Chapter 8

[78]System der Æsthetik(1790), pp. 9, 10, 11, where, in replying to the question why the arts were not only pursued with more perfection by the ancients, but also judged with more competence by them, he says: "Their material was drawn from the heart of their nation, and from the life of their citizens, and the manner of representing it and of framing it was in keeping with the character and needs of the people.... If the Greek lent his ear to the poet, or his eye to the painter and sculptor, of his age, he was shown subjects which were familiar to his soul, intimately related to his imagination, and, as it were, bound by blood-relationship to his heart." On pp. 12, 13, he also shows that if Art is less thrilling nowadays, it is because peoples are too mixed, and a single purpose no longer characterizes their striving.

[79]Æsthetic(translated by Douglas Ainslie), p. 210 et seq.

[80]W. P., Vol. II, p. 277: "The greatness of an artist is not to be measured by the beautiful feelings which he evokes: let this belief be left to the girls. It should be measured according to the extent to which he approaches the grand style, according to the extent to which he is capable of the grand style. This style and great passion have this in common—that they scorn to please; that they forget to persuade; that they command; that they will...." See also p. 241.

[81]This was first brought to my notice by my friend, Dr. Wrench. SeeThe Grammar of Life, by G. T. Wrench (Heinemann, 1908), p. 218. Although the development of this idea really belongs to a special treatise on the laws of Style in painting, it is interesting to note here that this excellent principle is quickly grasped if the powerfully alliterative phrases: "Where there's a will there's a way," or "Goodness gracious!" or "To-morrow, to-morrow, and not to-day," be spoken before certain pictures, or written beneath them. The first phrase, for instance, written beneath the "Aldobrindini Marriage," or Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," is seen immediately to be next of kin to these pictures as an art-form; and the same holds good of the second written beneath Reynolds's "John Dunning (First Lord Ashburton) and his Sister," or Manet's "Olympia."

[82]W. P., Vol. II, p. 277.

[83]W. P., Vol. II. p. 288. "The most convincing artists are those who make harmony ring out of every discord, and who benefit all things by the gift of their power and their inner harmony: in every work of art they merely reveal the symbol of their inmost experiences—their creation is gratitude for their life." See also p. 307.

[84]W. P., Vol. II, p. 280: "In regard to all æsthetic values I now avail myself of this fundamental distinction: in every individual case I ask myself has hunger or has superabundance been creative here?"

[85]W. P., Vol. II, p. 281.

"He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth fruit out of the earth."—Psalms civ. 14.

1. The Value "Ugly" in the Mouth of the Creator.

In the last section of this lecture, I told you of three kinds of ugliness. I said there was the ugliness of chaos and disorder, which provokes the hate of the layman, and which the artist overcomes. I spoke of the ugliness of form in Art, which appeared when the artist had failed in his endeavour to master disorder, or when he had selected a subject already ordered, in which he has left himself no scope for manifesting his power; and I also pointed to that ugliness of subject in Art, in which the ordinary beholder, as well as the artist, recognizes the degeneration of his type or a low example of it.

There is, however, a fourth aspect of ugliness, and that is the esoteric postulation of the value "ugly" by the creator. I have shown how creating also involves giving, and therefore loss—just as procreation does; but what is the precise meaning of the word "ugly" in the mouth of the Dionysian artist?

We must remember that his eyes are not our eyes, and that his mind is not our mind. He cannot look at Life without enriching her. But what is his attitude to the transfigurations of former artists?

Before these the Dionysian artist can feel only loathing, and, in a paroxysm of hatred, he raises his axe and shatters the past into fragments. All around him, a moment before, people said: "The world is beautiful!" But he, thoroughly alone, groans at its unspeakable ugliness.

He rejoices as he sees the fragments fly beneath his mighty weapon, and the greater the beauty of the thing he destroys, the higher is his exultation. For, to him, "the joy in the destruction of the most noble thing and at the sight of its gradual undoing," is "the joy over what is coming and what lies in the future," and this "triumphs over actual things, however good they may be."[1]

What he calls "ugly," then, has nothing whatsoever in common with any other concept of ugliness; it is simply the outcome of his creative spirit "which compels him to regard what has existed hitherto as no longer acceptable, but as botched, worthy of being suppressed—ugly!"[2]And thus it is peculiar to him alone.

