The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII by Various

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The olden times gauged correctly this aristocratic character of the
forest when they chose it as a privileged exercise-ground where princes
might take their amusement, and when they ennobled the chase; although,
seen by the light of a philosophic student's lamp, there is nothing very
noble about it when a court, shining with the smoothest polish that
civilization can give, withdraws from time to time into the barbarity of
the primeval forest, and in faithful imitation of the rude life of the
hunter spells out again, as it were, the first beginnings of
civilization. For no title did the German princes of the Empire struggle
more bitterly than for that of "Master of the Imperial Hunt." On
Frankish-German soil royalty put its centralizing power to the test
first and most decisively in the establishment of royal forest
preserves. The king's woods from that time on stood under a higher and
more efficient protection than the Common Law could have afforded. A
more strikingly aristocratic prerogative than that of the forest
preserves is inconceivable, and yet it is owing to this privilege that
Germany still looks so green, that our mountains are not bare of trees
like those of Italy, that country and people have not died off and dried
up, that, in fine, such vast magnificent tracts of forest could, as a
whole complete in itself, later pass over into the hands of the state.

This aristocratic love of the forest, however, went hand in hand with
the forest-tyranny of the Middle Ages. The forest-trees and the game
were treated with more consideration than the corn-fields and the
peasants. When a cruel master wished to punish a peasant sorely he
chased the game into his fields, and the hunt which was to slay the game
trampled down what the latter had not devoured. The war about the forest
violently forced upon the peasant the question as to whether or not the
ancient privileges of the aristocracy could be justified before God and
man. We possess a poem by G.A. Buerger which contrasts the naked rights
of labor with the historic rights of rank in so sharp a fashion that, if
it should be published today, it would undoubtedly be confiscated as
communist literature. This ancient specimen of modern social-democratic
poetry, characteristically, for those times, takes its theme from the
"War about the Forest;" it bears the title: _The Peasant to His Most
Serene Tyrants_. Because the princely huntsman has driven the peasant
through the latter's own down-trodden corn-field, followed by the halloo
of the hunt, the peasant in the poem suddenly hits upon the dangerous
question, "Who are you, Prince?"

The horrible punishments with which poachers and trespassers against the
forest were threatened in the Middle Ages can be explained only when we
see in them an outlet to the bitterness of two parties at war about the
forest. In this war martial law was declared. The poacher felt that he
was acting within his rights, like the pirate; neither of them wished to
be considered a common thief. Above, I compared the forest with the sea;
the former barbarous punishment of pirates likewise runs parallel with
the cruel chastisement of trespassers against the forest. The latter
still frequently thinks he is only getting back again by cunning and
force a proprietorship that was snatched from him by force. There are in
Germany whole villages, whole districts, where, even at the present day,
poaching and trespassing against the forest are sharply distinguished
from common crimes which disgrace the perpetrator. To catch a hare in
their traps is, for these peasants, no more dishonorable than it is for
a student to cudgel the night-watchman. Therein lurks the ancient hidden
thought of the "War about the Free Forest." In the forest the turbulent
country-folk in times of excitement can attack the state or the
individual large landholder in his most sensitive spot. We saw how, in
the year 1848, extensive tracts of forest were laid waste--not
plundered--in accordance with a well concocted plan. The trees were hewn
down and the trunks were intentionally left to lie and rot, or the
forest was burnt down in order, with each day's quota of burned forest,
to extort the concession of a new "popular demand." The old legend of
the "War about the Forest" had become, once more, really live history.

