and touching simplicity, a mystic, romantic submersion in waves of old-time feeling and a charming youthful fervour. They do not study him in order to _paint_ like him.

"Our heads are full of poetry, but we cannot give it expression," are the words with which Cornelius himself characterised this period. Germany had original geniuses indeed, but no fully matured school to compare with the French; as yet the Germans did not know how to paint. Up to this time the course of painting in Germany had been a bold but imprudent flight through the air; in its Kaulbach-like cloud-heights it had melted away to a shadow, only to fall again, somewhat roughly, to the ground. It died of an incurable disease--idealism. The painters of that time, one and all, had never become real artists; strictly speaking, they had always remained amateurs. He alone is a great artist in whom the will and the performance, the substance and the form, are in complete accordance. Painters who never knew exactly what is meant by painting, artists whose most noticeable characteristic was that they had no art-capacity, were only possible in the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany, where for that very reason they were admired and praised.

What now began was a necessary making good what had been so long neglected. For craftsmanship is the necessary presupposition of all art, which can no longer suffer any one to be called a master who has not learnt his business. In the atmosphere of incense which surrounded Cornelius in Munich, the dogma that salvation was to be found in German art alone, and that the German nation was the chosen people of art, had reached a height of self-adoration which came near to megalomania. In the proud enthusiasm of those times, great in their aims as in their errors, the Germans had as false an opinion as possible of the art of foreign countries.

In the very years when the first railways were ousting the old mail-coaches the mutual interchange of endeavour and ability between the various nations was slower and scantier than ever before. How German artists had wandered abroad in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in that great age when Dürer crossed the Alps on Pirkheymer's pony, and when Holbein obtained from Erasmus letters of introduction for England! With what joy Dürer, in his letters and in his journal, gives an account of the recognition accorded him in artistic circles in Italy and the Dutch cities! Nearly all the German painters had, in the course of their long wanderings, made acquaintance with either the Netherlands or Italy. They knew exactly what was going on in the world around them. Dürer and Raphael used to send drawings to each other, "so as to know each other's handwriting." It was only in the first half of the nineteenth century that the Germans, once proud in the consciousness of possessing the finest comprehension of, and the greatest receptivity for, foreign intellectual wares, lived apart in timid isolation. Into the suburban still-life of the German schools of art not a sound made its way of what was taking place elsewhere. Only thus was it possible for the Germans to imagine that among all modern nations they alone had a vocation for Art. No one had the least idea that in England, the land of machines and beefsteaks, there were men who painted; and people went so far as to proclaim piety, morality, thoroughness, accurate draughtsmanship, and diligent execution the monopoly of German art; and superficiality, frivolity, and "empty straining after effect" the ineradicable national failing of that of France.

[Illustration: SCHWIND. THE FAIRIES' SONG.]

With some such ideas in their heads the majority of the German painters, in the autumn of 1843, found themselves confronted by Gallait's "Abdication of Charles V" and Bièfve's "Agreement of the Dutch Nobility"; two Belgian pictures which at that time were going the round of the exhibitions in all the larger towns of Germany. And it was not long before the belief in the old gods, which had for thirty years held sway in the city of King Ludwig, was completely undermined by the younger generation. "Even for the great gods, day comes to an end. Night of annihilation, descend with the dusk!" Diogenes expelled from his philosophic tub could not have felt more uncomfortable than the German painters in presence of the Belgian pictures. As till then the incapacity to paint had been belauded as one of the strongest possible proofs of the higher artistic nature and of genuine greatness, so now it was perceived that nevertheless, on the banks of the Scheldt and of the Seine, a much greater school of painting was in full bloom, and producing splendid fruit.

[Illustration]

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