I have shown you that Nietzsche explains pleasure, æsthetically, as the appropriation of the world by man's Will to Power. Pain, or evil, now obtains its æsthetic justification. It is the outcome of the destruction that the creator spreads in a world of Becoming; it is the periodical smashing of Being by the Dionysian creator who can endure Becoming. No creator can tolerate the past save as a thing which once served as his schooling. But a people are usually one with their past. To them it is at once a grandfather, a father, and an elder brother. In a trice the creator deprives them of these relatives. Through him they are made orphans, brotherless and alone. Hence the pain that is inevitably associated with the joy of destruction and of creation.

Not only a creative genius, however, but also a creative age, may use the word ugly in this Dionysian sense. For a robust and rich people scorn to treasure and to hoard that which has gone before. And thus our museums, alone, are perhaps the greatest betrayal of our times.

When the Athenians returned to their ruined Acropolis in the first half of the fifth century before Christ, they did not even scratch the ground to recover the masterpieces that lay broken, though not completely destroyed, all around them. And, as Professor Gardner observes, it is fortunate for us that no mortar was required for the buildings which were being erected to take the place of those that had been destroyed; otherwise these fragments of marble sculpture and architecture, instead of being buried to help in filling up the terraced area of the Acropolis, would certainly have gone to the lime-kiln.[3]

The men of the Renaissance, in the same way, regarded the buildings of ancient Rome merely as so many quarries whence they might bear away the materials for their own constructions. And whether Paul II wished to build the Palazzo di Venezia, or Cardinal Riario the Cancellaria, the same principle obtained. At the same period we also find Raphael destroying the work of earlier painters by covering it with his own compositions,[4]and Michelangelo not hesitating to obliterate even Perugino's altar frescoes in the Sixtine Chapel in order to paint his "Judgment." While in comparatively recent times, at a moment when a great future seemed to be promised to modern Egypt, Mehemet Ali sent his architect to the sacred Pyramids of Gizeh, to rob them of the alabaster which he required for his magnificent mosque on the citadel of Cairo.[5]

From a purely archæological and scholastic point of view, therefore, it is possible to justify our museums—the British Museum, for instance. But from the creative or artistic standpoint, they are simply a confession of impotence, of poverty, and of fear; and, as such, are utterly contemptible. In any case, however, I think that, for the sake of public taste and sanity, some of the ugly fragments—such as two-thirds of the maimed and mutilated parts of bodies from the Eastern and Western pediments of the Parthenon—ought never to have been allowed to stand outside a students' room in a school of archæology or of art, and even in such institutions as these, I very much question the value of the pieces to which I have referred.

[1]W. P., Vol I, p. 333. See alsoB. T., pp. 27, 28.

[2]W. P., Vol. I, p. 333.

[3]A Handbook of Greek Sculpture, by E. A. Gardner, M.A., p. 212.

[4]Piero della Francesca's decorations in the Vatican, painted under the direction of Pope Nicholas V, were ultimately destroyed by Raphael. See W. S. Waters, M.A.,Piero della Francesca, pp. 23, 24, 108.

[5]See also Fergusson,A History of Architecture, Vol. I, p. 48: "... If we had made the same progress in the higher that we have in the lower branches of the building art, we should see a Gothic Cathedral pulled down with the same indifference, content to know that we could easily replace it by one far nobler and more worthy of our age and intelligence. No architect during the Middle Ages ever hesitated to pull down any part of a cathedral that was old and going to decay; and to replace it with something in the style of the day, however incongruous that might be; and if we were progressing as they were, we should have as little compunction in following the same course."

2. Landscape Painting.

Up to the present, I have spoken only of Man as the proper subject of Ruler-Art. I have done this because Man is the highest subject of Art in general, and because the moment humanity ceases from holding the first place in our interest, something must be amiss, either with humanity, or with ourselves.

Still, there are degrees and grades among ruler-artists. All of them cannot aspire to the exposition of the highest human values. And just as some turn to design and to ornament, and thus, in a small way, arrange and introduce order into a small area of the world, so others —standing halfway between these designers and the valuers of humanity —apply their powers quite instinctively to Nature away from Man. They have a thought to express—let us say it is: "Order is the highest good," or "Power is the source of all pleasure and beauty," or "Anarchy contends in vain against the governing power of light which is genius," and in the case of this last thought they paint a rugged scene which they reveal as arranged, simplified and transfigured by the power of the sun. In each of these cases they use Nature merely as a symbol, or a vehicle, by means of which their thought or valuation is borne in upon their fellows; and they do not start out as actual admirers of mere scenery, wishing only to repeat it as carefully as possible.