And this eternal trouble-maker, the forest, which, however, as we have
noticed, always gets the worst of it in every disturbance, is at the
same time a powerful safeguard for historic customs. Under its
protection not only an ancient nationality but also the oldest remains
of historic monuments have been preserved to us. Many of the most
remarkable old names have been retained for us in the appellations of
the forest districts. When German philology has finished investigating
the names of villages and cities, it will turn to the names of the
forest districts--which, for the most part, have changed far less than
those of the districts of the plain--as to a new and rich source of
knowledge. It is almost without exception under the shelter of the
forest-thickets that have been conserved until the present day the
town-walls of the nations which, in prehistoric times, occupied our
provinces, as well as the graves and sacrificial places of our
forefathers, which are our oldest monuments. And while, in the name of a
purely manufacturing civilization, it has been proposed to destroy our
German forests, they alone have guarded for us in their shade the
earliest speaking witnesses of national industry. In the
mountain-forests of the middle Rhine one often finds large dross-heaps
on sequestered hill tops, far from brooks and water courses. These are
the places where stood the primeval "forest smithies," whose forges were
perhaps worked with the hand or the foot, and of which our heroic
legends sing; these are the scenes of the first rude beginnings of our
iron industry which, since then, has developed so mightily. Thus the
oldest information that we possess on the subject of our German
manufacturing industry starts, like our entire civilization, in the
forest.

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 oL 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'etre_. 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.

The older masters, as well as those of today, liked to place themselves
below the landscape which they wished to construct, where all the
outlines stand out most clearly defined. It had almost grown to be a
rule that the foreground should be placed sharply in profile and often
so deep in shadow that it contrasted like a silhouette with the more
distant grounds. On the other hand, it is a favorite whim of the genuine
pigtail age to draw bird's-eye landscapes and views of cities, in which
every elevation of the earth seems flattened out as much as possible,
every distinct division of the separate grounds as much as possible
obliterated.

When Goethe was on his return trip from Messina to Naples he wrote at
the sight of Scylla and Charybdis: "These two natural curiosities,
standing so far apart in reality and placed so close together by the
poet, have furnished men with an opportunity to abuse the fables of the
bards, not remembering that the human imaginative faculty when it would
represent objects as important always imagines them to be higher than
they are broad, and thus lends more character, seriousness, and dignity
to the picture. I have heard complaints, a thousand times, that an
object known only from description no longer satisfies us when we come
face to face with it. The cause of this is always the same. Imagination
and reality bear the same relation to each other as poetry and prose:
The former conceives objects to be huge and precipitous, the latter
always thinks that they flatten themselves out. The landscape painters
of the sixteenth century, compared with those of our own day, furnish
the most striking example of this."

A number of the most pertinent aphorisms might be developed from this
short remark. For us this one will suffice: On account of their whole
fantastic-romantic ideal of art the medieval painters were forced to
make their landscapes steep and rugged and to crowd them within narrow
confines. The backgrounds of their landscapes--in the sense of the above
remark of Goethe--are composed like poetry rather than like a painting.
It is not the portrayal of the earthly, but an imaginary sacred
landscape, which stood everywhere so alpine-like before their spirit.
This, however, straightway became identified with the actual picture of
nature, and determined the eye for natural scenery of the age.

From the biblical poetry of the Hebrews the Christian world (and not
only the Germanic) had acquired an enthusiasm for the beauties of nature
which could never have been kindled by ancient art. With the deeper
Christian knowledge of God comes also deeper poetic perception of His
beautiful earth, and not until man felt with intense pain the
transitoriness of this beautiful earth did he begin to love it so
ardently. It is therefore a transparent anti-realistic lanscape
painting, like that of the Psalmist, which those pious painters give us;
it strives after elevated forms for the outer senses also, strives
upward, and seeks to gain an insight into an entire world, into a cosmos
of concentrated, natural life, the archetype of which--in spite of all
childish naturalism--it has seen in the paradise of fancy rather than in
reality. The tall luminous mountain peaks, attainable only by the eye,
not by the foot, of themselves half belong to heaven. The landscapes of
the seventeenth century, on the contrary, which are inspired by earthly
beauty pure and simple, have a tendency to flatness, just as in reality
all landscapes lie spread out in length and breadth before us. Classical
antiquity had just as uncultivated an eye for the beauty of the Alps as
the age of Renaissance and the Rococo which emulated it so ardently.
Humboldt mentions that not a single Roman author ever alludes to the
Alps from a descriptive point of view except to complain of their
impassableness and like qualities, and that Julius Caesar employed the
leisure hours of an Alpine journey to complete a dry grammatical
treatise, _De Analogia_.

