For the opponents of the conservation of large landed estates the forest

will always be the worst stumbling-block, for it will never be possible

to establish an even apparently successful forestry on a small scale.

Where agriculture is concerned, the advantage of small farming is open

to discussion; but he who would not see the pitifulness of forestry on a

small scale must hold his hands before both eyes. In proportion as

forestry is carried on in a small way, that is to say, in so far as it

shall be exclusively operated so as to obtain the largest possible

income out of the smallest possible capital and with the shortest

possible delay, the forest loses its historic stamp, its cultural

influence on the social and esthetic education of the nation, and on the

characteristic distinctions of society.

Germany is not separated into field and woodland in such a manner that

one part is dedicated almost exclusively to forestry and the other part

to agriculture. Rather does the contrast between field and forest exist

everywhere; it interferes with the natural division into mountainous and

flat country, and thus divides and subdivides the soil of the entire

German empire in a fashion of which no other country of Europe can

boast. In addition, agriculture and forestry are present in every

legitimate form possible. On German soil the whole scale is run through,

and we have the most variegated examples all the way from

spade-husbandry up to the largest private estates; in the forms of our

forest economy we are much more divided than in the forms of our

political economy. This unexampled multiplicity of ways of cultivating

the soil is not only typical of the wonderfully rich organization of

our social conditions, but it also furnishes the most natural basis for

the peculiar suppleness, many-sidedness, and receptivity of German

mental-culture and civilization.

Through the recently ever-increasing artificial conversion of the proud

beech and oak into short-lived pine-forests, which is due to necessity

or to a short-sighted financial policy, Germany has lost at least as

much of the peculiar character lent to it by its forests as through the

complete uprooting of tremendous tracts of woodland. In the old forest

ordinances especial weight is, with good reason, laid upon the

protection of the oak-trees. Even the German Reichstag, as early as the

sixteenth century, was occupied with the "art of economizing the woods."

There are a few kinds of forestry which, to a certain extent, permit the

parceling off of the forest--as, for example, there are localities where

forestry and agriculture are carried on, turn and turn about, on the

same land; or others where the practice prevails of stripping the bark

off the oak-trees, a process which yields a quick monetary return--these

few kinds of forestry, however, which are favorable to the parceling off

of the woodland into small estates, quite destroy the conception of the

forest as we understand it. An oak-forest like the above, which, as soon

as the trees begin to grow really strong and sturdy, stretches forth

toward the wanderer only slim, bark-stripped trunks with withered

remnants of leaves, interspersed with rank miserable meadow-trees, with

hazel-nut thickets and dog-rose bushes, a piece of woodland in which

husbandry and forestry are completely jumbled, is actually no longer a

real forest. The most valuable kind of timber furnished by the massive

trunks of the oaks and beeches and for which there is absolutely no

substitute elsewhere--this most specific treasure of the forest can be

obtained only when the forest is managed by a rich corporation which can

afford to wait a hundred years for the interest on its capital.

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. Bürger 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 o£ 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'être_. 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.

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 rôle of church-pitch,

and thus the former has in fact gradually become higher than the latter.

There is still another fact connected with this. Händel's operas seem to

us concert-like; the arias of Bach's church cantatas often appear

operatic. Many numbers of these cantatas would disturb us today in

church; on the other hand we consider them exquisite religious parlor

music--which they were far from being in Bach's day. We are no longer

such a vehemently excitable generation religiously as to be able to

endure Bach's music to its full extent in church; on the other hand, as

individuals, in the family, in society we are infinitely more vehemently

excitable and much higher tuned spiritually as well than were those of

the eighteenth century; we want Bach in the concert hall and in the

parlor. The pious and yet forcible leader of St. Thomas' Choir has been

made a parlor musician by us and for us--but for his own generation he

was not one.