Even when it uses Nature merely as a symbol or a vehicle, however, there can be little doubt that this kind of Ruler-Art is a degree lower in rank than the art which concerns itself with man; and when this kind of art becomes realistic, as it did with Constable and all his followers, it is literally superfluous. Only when the landscape is a minor element, serving but to receive and convey the mood or aspiration of the artist, is it a subject for Ruler-Art, and then the hand of man should be visible in it everywhere. With the artist's arranging, simplifying and transfiguring power observable in Nature, landscape painting, as Kant very wisely observed in hisKritik der Urteilskraft, becomes a process of pictorial gardening, and as such can teach very great lessons.

Still, all landscapes ought to be approached with caution by the lover of Ruler-Art; for unless they are treated with an extreme ruler-spirit, they point too imperatively away from man, to promise a development that can be wholesomely human.

When it is remembered that landscape painting only became a really important and serious branch of art when all the turmoil and contradiction which three successive changes of values had brought about were at their height—I refer to the blow levelled at Mediæval values by the Renaissance, to 'the blow levelled at the Renaissance by the Counter-Renaissance and Protestantism (in its German form of Evangelism and in its English form as Puritanism), and to the blow levelled at the artistic spirit of Europe in general by the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and when, therefore, doubt and confusion had already entered men's minds as to what was to be believed about Man and Life; when it is remembered also that it was precisely in the north, where, as we shall see, culture was less a matter of tradition than in the south, that landscape found its most energetic and most realistic exponents—from Joachim Patenier[6]to Ruysdael; and that it was in the north, even after the Renaissance, that the negative character of Christianity, in regard to humanity and to Life, found its strongest adherents; the importance of establishing a very severe canon in regard to all landscape painting, and of insisting upon very high ruler qualities in this branch of the art, ought to be clear to all who take this subject to heart.

For, difficult as it may seem to realize it, there is nothing whatsoever artistically beautiful in landscape.[7]Only sentimental[8]townspeople, compelled by their particular mode of existence to gaze daily on their own hideous homes and streets, ever manifest a senselessly ardent and determined affection for green fields and hills, for their own sake; and with English psychologists, it would be quite admissible here to say that all beauty that particular people believe to exist in country scenery, is the outcome of association. The ancients liked the sunlit and fruitful valley because of its promise of sustenance and wealth; but they showed no love of nature as such.[9]

Mr. S. H. Butcher,[10]for instance, points out how landscape painting only became a serious and independent branch of art among the Greeks after the fourth century B.C.—that is to say, long over a century after the date when, according to Freeman, the decline of Hellas began; and, in speaking of the Greeks in their best period, he says: "They do not attach themselves to nature with that depth of feeling, with that gentle melancholy, that characterizes the moderns.... Their impatient imagination only traverses nature to pass beyond it to the drama of human life." J. A. Symonds tells us that "Conciseness, simplicity and an almost prosaic accuracy are the never-failing attributes of classical descriptive art—moreover, humanity was always more present to their minds than to ours. Nothing evoked sympathy from the Greek unless it appeared before him in human shape, or in connection with some human sentiment. The ancient poets do not describe inanimate nature as such, or attribute a vague spirituality to fields and clouds. That feeling for the beauty of the world which is embodied in such poems as Shelley'sOde to the West Windgave birth in their imagination to definite legends, involving some dramatic interest and conflict of passions."[11]And Mahaffy and Mr. W. R. Hardie tell the same story.[12]

But even among sensible moderns, uninfected by sentimental fever, the love of nature is mostly of a purely utilitarian kind, as witness the love of cornfields, hayfields and orchards. The farmer at certain times gazes kindly at the purple hills behind his acres of cultivated land, because their colour indicates the coming rain. The cattle-breeder smiles as he surveys the Romney marshes, and thinks of the splendid pastureland they would make.

In fact, the attitude of sensible mankind in general towards landscape, as landscape, seems to have been pretty well summarized by the writer of the 104th Psalm, from whom, according to W. H. Rhiel, the Christian world, and especially the Teutonic part of it, seems to have derived much of their love of the beauties of Nature.[13]

What constitutes the artistic beauty in a painted landscape, then, is the mood, the particular human quality, that the artist throws into it. As the French painters say, a landscape is a state of the soul; and unless the particular mood or idea with which the artist invests a natural scene have some value and interest, and be painted in a commanding or ruler manner, it is a mere piece of superfluous foolery, which may, however, find its proper place on a great railway poster or in an estate agent's illustrated catalogue.

