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

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




This goes so far that one might even be deceived into thinking that the
different ages had gazed upon the beauty of nature not only with
differing mental eyes but also with a different faculty of seeing. Most
of the old masters have painted their landscapes with the eyes of a
far-sighted person; we think, as a rule, that we can attain far greater
natural truth if we paint our pictures, as it were, from the angle of
vision of a near-sighted person. A far-sighted painter will usually be
more inclined to paint a plastic landscape, while a near-sighted one
would make a mood-picture out of the same scene. The very trees of the
old Italians, on which the leaves are numbered, may serve to exemplify
this comparison. The scenery of the landscapes of Van Eyck and his
pupils is quite often painted as though the artist had looked at the
background through a perspective glass and the foreground through a
magnifying one. Jan Breughel paints his charming little landscapes with
such detailed precision of outline, especially as regards foliage, he
draws in his swarming little figures with such sharp lines, that the
whole seems reflected in the eye of an eagle rather than in that of a
man. On the other hand we miss the unity and the differentiation of the
combined effect--the concentration of large groups, an eye for the
landscape as an organic whole. Claude Lorraine and Ruysdael are the
first who may be called epoch-making along these lines; they are also,
in this sense, the ancestors of modern landscape painting. Where the old
masters still counted the leaves, flowers, and blades of grass and
laboriously imitated them, we have now adopted broad, general, and, to a
certain extent, conventional forms of foliage, meadowland, and the like.

Taken separately, these are far less true to nature than the miniature
imitation of detail. Taken collectively, on the other hand, they are far
more profoundly true to nature and to art. Do we not at present
sometimes see artists who almost seem to consider it their whole life's
mission to paint landscapes which have scarcely any definite plastic
forms, pure mood-pictures, as, for example, Zwengauer, who is never
tired of portraying barren moorlands with some water in the foreground,
a shapeless tract of land in the centre, and above the fiery glow of the
sunset, which, with a considerable portion of atmosphere growing ever
darker and darker, fills up the largest part of the whole picture. It is
as though fire, water, air and earth, the four elements as such, were
demonstrated before us on the Dachauer moor and combined to form a
landscape harmony. For such pictures of mood, pure and simple, the old
masters had absolutely no eye. If a painter of the fifteenth or
sixteenth century should rise from his grave and gaze upon even our best
landscape paintings he would certainly take very little pleasure in
them; he would consider them daubs executed after a recipe according to
which one can obtain the most beautiful foliage by throwing a sponge
dipped in green paint against the wall.

It is not only the eye for natural scenery which has thus advanced in
the last three centuries from the perception of the individual parts to
the perception of the whole. We find the same phenomena in the case of
historical painters, and no less in that of the poets, musicians, and
scholars. A Bach suite, just like a Breughel landscape, has been, as it
were, worked out under the microscope, and nowadays it is easier to find
a hundred philosophers of history who are capable of constructing
history as a "work of art"--exceedingly well on the whole--than one
individual chronicler who would lose himself, with the dead
leaf-counting diligence of bygone centuries, in endless detail-work. We
look not only at landscapes but at the entire world more from the
viewpoint of the harmony of the whole than from that of the divergence
of the individual parts.

In helping us to gauge the eye for natural scenery of an age, the really
artistic portrayals are often far less accurate than the fashionable
articles manufactured, as it were, by the artistic handicraftsman, for
the latter best disclose to us the eye of the entire public. Hence, for
example, the popular passion for Rhine landscapes, Swiss pictures,
Italian views, etc., mechanically executed after a fixed model--which
periodically breaks forth only to vanish again--is more important for us
in this respect than the conception of many a leader of genius in the
art of landscape-painting, who may perhaps set the tone for the future
but seldom for the present. There exist special directions for making a
Rhine landscape and for infallibly bestowing upon it the genuine
coloring of the Rhine, which appeared in the book-market about a hundred
and fifty years ago, side by side with directions for preparing the best
vinegar, the best sealing-wax, etc.--I do not know whether it was also
sealed up as a secret recipe, as they were. By genuine Rhine coloring
was meant that sentimental, mistily indistinct tone in the dullest
possible half tints formerly so much in vogue. The fact that such a
booklet could be written and sold with profit affords us instructive
hints regarding the eye of the multitude for natural scenery in those
days, and the tone of that infallible Rhine coloring is, in its way,
also a color-tone of the age. Nowadays, when Alpine landscapes are
painted even on the rough stones from the Alpine rivers (for
paper-weights), it would be very easy to write out a recipe for genuine
mountain coloring. Mountain peaks, rugged as possible, painted in thick
Venetian white, must detach themselves from a sky of almost pure Berlin
blue; with these again contrasts a centre-ground partly composed of
clumps of dark green fir-trees and partly of a poisonous yellow-green
meadow; finally the rocks of the foreground must be painted in glaring
ochre tones, just as they are squeezed out of the paint tube. Such
factory goods are, for the historian of culture, just as necessary a
supplement to Zimmermann and Schirmer and Calame as that "genuine Rhine
coloring" is to Koch and Rheinhard, to Schuetz and Reinermann.