In the last hundred years the compass of pitch of almost all instruments

has been considerably enlarged in the treble. The high registers in

which every ordinary violinist must be able to play nowadays would in

those days have seemed too break-neck for the foremost virtuosos. Men

themselves were not tuned high enough to take pleasure in such poignant

chirping. The flute of the seventeenth century was a fourth lower than

that of the eighteenth. In the flute and the piccolo of the nineteenth

century we have again risen a third, yes, an entire octave above the

eighteenth century! Our great-grandfathers called the bass flute _flauto

d'amore_, the alto oboe, _oboe d'amore_, a bass viol, _viola d'amore_,

because their ear found preferably in the deep middle tones the

character of the tender, the sweet, and the languishing. Now we can

scarcely play on the violin or wind instrument a love melody which does

not rise two or three octaves above the normal.

The standard Italian song-composers of the first half of the last

century were especially fond of using the middle register for tones

expressive of peculiarly dramatic pathos, as well as for powerful final

passages of arias. Our differently tuned ear demands that these tones of

passion shall, as a rule, be as high as possible. The alto voice as a

solo voice has almost entirely disappeared from the operas in which it

formerly played so conspicuous a part. The elevated tone of our whole

inner man has deprived us of any ear for the alto.

In any case we have here reached an extreme which is contrary to the

very construction of the human vocal organs. Scarcely is moderate and

natural compass of tone still permitted, even in a song. In every age

the song-composer had been allowed to construct his melodies out of the

fewest possible tones. While the elder Bach in his arias often chases

the human voice in the most ruthless manner from one extreme to the

other, his sons and pupils in their little German songs confine

themselves to the most modest compass. Most of the later composers

proceeded in the same way up to the time of the Romanticists; then the

bonds were snapped, even in this respect. Schubert, on the one hand,

could compose the most moderate songs, on the other, the most

immoderate. It often seems (and this is also the case with Beethoven)

that his fantasy rebelled against the fact that a curb was placed upon

it by the natural limitation of the human voice.

This natural limitation, however, is once for all not to be done away

with, and it is ignored only at the expense of feasibility. Some later

Romanticists, therefore, such as Spohr and Mendelssohn, came back

immediately to the comfortable middle register as the real vocal

register of song. The thirst for shrill sounds had made men entirely

forget that a song must be easy to sing just because it must always be

sung suggestively and never be delivered with full dramatic execution.

Do not our singers, who since Schubert's time are so fond of making a

song a dramatic scene, feel how ridiculous it would be if a reader

should declaim a song at the top of his voice like the dialogue of a

drama?

In the invaluable privilege of writing for a moderate compass, a

song-composer, almost alone of all composers, is provided with a means

of reacting gradually upon instrumental music and of tuning anew the ear

of our generation, so that it shall no longer find satisfaction in the

shrill tones of extreme voice registers and the euphony of strong,

easily and comfortably attained middle tones shall again be universally

perceived. At the present moment our instrumental art has, in this

particular, fallen under the tyranny of piano manufacturers and makers

of wind instruments. When the keyboard of the grand piano has been made

longer by a few keys, the composers think they are remaining "behind the

times" if they do not immediately introduce these new high treble tones

into their next work, and when the wind instruments have been enriched

by several new valves and regulators the scores immediately grow in

proportion to these keys and pistons. But does art feel no shame at

having thus fallen under the dominion of trade!