There is, on the other hand, another kind of love of nature, which dates only from the eighteenth century, and which is thoroughly and unquestionably contemptible. This also, like the above, is the result of association, and has nothing artistic in its constitution; but this time it is an association which is misanthropic and negative. I refer to what is generally known as the love of the Romantic in Nature, the love of mountains, torrents, unhandseled copses, virgin woods, and rough and uncultivated country.

In this love a new element enters the appreciation of Nature, and that is a dislike and mistrust of everything that bears the stamp of man's power or his labour, and therefore an exaltation of everything untutored, uncultured, free, unconstrained and wild.

This attitude of mind seems to have been unknown not only to the Greeks and to the Romans,[14]but, practically, to all European nations up to the time of Rousseau. As Friedländer says, it would be difficult to find evidence of travellers going to mountain country in quest of beauty, before the eighteenth century,[15]and the majority of those who were forced to visit such country, before that time, in their Journeys to foreign cities, describe it as horrible, ugly and depressing. Oliver Goldsmith is a case in point. Riehl declares that in guidebooks, even as late as 1750, Berlin, Leipzig, Augsburg, Darmstadt, Mannheim, etc., are spoken of as lying in nice and cheerful surroundings, whilst the most picturesque parts (according to modern notions) of the Black Forest, of the Harz, and the Thuringian woods are described as "very gloomy," "barren," and "monstrous," or at least as not particularly pleasant. And then he adds: "This is not the private opinion of the individual topographists: it is the standpoint of the age."[16]

Even in the Bible illustrations of the eighteenth century, we also find the same spirit prevailing. Paradise—that is to say, the original picture of virgin glory in natural beauty—is made to look like what moderns would call a monotonously flat garden, devoid of any indication of a hill, in which the Almighty, or Adam, or somebody, has already clipped all the trees and hedges, and carefully trimmed the grass.

You may argue with Riehl[17]that mediæval painters must have thought rough, wild and barren country beautiful; otherwise, why did they put it in their pictures? One low-German painter of the Middle Ages, for instance, painted a picture of Cologne, and, contrary to the genuine nature of the surrounding country, introduced a background of jagged and rocky mountains. Why did he do this, if he did not think jagged and rocky mountains beautiful?

In reply to this I cannot do better than quote Friedländer again, who on this very question writes as follows—

"At least the lack of a sense for the beauty of mountain scenery, which is noticeable in the poetry and travels of the Middle Ages, viewed as a whole, ought to lead us to suspect that this same sense could have been only very slightly apparent in the realm of pictorial art. But ought we not to ascribe the fantastic and romantic art ideal of the old masters, in landscape, rather to their endeavour to transfer the scene and figures of their pictures from reality to an imaginary world?... Even if historical painters like John van Eyck and Memling eagerly introduced jagged rocks and sharp mountain (which apparently they had never seen) into their backgrounds ... it is difficult to recognize any real understanding or even knowledge of the nature of mountains in all this; but simply an old and therefore very conventional form of heroic landscape which was considered as the only suitable one for a large number of subjects."[18]

But there is other evidence, besides that to be found in mediæval poetry and travels, which shows to what extent the particular sense for natural beauty, which I am now discussing, was lacking in the Middle Ages. Its absence is also illustrated by the arrangement of castles and other buildings. Mr. d'Auvergne, in his workThe English Castles, more than once calls attention to this, and instances a tower at Dunstanburgh Castle,[19]which, though commanding a wildly romantic prospect, was selected for the vilest domestic uses.

Suddenly, all this is contradicted and reversed. Precisely where man's hand has been, everything is supposed to be polluted, unclean, and ugly; and rough, uncultivated nature, however rugged, however unkempt, is exalted above all that which the human spirit has shaped and trained.

How did this change come about?