Let us linger a moment longer in the region of the Rhine, which was in
Germany, for nearly two centuries, the subject of the most salable
landscape fancy articles. In the seventeenth century it was already a
sort of industry to turn out mechanically so-called "Rhine rivers." In
the same way that we now reproduce Rhine scenes on plates, cups,
tin-ware and pocket-handkerchiefs, in those days folding-screens,
fire-places, bay-windows, even door-cases, but more especially the space
over the doorway (though the latter were executed in the fresco style of
the cooper), were decorated with "Rhine rivers." But these "Rhine
rivers" are totally unlike those which the manufacturers of views of the
Rhine furnish us with today. The eye revealed by the one is very
different from that which we find in the other; at the most they have
the water in common.

[Illustration: AT THE SICK BED actually a painting by BENJAMIN VAUTIER]

In the old "Rhine rivers" there are, for the most part, rounded-off
mountainous formations, whereas we now make the angularity of the
real Rhine mountains still more angular if possible; the castles, as
indicative of a too barbaric taste, are often omitted or changed into a
sort of Roman ruin; the portrayal is so free that it ceases to be a
portrait, and yet they believed that they had adhered all the more
strictly to the peculiar motive of Rhine scenery. The most lively
activity of men and animals, ships and rafts, and all sorts of land
conveyances, formed the principal ornament; there had to be a sort of
antlike swarming to and fro on a river Rhine of this description if it
was to be considered really beautiful. In Saftleewen's views of the
Rhine this fondness is already discernible. Although in his pictures
there is still evidence of a very clear eye for mountainous formation
and the architectonic adornment of the region, yet the monotonous,
unnaturally tender and misty coloring indicates the effort to soften and
equalize the contrast of forms, while life is introduced into the
landscape only by means of the immeasurably rich accessories which make
every rock, every valley, and especially the entire river, swarm with
people. These are, in truth, cultural landscapes, in which we perceive
the greatest charm of the region to lie in the pathway of human work,
just as the whole age in which they were painted longed to get away from
the devastation of the Thirty Years' War into the crowded activity of
work and festive pleasures, which, however, were far less apt to be
found on the real Rhine than on the painted "Rhine rivers" of the
seventeenth century. Johannes Griffier affords us an even clearer idea
than Saftleewen of the model pictures of the mechanical old "Rhine
rivers." Griffier paints from imagination an idyllic river valley,
adorned with Roman ruins such as never stood on the Rhine, animated by
all kinds of jolly people, such as it would have been hard, in that day,
to find gathered in our devastated provinces. That was then dubbed a
river Rhine. Griffier, however, certainly believed that he had beheld
the genuine scenery of the Rhine; he did not laboriously evolve his
pictures shut up in a room, but painted his imaginative pieces in a
skiff, direct from nature. And it really was the actual Rhine that he
saw, only he looked at it with the idealistic eye of the seventeenth
century.