The ear of the eighteenth century preferred human voices whose _timbre_

approached closest to the violin, the oboe or the 'cello, and considered

that such were peculiarly fitted for lyric and dramatic expression. The

eunuch sings as if he had an oboe in his throat; it is much too harsh

and lacking in brilliancy for our ear, which values incomparably higher

the more brilliant, clearer _timbre_, corresponding to the tone of the

flute, clarinet, or horn. The favorite _timbre_ of the eighteenth

century compares with that of the nineteenth as dull oxidized gold does

with that brightly polished. The period of the Romanticists marks here

too the turning-point of taste; Beethoven completed the emancipation of

the above-mentioned wind instruments in the symphony. The modern

treatment of the piano with the introduction of the perfect chord

accelerated its victory at the same time. It worked favorably for the

external brilliancy of tone of this instrument, while gradually closing

the ears of the dilettante and the musician to the charms of a simple

but characteristic management of the voice in accordance with the rules

of counterpoint. Thus the layman nowadays has seldom an ear for the

subtleties of the string quartet, whereas, on the other hand, our

great-grandfathers would indubitably have run away from the sound of our

brass bands and military music. The earlier symphonies, since they were

essentially intended to bring out the effects of the stringed

instruments, now seem like darkened pictures. Yet the symphonies have

certainly remained unchanged; only our ear has grown dull so far as

comprehension of the tone-color of the string quartet is concerned. The

same full orchestra, which in those works sounded so overpoweringly

imposing seventy years ago, now sounds to us simply powerful. In such

symphonies, in order to sharpen our ears, which have become dulled in

this respect, we have arrived at the strange necessity of doubling the

parts of the stringed instruments in a simple wind instrument

_ensemble_, so as to attain the same effect which old masters attained

with a simple distribution of the string parts.

The characterization of musical keys is very strange. In different ages

an entirely different capacity of expression, often an exactly opposite

color, has been attributed to each separate key. In the eighteenth

century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous

key--indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far

as to call it _tonum voluptuosum_. We, on the contrary, consider G-major

particularly modest, naïve, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even

trivial. Aristotle ascribes to the Dorian key, which corresponds

approximately to our D-minor, the expression of dignity and constancy;

five hundred years later Athaenaeus also calls this key manly,

magnificent, majestic. D-minor, therefore, had for the ear of the

ancient world about the same character that C-major has for us. That is

indeed a jump _a dorio ad phrygium_.

What, however, was for the ancients not proverbially, but literally, a

jump _a dorio ad phrygium_--namely, the contrast between D-minor and

E-minor--is for us no longer such a very astonishing antithesis. In the

seventeenth century Prinz finds the same Dorian key--which for Aristotle

bore the stamp of dignity and constancy--as D-minor, not only "grave"

but also "lively and joyous, reverent and temperate." This key conveys

to Kircher's ear the impression of strength and energy. For Matheson it

possesses "a pious, quiet, large, agreeable and contented quality,"

which encourages devotion and peace of mind, and, for that matter, may

also be employed to express pleasure. On the other hand, since Ch. P.

Schubert's theoretical procedure and since the use Gluck and Mozart have

made of D-minor in dramatic practice, the modern esthetic critic finds

the stamp of womanly melancholy, dark brooding, deep anxiety, in the

selfsame key which for a former age was the _tonus primus_, the one

particularly expressive of manly dignity and strength. And, to cap the

climax, the ear of the musical Romanticist of our day has become quite

accustomed also to hear in D-minor devilish rage and revengeful fury, as

well as all sorts of demoniacal terror and dreadful, midnight, musical

vampirism, as, for example, we find the Queen of Night giving vent in

D-minor to the "hellish revenge" which boils in her heart, and in the

_Freischütz_ hell triumphs in D-minor. In the seventeenth century,

Sethus Calvisius, speaking of C-major, the Ionian key, says it was

formerly a favorite key for love songs and therefore had acquired the

reputation of being a somewhat wanton and lewd melody; in his day, on

the contrary, it resounded clear, warlike, and was used to lead the

warriors in battle. The victoriously joyful battle hymn of the

Protestant church, "A mighty fortress is our God," is therefore in the

Ionian key. Calvisius himself is, however, puzzled at this incredible

transformation in the conception of the selfsame thing, and adds that

one is almost inclined to suspect that what is now known as the Ionian

key was formerly called the Phrygian, and _vice versa_. The fact is,

however, that the names have not changed--it is the ear which has

changed. If before Calvisius C-major was the erotic key, in the

seventeenth century G-major was considered so; in the eighteenth, on the

contrary, when love poetry jumps from the merry and playful over to the

sentimental, the musical ear likewise altered accordingly, and even

before the time of Werther and Siegwart the languishing, gently

melancholy G-minor was the fashionable tone, for the erotic Matheson,

indeed, even goes so far as to declare that it is the "most beautiful of

tones"--an opinion which is certainly characteristic of the state of

nerves of the world of culture at that day. We have outgrown this

tearful, tender love melody and now consider A-major to be a key

especially appropriate for the love song; and already we find Don Juan

declaring his love to Zerlina in A-major.