To begin with, let it be said, that it was not quite so sudden as Friedländer would have us suppose. Long before the dawn of the eighteenth century, the very principles that were at the base of European life and aspirations—the principle of the depravity of man, the principle of liberty for liberty's sake, the principle of the pursuit of general truth; and finally, the principle that experience —that is to say, a direct appeal to nature—was the best method of furnishing the mind—all these principles had been leading steadily to one conclusion, and this conclusion Rousseau was the first to embody in his energetic and fulminating protest against culture, tradition, human power and society. And the fact that his doctrine spread so rapidly, that within fifty years of its exposition, with the help of men like Coxe, Ramond de Carbonnières, Étienne de Sénancour, Töppefer, Saussure and Bourit, it had practically become the credo and the passion of Europe, shows how ready the age must have been for the lessons Rousseau taught it.

All of you who have read the fulsome and bombastic praise of Nature, together with the bitter disparagement of the work of man, in such works asLa Nouvelle Héloise, theConfessions, his letters toMonsieur de Malesherbes, and hisReveries of a lonely Rambler, will not require to be told the gospel Rousseau preaches.[20]

Suffice it to say, that he successfully created a love of the rough, of the rugged, the unhandseled and the uncultivated in the minds of almost all Europeans—especially Northerners, and that this love was rapidly reflected in landscape painting.

This new feeling for the romantic, for the unconstrained and for the savage in Nature, although it soon dominated art, was, in its essentials, quite foreign to art and to the artist. It had nothing in common with the motives that prompt and impel the artist to his creations. Its real essence was moral and not artistic; its fundamental feature was its worship of the abstract principles of liberty, anarchy and the absence of culture, which rude nature exemplifies on all sides; and it was a moral or scientific spirit that animated it, whether in Rousseau or in his followers.

Friedrich Schiller, who entirely supports Rousseau's particular kind of love for Nature, frankly admits this[21]in his able and profound analysis of the sentiment in question; whatever self-contempt, and contempt of adult manhood, may have lain behind Rousseau's valuations, Schiller brings all of it openly into the light of day, and in his efforts to support the Frenchman's school of thought, literally exposes it to ridicule.

One or two voices, such as Hegel's[22]and Chateaubriand's, were raised in protest against this thoroughly vulgar and sentimental attitude towards savage and wild phenomena; but they were unable to resist a movement, the strength of which had been accumulating for so many centuries in the hearts of almost all Europeans; and, ultimately, numbers triumphed.

Even the hand of man—of the artist—in a painted landscape, got to be a thing of the past. Realism—because it most conscientiously repeated that unconstrained and anarchical spirit which the romantic age loved to detect in matted weeds, in tangled and impenetrable coppices, in thick festoons of parasitic plants, in unhandseled brambles and in babbling brooks—became the ruling principle. Classical influence alone was able for a while to resist too rapid a decline; but soon we find Constable declaring in the early part of the nineteenth century, that "there is nothing ugly," and addressing aspiring artists in these words: "Observe that thy best director, thy perfect guide is Nature. Copy from her. In her paths is thy triumphal arch. She is above all other teachers; and ever confide in her with a bold heart:"[23]and a whole host of people following in his wake and applauding his principles.

Just as England by her influence had created Rousseau and his peculiar mode of thinking,[24]so, again, British influence was to show its power in the world of Art. The parallel is striking, but nevertheless true. In the years 1824, 1826 and 1829, Constable, whom Muther calls the father of landscape painting,[25]and whom Meier Graefe calls the father of modern painting,[26]exhibited in Paris, and his style soon became a dominant force.[27]Stendhal, though very much too moderate, was one of the first to raise, his voice against the lack of idealism (transfiguration, simplification) in these English pictures; but his efforts were of no avail, and he might just as well have shouted in the face of a hurricane.

[6]According to Dr. Wilhelm Lübke,Outlines of the History of Art(Vol. II, p. 452), Patenier might almost be called the founder of the modern northern school of landscape painting. See also p. 575 in the same volume. On this subject see also Muther,Geschichte der Malerei, Vol. II, p. 72: "Although in a way it is possible to establish in what respect the painting of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century ran parallel with that of Italy, it is also necessary to emphasize the fact, on the other hand, that painting." Muther mentions Hendrik Met de Bles, Joachim de Patenier and Bosch as the leaders of this tendency.

[7]See W. H. Riehl,Culturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten, p. 67.

[8]This use of the word sentimental in regard to the love of nature for its own sake, is not by any means unprecedented. Schiller, in his essayUeber naive und sentimentale Dichtung, as an advocate in favour of the love in question, constantly refers to it as sentimental. (See 1838 Edition ofWorks, Vol. XII, pp. 167-281.)