If one confronts productions of this kind with the later works of a
Schuetz or Reinermann which treat of the same subject, and then again
compares both with our modern views of the Rhine, one can often scarcely
comprehend how even the same character of scenery is supposed to be
reproduced in these widely differing conceptions, much less the
identically same landscape. While in Saftleewen, for example, we always
see the Rhine country veiled in a soft mist, seventy years ago it was
accounted as a merit of the elder Schuetz that he always gave his
pictures of the Rhine and the Main the clearest possible air, and that
there was never a trace of mist in the atmosphere! Let us now compare
both of these conceptions with the Rhine views executed in the modern
style of a steel engraving, with their heavy, tropically stormy sky,
dark masses of clouds, between which thick dazzling streams of light
break forth, and similar violent light-effects. One might think that
sun, air, and clouds, water and mountains and trees and rocks, had
altered in the course of the centuries, that nature itself had been
transformed, if we did not know only too well that it is the eye of man
alone which has altered in the mean time, that every generation _sees_
in a different style.

The masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries looked at natural
scenery in a very much more objective manner than we do. Wherever there
is bright springtime or summer, wherever all the trees are green and the
flowers blooming, wherever the cloudless sky is glittering in deepest
blue, and all forms stand out detached from one another in the luminous
clearness of the full, joyous, midday sunlight--there for them is
genuinely beautiful natural scenery. It was not lack of technique that
prevented the artists of that period from painting faded yellow autumn
pictures, or thunder-storms and rain landscapes as we do. With regard to
more difficult points they were technically so far advanced that they
could surely have produced a gray sky instead of a blue, and yellow-red
trees instead of green, if they had seriously tried to do so. But with
their far brighter eyes they saw the landscape far brighter than we do,
and therefore, of necessity, they painted it so. Whoever compares
medieval lyrics, where the same sunny, springlike tone plays through all
the verses, with modern lyrics, will become more deeply conscious of
this necessity.

And as those men found their calm nature reflected in the midday
clearness of the most peaceful of spring days, so it is necessary for us
to seek the mirror of our own passionate agitation in the pathos of the
stormy, mournful, autumnally decaying, desolate, savage landscape. They
therefore really painted pictures of mood just as we do. Only they
strove, as it were, to preserve the most general elemental mood of
natural beauty, while we strain ourselves in depicting individual
changeable moods. Do we not actually see at present stage-scenery
painted like sentimental mood-pictures, trees in the foreground, for
example, on whose deformed greenish-brown foliage an elegiac
late-autumnal tinge rests? And these are shoved into position regularly
each evening for every dialogue scene, and every light comic
situation--a satire on the inner eye of our time. In a German metropolis
of art one can even see sign-boards of sausage manufacturers on which
sausages, hams, salted spare-ribs and swards are appetizingly painted
with brilliant technique; and they too are conceived like mood-pictures,
since that soft melancholy mist, with which our landscape painters are
so fond of coquetting, spreads likewise over these sausages and hams,
almost making them look as though they had all grown moldy. That is
another indication of the eye for natural scenery of our time.

Change of styles that great masters had made conventional, the
degeneration and progress of technique, etc., play a large part, to be
sure, in all these things, with and beside the changing eye. How much,
however, essentially depends upon the latter we can notice very plainly
when the question is one of architectural landscapes and, in general,
of the portrayal of old works of sculpture and architecture, which men
have seen very differently in different ages and represented
accordingly, while the originals have, in truth, remained the same
throughout the centuries.

The purest Gothic architecture portrayed in the pigtail age nearly
always has a pigtail look. The ornamentation of leaves and vines,
executed in accordance with the laws of organic necessity, becomes,
without the draughtsman being aware of it, an arbitrarily curved rococo
scroll; the proportions, which in reality soar upward, spread out in
width, so that one might think it possible for the eyesight to change
also, and yet in the building itself perhaps not a stone has been
disturbed since its erection; the pigtail surely did not transport
itself into the original--it existed only in the eye of the copyist. The
views of cities and buildings furnish the most striking examples of
this, for in them we can see how these additions have been made, in
woodcut, to the numerous topographical works of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Almost every medieval tower here bears the stamp
of the Renaissance, every pointed arch is, if possible, compressed into
a Roman arch, so firmly implanted were these new forms in the eye and
hand of the people of that time. For even in an external sense men no
longer possessed an organ for the old lines. Peter Neefs, the celebrated
architectural painter of this age, did indeed stand on such a high plane
of art and technique that he reproduced the perspectives of his Gothic
churches absolutely correctly. He had in this particular preserved the
objectivity of the artistic eye which is absolutely lacking in the
mechanical works mentioned above; nevertheless, even here, he shows
himself to be the child of his age. For example, he almost always paints
the interiors of his Gothic cathedrals on broad canvases of
insignificant height, which causes the pointed arches and vaulted
structures of the foreground to be cut off at the top. In spite of the
mathematically correct drawing the general plan of the picture
therefore reveals that the age of Peter Neefs no longer had a correct
eye for the principle, for the spirit, of the Gothic, otherwise the
master would not have cut off precisely the characteristic terminations
of the columns and vaultings by the arbitrary horizontal line of the
frame. Thus, in very truth, Neefs paints rigid Gothic, but in his
pictures we can recognize the seventeenth century which, at the most,
could see the medieval forms correctly with the outer but not with the
inner eye.