Since the days of the Romanticists, since Beethoven, our ear, in the

conception of the keys also, has decidedly turned away from the more

simple and natural toward the more eccentric. In the keys C-, G-, D-,

F-, B-and E-flat major the eighteenth century still found characteristic

peculiarities which we are scarcely able to hear at present; to the

over-irritated modern ear these simple keys sound flat, colorless, and

empty; instead, we have dug our way deeper and deeper among the

out-of-the-way keys, and melodies which our fathers made use of only to

produce the rarest and strongest emotions have already become the daily

bread of our composers.

One can, in the end, escape from this chaos of differing ears only if

one accedes to the opinion of old Quantz, the flute teacher of Frederick

the Great, who, after an exhaustive argument for and against, comes to

the conclusion that in theory nothing can be definitely decided

concerning the characters of the keys; in practice, however, the

composer is sure to feel that everything does not sound equally well in

all keys and therefore must decide each individual case separately, in

conformity with his artistic ear and instinct; I will merely add--also

in conformity with the ear of his time. For Quantz, by declining to make

a theoretical decision, shows that his ear had fallen captive to the

Italian musical school which strove not so much to hear the

characteristic in music as the simply beautiful, and, indifferent to the

prevailing lively controversy over the keys, composed its melodies as

was most convenient for the voice of the singer and the fingers of the

accompanist.

In the first half of the eighteenth century people still possessed a

very keen ear for dance music. The great majority of the dance melodies

of that time are moderately animated. To our modern ear and pulse-beat,

on the contrary, slow dance music seems to be a contradiction in itself;

a melody which in those days inspired people and started their feet to

dancing would now lull us to sleep. We desire stormily exciting dance

music; our ancestors gave the preference to the gayly stimulating kind.

How entirely differently constituted, how differently qualified

historically, politically, and socially, was that generation in whose

ears sounded the dance rhythm of the majestic _sarabande_, the solemnly

animated _entrée, loure_, and _chaconne_, the delicate pastoral

_musette_, the staid gliding _siciliano_, and the measured, graceful

minuet, compared to a generation who dance the whirling waltz, the

stormy skipping _galop_, and the furious _cancan!_ In the opera the

tragic hero could dance a _sarabande_, and even in choral songs of the

church the ear of the eighteenth century could distinguish dance music.

Matheson made (1739) out of the choral song "When we are in dire

distress" a very danceable minuet; out of "How beautifully upon us

shines the morning star" a _gavotte_; out of "Lord Jesus Christ, thou

greatest gift" a _sarabande_; out of "Be joyful, my soul" a _burrée_;

and finally out of "I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ" a _polonaise_, by

preserving the choral melodies note for note and only changing the

rhythm, just exactly in the same way as we now make marches, waltzes,

and polkas out of operatic arias. What colossal contrasts of the musical

ear in the course of a single century! In them is marked not only a

revolution of artistic development, but a much greater revolution of the

entire system of social ethics.