[9]See W. R. Hardie,Lectures in Classical Subjects, pp. 16-17: "What are the scenes in Nature which had the greatest attraction for the ancients? The landscape which a Greek would choose for his environment was a tranquil one, a cultivated spot or a spot capable of cultivation;" and p. 21: "... apart from the work of one or two exceptional poets like Æschylus or Pindar, it must be allowed that the ancient view of Nature was somewhat prosaic and practical, showing a decided preference for fertile, habitable and accessible country."

[10]Some Aspects of Greek Genius, p. 252. See also his remarks, pp. 246-248, concluding thus: "The great period, indeed, of the Attic drama, when the dialectic movement of thought was in full operation, can hardly be called 'simple' in Schiller's sense" [he is quoting Schiller on "Simple and Sentimental Poetry," where in the opening paragraph Schiller applies the wordnaiv, simple, to a natural object, as meaning that state in which nature and art stand contrasted and the former shames the latter]; "yet even then, as in Homer, nature is but the background of the picture, the scene in which man's activity displays itself. The change of sentiment sets in only from the time of Alexander onwards. Nature is then sought for her own sake; artists and poets turn to her with disinterested love; her moods are lovingly noted, and she is brought into close relationship with man."

[11]Studies of the Greek Poets, Vol. II, p. 258.

[12]SeeSocial Life in Greece(Mahaffy), p. 426, andWhat have the Greeks done for Modern Civilization?(Mahaffy, 1909), p. 11: "External nature was the very thing that the Greeks, all through their great history, felt less keenly than we should have expected. Their want of a sense of the picturesque has ever been cited as a notable defect." See also W. R. Hardie,Lectures on Classical Subjects(1903), p. 8: "To what extent do the modern feelings and fancies about Nature appear in the ancient poets?... The usual and substantially true answer is that they appear to a very slight extent. Like Whitehead, the Greek is slow to recognize 'a bliss that leans not to mankind.'"

[13]Culturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten(2nd Edition, 1859), p. 63.

[14]See S. H. Butcher,Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, pp. 265, 266: "Mountains and lonely woods and angry seas, in all periods of Greek literature, so far from calling out a sublime sense of mystery and awe, raise images of terror and repulsion, of power divorced from beauty and alien to art. Homer, when for the moment he pauses to describe a place, chooses one in which the hand of man is visible; which he has reclaimed from the wild, made orderly, subdued to his own use. Up to the last days of Greek antiquity man has not yet learnt so to lose himself in the boundless life of Nature, as to find a contemplative pleasure in her wilder and more majestic scenes."See also J. A. Symonds,Studies of the Greek Poets, Vol. II, p. 257: "The Greeks and Romans paid less attention to inanimate nature than we do, and were beyond all question repelled by the savage grandeur of marine and mountain scenery, preferring landscapes of smiling and cultivated beauty to rugged sublimity or the picturesqueness of decay...."See also W. R. Hardie,Lectures on Classical Subjects, pp. 3, 9, 17, and Friedlander,Roman Life and Manners, Vol. I. pp. 391, 392, 393, 395.

See also J. A. Symonds,Studies of the Greek Poets, Vol. II, p. 257: "The Greeks and Romans paid less attention to inanimate nature than we do, and were beyond all question repelled by the savage grandeur of marine and mountain scenery, preferring landscapes of smiling and cultivated beauty to rugged sublimity or the picturesqueness of decay...."

See also W. R. Hardie,Lectures on Classical Subjects, pp. 3, 9, 17, and Friedlander,Roman Life and Manners, Vol. I. pp. 391, 392, 393, 395.

[15]Ueber die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Gefühls für das Romantische in der Natur, pp. 4, 10.

[16]Culturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten, p. 57.

[17]Ibid., pp. 59, 60.

[18]Ueber die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Gefühls für das Romantische in der Natur, pp. 2, 3.

[19]E. B. d'Auvergne,The English Castles, pp. 216, 217.