All the outlines of the ancient statues swell up under the pencil of the
draughtsman of that day, every muscle becomes coarser, fuller, more
fleshy, although the draughtsman undoubtedly believed he had reproduced
it with mathematical exactitude. The Grecian goddess no longer looks so
demure. She has grown to be a coquette; the Virgin has become a wife,
because the age lacked the virgin eye, because Rubens' full-bosomed
women's figures and Buonarotti's swelling play of the muscles obtruded
themselves everywhere, not only before the creative vision but also
before the inner receptive vision. Mignon, at that time, painted flowers
preferably in the stage of their most fully developed splendor, and
fruits succulently ripe to bursting; he despised closed buds. This is
something more than a mere fancy of this particular master; it is a
token of the eye of the whole generation, which was dull as regards the
beauty of buds, not only in the flower-piece but in all subjects of the
plastic arts.

This changing play of "vision" takes place everywhere that beauty meets
the gaze, but principally in the case of the beautiful in nature,
because this, as such, must first be conceived by the vision. The eye
for the beautiful in art remains more constant in comparison.

In youth one has a totally different eye for natural scenery than in old
age. This is the reason why we often feel greatly disappointed when we
behold a familiar region after a long time. There is no more thankless
task than to try to convince another of the beauty of natural scenery.

One tries, as it were, to implant in him one's own eye--an effort which
rarely succeeds. So it is, furthermore, the business of the landscape
painter to implant his own eye for natural scenery in every one who
looks upon his pictures, in such a manner that the latter shall get out
of the landscape the same beauties which the eye of the artist put into
it. If he succeeds in this, one must at least concede that he has worked
clearly, logically, and conscious of his effects.

The eye for natural scenery is never an absolute one, and if out of ten
generations each one finds the primitive canon of natural beauty in
something different, then none is entirely right and none entirely
wrong. This uncertainty of the eye for natural scenery might drive a
painter crazy if he should insist upon knowing definitely, once for all,
whether the succeeding century would not perhaps have just as good a
right to laugh at his ideal of the beautiful in nature as we have to
laugh at the preferences for natural scenery of the two preceding
generations. He might then, in consideration of the tremendous
fluctuations in the conception of the beautiful in nature, lose
confidence in his own eyes to such an extent that at last he would no
longer have any guarantee to assure him that the mountain which he is
drawing as a rounded knoll is not perhaps, in reality, pointed and
jagged, while the roundish outline merely holds his eyes captive, as it
did those of the painters of the pigtail.

If, however, the eye for natural scenery only sees _bona fide_, as the
jurists say, then it follows that it saw correctly for its age.

Whether our grandchildren will laugh at us because we saw thus and not
otherwise need not disturb our peace of mind, for no present has any
kind of guarantee that it will not be laughed at by the immediate
future.

* * * * *




THE MUSICAL EAR[15] (1852)


By W.X. RIEHL

TRANSLATED BY FRANCES H. KING


The North German pitch differs in general from the South German--I mean
the orchestral pitch.