In several musical authors of the first decade of the last century we

find the remark that the fashionable taste in music had at that time

suddenly veered around; a short time before, the greatest effects had

been produced with the fastest possible tempo, the most animated rhythm

and figures; now slow, solemn music was the order of the day. In the

seventeenth century the twelve-eighths time was mainly employed for

dance music and, in general, for quick movements; in the beginning of

the eighteenth century, on the contrary, this species of time conveyed

to people's ears something quite different; it then became the

conventional measure for the soft, yearning _adagio_. Händel, in his

lively _gigs_ and in his lingering pastoral love arias, gives us side by

side both conceptions of twelve-eighths time. In the second half of the

century this species of time, so much in vogue formerly, disappears

almost entirely. Generally speaking, in the period of Haydn the sense of

rhythm undergoes a simplifying process, and many species of time are

done away with altogether. There is, in this particular, no greater

contrast than Haydn and Sebastian Bach. Haydn generalizes the rhythms in

order to attain the most telling and universally comprehensible effect

possible; Bach individualizes them in order to get the most subtle

result possible. Haydn and his age were satisfied, in the main, with the

four-fourths and two-fourths, three-fourths and six-eighths rhythm; he

simplified all conceivable rhythmic forms in such a manner that it was

possible to express them in one of these four rhythms. Bach employs at

least three times as many species of time and is so hair-splitting in

his selections that it is more often a question of a refinement of

designation, of professional coquetting with the master secrets of

technique, than of any real difference in the matter. Only it must be

said that this, with him, springs from a feeling for the most delicate

shades of rhythm, such as has never existed since. The ear of the whole

Bach age had a much keener appreciation than ours, of the subtleties of

rhythm. At that time, in order to distinguish in the ball-room whether a

_courante_ or a minuet, whether a _gavotte_ or a _bourrée_, were being

played, a keenness of rhythmic instinct was necessary, of which in truth

very little has survived in our young dancing people of today, who often

have to bethink themselves whether it is a waltz or a polka which the

music is beating in their ears with the rhythmic flail.

In the first decades of our century an ear for fine rhythmic _nuances_

of dance music scarcely existed any longer, while at the same time, in

concert-music, a greater wealth of rhythm was developing. Never were

people inspired by more rhythmically flat dance tunes than those of the

waltzes, schottisches, etc., which, for example, were danced in the

twenties. The ear for the fine shades of "danceableness" in musical

rhythm had at that time become absolutely dulled and had fallen asleep;

now it is perceptibly awakening once more. Our polkas, mazurkas, etc.,

based on the clearly defined original rhythm of the national

folk-dances, are promising harbingers of this. But is there not an

important hint for the historian of culture in the fact that the sense

for the finer dance rhythms began to die out at the time of the French

revolution and was most completely extinguished in the rough days of the

Napoleonic tempest and the decade immediately following, whereas in the

age of Louis XIV. the ear for the subtleties of dance rhythm appears to

have been most universally and most highly developed? And with the newly

awakening delight in the _rococo_ the modern ear is again becoming

perceptibly keener as regards the _nuances_ of dance rhythms.

We have grown quicker in tempo in exactly the same proportion as we have

become more elevated in pitch. We live twice as quickly as the

eighteenth century, and therefore our music is performed twice as

quickly. Most of our musicians can no longer play even a Haydn minuet

because they no longer have an ear or a pulse for the comfortable

moderate movement of these compositions. The calm, easy-going _andante_,

in which our classical age portrayed many of its clearest and purest

musical pictures, is a tempo absolutely tabooed by modern Romanticists.

_Comodo, comodamente_, i.e., comfortably, was, a hundred years ago, a

very favorite designation for the manner of performing individual

musical compositions. This superscription has quite disappeared from

circulation in our day, and we are much more apt to mount up to the

_furioso_ than to remain quietly behind with the _Comodo_. The old

masters also had a species of composition with the superscription

"_Furia_," but their fury was not to be taken very seriously, for the

_furia_ was a dance. The French in former times considered the very slow

trill to be especially beautiful. This kind of trill sounds to us

amateurishly ridiculous, while, on the contrary, the most admired rapid

trills of our best singers of today would probably have been called

"false shakes" a hundred and fifty years ago. Incidentally it may be

remarked that two hundred years ago people actually took pleasure in

trilling with the third instead of with the second; this, in the

eighteenth century, was only adhered to by bagpipers, while to our ear

it has become an absolute abomination and barbarity.