[20]SeeLettres Nouvelles addressées à Monsieur de Malesherbes(Geneva, 1780), 3rd letter, p. 43. Speaking of a lonely walk in the neighbourhood of his country house, he says: "J'allois alors d'un pas plus tranquille chercher quelque lieu sauvage dans la forêt, quelque lieu désert, où rien ne me montrant la main de l'homme ne m'annonçât la servitude et la domination, enfin quelqu' asyle où je pusse croire avoir pénétré le premier, et où nul tiers importun ne vint s'entreposer entre la nature et moi. C'était là qu'elle sembloit déployer à mes yeux une magnificence toujours nouvelle. L'or des genêts et la pourpre des bruyères frappoient mes yeux d'un luxe qui touchoit mon cœur; la majesté des arbres"—and so on in the same romantic strain for twenty lines. It is impossible to reproduce every passage I should like to quote, in order to reveal the full range of Rousseau's passion for nature and his bitter contempt of man and man's work; but the above is typical, and other equally gushing passages may be found inLes Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire(Paris, 1882), pp. 119, 138, etc., etc.;La Nouvelle Héloise, especially the 11th letter;Les Confessions(Ed. 1889, Vol. I), Bk. VI, pp. 229, 234, 238, 245, and Bk. IV, p. 169: "... on sait déjà ce que j'entends par un beau pays. Jamais pays de plaine, quelque beau qu'il fût, ne parut tel à mes yeux. Il me faut des torrents, des rochers, des sapins, des bois noirs, des montagnes, des chemins raboteux à monter et à descendre, des précipices à mes cotés, qui me fassent peur.... J'eus ce plaisir ... en approchant de Chambéri ... car ce qu'il y a de plaisir dans mon goût pour des lieux escarpés, est qu'ils me font tourner la tête: et j 'aime beaucoup ce tournoiement pourvu que je sois en sureté."

[21]Sämmtliche Werke(Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1838), Vol. XII, "Ueber naive und sentimentale Dichtung," p. 168, 169: "This kind of pleasure at the sight of Nature is not an æsthetic pleasure, but a moral one: for it is arrived at by means of an idea, and it is not felt immediately the act of contemplation has taken place, neither does it depend for its existence upon beauty of form." And, p. 189, after pointing out that the Greeks completely lacked this feeling for Nature, he says: "Whence comes this different sense? How is it that we who, in everything related to Nature, are inferior to the ancients, should pay such homage to her, should cling so heartily to her, and be able to embrace the inanimate world with such warmth of feeling? It is not our greater conformity to Nature, but, on the contrary, the opposition to her, which is inherent in our conditions and our customs, that impels us to find some satisfaction in the physical world for our awakening instinct for truth and primitive rudeness, which, like the moral tendency from which that instinct arises, lies incorruptible and indestructible in all human hearts and can find no satisfaction in the moral world."

[22]SeeHegels Leben, by Karl Rosenkranz, especially pp. 475, 476 and 482, 483.

[23]SeeThe Life and Letters of John Constable, by C. R. Leslie, R.A., pp. 343, 349.

[24]See J. Morley'sRousseau, Vol. I, pp. 85, 86: "According to his own account, it was Voltaire's Letters on the English which first drew him seriously to study, and nothing which that illustrious man wrote at this time escaped him." And p. 146: "Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics." And p. 147: "We need not quote passages from Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption between him and the author of the Social Contract. They are to be found in every chapter."

[25]Geschichte der Malerei, Vol. III, p. 175.

[26]Modern Art, Vol. I, p. 140.

[27]Ibid., p. 138: "What his fatherland neglected was taken over by the Continent. Strange as this neglect may seem, the rapidity with which Europe assimilated Constable is even more remarkable. The movement began in Paris.... France needed what Constable had to give.... The young Frenchmen saw the traditional English freedom with eyes sharpened by enthusiasm."

3. Portrait Painting.

When one now adds to these influences, the steady rise of the power of the bourgeoisie in Europe, from the seventeenth century onward, and, as a result of this increasing power, an uninterrupted growth in the art of portrait painting—a growth that attained such vast proportions that it cast all attainments of a like nature in any other age or continent into the shade—one can easily understand what factors have been the most formidable opponents of Ruler-Art in the Occident, since the event of the Renaissance.

After all that I have said concerning the principles of Ruler-Art, it will scarcely be necessary for me to expatiate upon those elements in portrait painting which are antagonistic to these principles; for when you think of portrait painting as it has been developed by the claims of the bourgeoisie in Europe, you must not have Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" in mind. Neither must you consider that portrait work in which, by chance, the artist has had before him a model who, in every feature of face or of figure, corresponded to his ideal; nor that in which the artist has been able to allow himself to exercise his simplifying and transfiguring power. Otherwise some of the best of Rubens' and Rembrandt's work would of necessity come under the ban which we must set upon by far the greater number of portraits.

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