In Bible vignettes of the eighteenth century, Paradise--which is the
archetype of the virgin splendor of nature--is depicted as a flat
tiresome garden entirely without elevations of any kind, in which the
dear God has already begun to correct his own handiwork, and with the
shears of a French gardener has carved out from the clumps of trees,
straight avenues, pyramids, and the like. In older wood-carvings, on the
other hand, Paradise is represented as a gradually rising wilderness
where Adam's path is blocked by overhanging masses of rock which
contrast strangely with the conception of natural life devoid of all
labor and danger. Our fathers often saw in a charming, rich, and
fertile region a picture of Paradise, whereas we are far more likely in
a primeval wilderness to exclaim with the medieval masters:

"The lofty works, uncomprehended,
Are bright as on the earliest day."

In the landscapes of medieval pictures one scarcely ever sees the woods
painted. Can the thin foliage of the trees of the old Italians, which
look as though the leaves on them had been counted, be entirely
explained by lack of technique? The generation of those days surely had
a very different archetype of the intact, uncontaminated splendor of the
forest than is possessed by us, for whom there remains scarcely anything
but a cultivated forest ravaged by the axe and inclosed within
boundaries fixed by rule and measure. The medieval poets felt deeply
enough the poetic beauty of the forest, but men saw it with the
appreciative eye of the artist only when they had gone away from the
forest, when they had become more unfamiliar with it, and the woods
themselves had begun to disappear. Thus the peasant in the folk-song
knows how to reveal poetically many a tender charm of the beauty of
nature; but, on the other hand, he very seldom has an eye for the
picturesque beauty of natural scenery. As regards the latter it is with
him as with the late Pastor Schmidt of Werneuchen who when describing in
hexameters the spectacle of a barley field to the Berliners, called it
"a marvelous view." When the forest was still the rule in Germany and
the field the exception, the uprooted parts of the forest, the oases of
cleared land, the free open spaces, undoubtedly passed for the most
attractive landscapes; whereas we, who have acquired too much of the
open, are more attracted by the oases of the forest shade.

Only he who takes this into consideration can understand for example,
how it is possible that the palace of Charlemagne at Ingelheim could
have passed for a perfect country-seat, situated in what must have been
considered in those days an extremely charming and picturesque spot.
Seen through modern eyes these plains of the left bank of the Rhine with
their fields, vineyards, sandy wastes and stunted pine-woods are
intensely uninteresting, and one fails to comprehend why an emperor
should have chosen Ingelheim as a country-seat, when he needed only to
cross the river, or to proceed down stream for a few hours in order to
build his palace in a region of imperishable natural beauty. If,
however, one takes one's stand on the ruined walls of the imperial abode
and looks out over the broad plains of the Rhine valley, which at that
time were already cleared land, while the chain of hills along the left
bank, which are so monotonous at present, were still covered with woods,
then one can estimate to some extent the delight caused by the view
spreading before the gaze of the emperor. His castle at the edge of the
wood, as it were on the borders of night and old barbarity, looked out
upon the open, and under the windows stretched the broad agricultural
land of the Rheingau, from whose virgin soil the first vines were just
beginning to sprout, adorned with new settlements and roads--surely a
royal spectacle for the eye of those days. It was, so to speak, the
symbol of the universal historical mission, not only of the emperor but
of the entire age--namely, to root up, to clear, to procure light. And
thus the same landscape which today is considered, if not exactly
commonplace, yet at the most idyllic, may have appeared imposing and
imperial to the people of a thousand years ago.

It is because of this varying eye for natural scenery--which is the eye
of generations succeeding one another in the course of history--that
landscape painting, which conveys to us the most trustworthy information
of this variation of vision, does not belong solely to the sphere of the
esthetician; the historian of civilization must also study this most
subjective of all plastic representations.

It is well known that even the most beautiful region is not in itself a
real work of art. Man alone creates artistically; nature does not. A
landscape such as meets our gaze out of doors is not beautiful in
itself, it only possesses, possibly, the capability of being
spiritualized and refined into beauty in the eye of the spectator. Only
in so far is it a work of art as Nature has furnished the raw material
for such, while each beholder first fashions it artistically and endows
it with a soul in the mirror of his eye. Nature is made beautiful only
by the self-deception of the spectator.

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.

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