A hundred years ago it was considered very daring to perform an _adagio_

before the public in a concert hall. Contemporary musical authors utter

emphatic warnings against this experiment. A sustained, seriously

melancholy composition, dying away in quiet passion, was naturally just

as tiresome for the opulent merry company of those days as a fugue

composition is for the majority of our public. People sought to be

pleasantly incited by music, not thrillingly excited; therefore

comfortable slow tempo was demanded, but no _adagio_. If one did attempt

an _adagio_ in a gallant style of composition the player first had to

render it lively and amusing by all sorts of freely added adornments, by

means of passages and cadences, by improvised trills, _gruppettos_,

_pincements_, _battements_, _flattements_, _doublés_, etc. "In the

_adagio_," says Quantz, speaking of the mode of execution, "each note

must be, as it were, caressed." In the execution of our heroic _adagios_

it is rather required that each note shall be maltreated. From the

viewpoint of the historian of culture it is an important fact that the

first half of the eighteenth century had not yet acquired an ear for the

sentimental, feminine _adagio_. The _adagios_ of Bach and Händel are all

of the masculine gender. And then what a remarkable alteration of the

musical ear took place, when, in the second half of the same century,

the soft-as-butter _adagios_ of the composers of the day all at once

caused every beautiful soul to melt with tender emotion! At the same

time that the Werther-Siegwart period starts in literature, the layman

acquired an ear for the _adagio_. How very slightly as yet has the

intimate concatenation between the development of music and that of

literature been investigated. The entire _Siegwart_ is indeed nothing

but a melting Pleyel _adagio_, translated into windy words. A

priceless passage in _Siegwart_ treats of the _adagio_. Siegwart and his

school friend are playing one evening an _adagio_ of Schwindl on the

violin: "And now they played so meltingly, so whimperingly and so

lamentingly, that their souls became soft as wax. They laid down their

violins, looked at one another with tears in their eyes, said nothing

but 'excellent'--and went to bed." The ear of the sentimental period,

which had so suddenly become sensitive to the _adagio_, has never been

so tersely branded! From that time on there was a regular debauch of

_adagio_ beatitude. In the time of Jean Paul they wrote as a maxim in

autograph albums that a bad man could not play an _adagio_, not to

mention other florid trash of this sort. Nevertheless, the moment when

we acquired an ear for the _adagio_ remains epoch-making in the history

of culture.

It is not strange that, in harmony, much that formed surprising

contrasts for our ancestors should, on the contrary, cause us very

little surprise, or rather should appear trivial to us.

[Illustration: A VILLAGE FUNERAL _From the Painting by Benjamin

Vautier_]

But that combinations of harmony should sound absolutely false and

nonsensical to the ear of one generation, which to the ear of another

age sounded beautiful and natural--this is a puzzling fact. The shrill

and unprepared dissonances which we now often consider very effective

were thought to be ear-splitting a hundred years ago. But let us go

still further. The awful succession of fourths in the diaphonies of

Guido of Arezzo, in the eleventh century, are so incongruous to our ear

that expert singers must exercise the utmost self-control in order even

to give utterance to such combinations of harmony--and yet they must

have sounded beautiful and natural to the medieval ear! Even dogs, which

listen quietly to modern third and sixth passages, begin to howl

lamentably if one plays before them on the violin the barbaric fourth

passages of the Guido diaphonies! This historically verified alternation

of the musical ear is indeed incomprehensible. It may serve, however, to

help us to divine how horribly medieval dogs would have howled if one

had been able to play to them--well, let us say, modulations from

_Tannhäuser_.

The concert music of the first half of the eighteenth century was _in

its trivial entirety_ a "diversion of the mind and wit." In the same way

that we now write "popular musical text-books," they wrote, in that day,

directions "how a _galant homme_ could attain complete comprehension of

and taste in music," and Matheson says, not satirically, but in earnest:

"Formerly only two things were demanded of a composition, namely, melody

and harmony; but nowadays one would come off badly if one did not add

the third thing, namely, gallantry, which, however, can in no wise be

learned or set down in rules but is acquired only by good taste and

sound judgment. If one wished for an example, and were the reader

perhaps not gallant enough to understand what gallantry means in music,

it might not come amiss to use that of a dress, in which the cloth could

represent the so necessary harmony, the style; the suitable melody, and

then perhaps the embroidery might represent the gallantry."

With such tailor-like artistic taste prevalent in the gallant world of

that day, it is all the more astonishing that a solitary great spirit

like Sebastian Bach dared to develop his best thoughts and most peculiar

forms also in concert music. To be sure, as a natural consequence he had

to remain solitary.