The Viennese pitch is the highest in Germany. They go still higher,
however, in St. Petersburg; the pitch in which they play on the Neva is
the highest in the whole of Europe. The climax of the European
concert-pitch of the present day may be represented in its three
principal degrees by the orchestral tone of the three capitals--Paris,
Vienna, St. Petersburg--ascending from the lowest pitch to the highest.
There is no German concert-pitch, but there are dozens of different
German concert-pitches--a Viennese, a Berlin, a Dresden, a Frankfurt
pitch, etc., so that in the light of such distinctions even the
above-mentioned division into northern and southern tone appears like a
very general hypothesis. The Parisian pitch and the French pitch, on the
contrary, are accepted without caviling as synonymous.[16] Italy, on the
other hand, is also without a uniform pitch; as early as a hundred years
ago a distinction was made there between the Roman, the Venetian, the
Lombard pitch, ascending from the lower to the higher. It may therefore
be said that in Rome they play approximately in the Parisian pitch, in
upper Italy in the Viennese and St. Petersburg pitch. I am not indulging
in any political metaphors, but in sober musical truth.





Is it possible, however, that this variety of musical tone, the
historical roots of which extend back so far, may be something arbitrary
and accidental? The very usage of the German language lends a
significant double meaning to the word _Stimmung_ (pitch, tone, mood).
It stamps with the same name, on the one hand, the given basis upon
which are built up the harmonies of music and, on the other, the
harmonies of emotional life.

It is one of the most fascinating, but at the same time most difficult
tasks of the history of culture to catch, as it were, the personal
emotions, the pitch upon which each generation is based, in distinction
from the perception of the outspoken deeds and thoughts of the age.

This task would be incapable of solution if the history of art did not
furnish us a key to it. I have already shown in the preceding essay on
the _Eye for Natural Scenery_, that the question does not concern the
historical appreciation of the work of art as such, so much as the
investigation of the special manner in which a generation has perceived
and enjoyed the beautiful. And indeed this is more easily discerned in
the case of the most fluid, subjective species of the beautiful, in
natural beauty, than in the more objective artistic beauty.

In art, however, musical beauty comes closest to natural beauty, since
it is in its turn the most subjective, the most general in its
expression, and the most versatile in its forms. The phenomenon, so
important from the point of the history of culture, namely, that each
age sees with its own eyes and hears with its own ears, can therefore
nowhere be more sharply observed than in the conception of natural
beauty and in the fundamental forms of musical expression which happen
to prevail for the time being. I will speak, therefore, of these
fundamental forms and not of musical works of art, for by means of what
one might call, by way of comparison, musical natural beauty, by means
of the prototypes of the high or low tones, of tone-color, of time, of
rhythm, etc., we can test most clearly the unconscious transformation
of the musical ear in contrast to the conscious development of artistic
taste.

Let us compare the orchestral pitch of the eighteenth with that of the
nineteenth century. As the peoples of Europe became more passionate and
agitated in public and in private life, and as our whole intellectual
life rose to a higher level, our orchestral tone was keyed up higher. In
1739 Euler reckoned the vibrations of the great eight-foot C to be one
hundred and eighteen to the second. In 1776, Marpurg, for the same tone,
gives one hundred and twenty-five vibrations. Chladni, in the year 1802,
calculated its vibrations as a hundred and twenty-eight, twenty years
later as a hundred and thirty-six to a hundred and thirty-eight to the
second. And since then we have, no doubt, gone noticeably higher!

We find, then, that the tone has risen most emphatically since the
appearance of the Romanticists; in the days of the Classical School it
remained the same for the greatest length of time. The latter was the
period of the most moderate artistic expression. At present, on the
contrary, we thirst for shriller and shriller tones, higher and higher
singing. Even though every violin treble-string snaps and every singer's
throat becomes exhausted before its time, we go on forcing the tone
higher from decade to decade.

The entirely reversed relation of church-pitch to concert-pitch, which
has taken place in the course of time, appears noteworthy in this
connection. Even in the eighteenth century, church-pitch was much higher
than concert-pitch, and surely for a reason far deeper than the mere
wish to save tin on the organ pipes. For the old masters used church
music for the portrayal of strong emotions, and on this account they
needed the shriller pitch. Bach is much more shrilly and
characteristically dramatic in his church cantatas than contemporary
masters of Italian opera. Chamber and theatrical music, for which the
lower, milder, more agreeable orchestral tone was chosen, was played,
for the most part, only with the semblance of emotion. When Gluck and
Mozart transported tragedy from the church to the stage and concert
hall, concert-pitch naturally had to assume the role of church-pitch,
and thus the former has in fact gradually become higher than the latter.