The above mentioned music "for the diversion of the mind and wit" loved

short pieces, concise composition, minor measures, frequent repetitions

of the same thought. The intellectual ear grasps all that easily, and

amuses itself with the comparison of themes which are repeated in the

same or in changed forms. We, on the contrary, nearly always listen to

music with a dreamy, seldom with an intellectually comparative ear;

therefore modern music is much more influential, but also much more

dangerous, than the old. Musical pieces increase in length from year to

year, in order that, during the performance of them, one may have the

requisite time to dream. The composition has become infinitely more

complicated. Formerly four measures sufficed for a simple melodic

phrase, then six, then eight, now twelve and sixteen are hardly enough.

Worthy old Schicht called young Beethoven a musical pig when he first

learned to know the broad architectonic composition in the latter's

works. He listened to the man of the future with the ear of his own past

age, and in so far was quite right. To the people of the earlier period

of the eighteenth century Beethoven's works would certainly have seemed

unspeakably confused and bombastic, indeed like the products of musical

insanity and, moreover, swarming with the worst kind of stylistic and

grammatical blunders, as they did indeed appear at times even to the

older contemporaries of the master. Little by little, however, it has

grown to be rather risky to assert this fact, for every musical ass now

argues that _because_ his works please nobody, therefore he must be a

Beethoven.

The concise thoughts and phrases of the old masters are disturbing to

our dreamy musical ear--they are disquieting, they wake us up. Modern

musicians are very seldom able to perform impressively this all too

concise style of composition because they are no longer accustomed to

interchange _forte_ and _piano_ and melodic expression in such short

musical sentences; they only have ear and hand for very broad periods,

yard-long _fortes_, _pianos_ and _crescendos_. By far the greater part

of the older chamber-music of the eighteenth century has for our ear

something soberly rationalistic. Such imitative music in that age

compares with modern imitative music as the painted allegories of the

Pigtail age compare with the symbolical paintings of Kaulbach. Johann

Jacob Frohberger, court organist to the Emperor Ferdinand III.,

portrayed the dangers which he incurred crossing the Rhine in

an--_allemande_. To the ear of his contemporaries this portrayal sounded

absolutely plain and intelligible. Dietrich Buxtehude described the

nature of the planets in seven suites for the piano. The Hamburg

organist, Matthias Weckmann, set the sixty-third chapter of Isaiah to

music, and the then celebrated missionary to the Jews, Edzardi, bore him

witness that in the bass he had painted the Messiah as plainly as if he

had seen Him with his own eyes. We have no longer any ear for the

comprehension of such rationalistically allegorized music; indeed, we

can understand the ear which a former age possessed for it just as

little as we can understand the euphony which the ear of the Middle Ages

found in Guido's fourth-harmonies, which now even the dogs cannot put up

with.

I shall break off here with the presentation of my documents concerning

the alteration of the musical ear. If one tried to expatiate instead of

merely suggesting, the sketch would soon grow to be a book.

There is certainly a wonderful charm in conjuring up the spirit of past

ages from yellowed sheets of music, and, with the help of historical

study, in quiet cozy hours, to tune one's own ear anew, so that it may

once more hear in spirit the harmonies which were listened to by

generations long since deceased, just as they sounded to the ear of the

latter. There is a wonderful charm in searching after the most secret

instinctive tones of the emotional life of a bygone world, the natural

sounds of their souls, which are so entirely different from our own and

which would be lost for us--since picture and word stand too far

off--had they not found fixed expression in musical composition. The

character-picture of the last century, as portrayed by the historian of

culture, is lacking in that peculiar soulful lustre, that mysterious

little luminous point which shines upon the beholder from the eye of a

well-painted portrait, if such things as the knowledge of the eye for

natural scenery and the ear for music of the age are not included among

the features of the character-picture.

THE STRUGGLE OF THE ROCOCO WITH THE PIGTAIL[17]

By W.H. RIEHL

Translated by FRANCES H. KING

No time is so rich as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in humorous

original types of a distinct _genre_, who built for themselves a world

apart. Everywhere in this period we meet with eccentrics by profession,

who with deliberate intention play, as the actors say, a "charged"

character-part. Their freaks and gambols were considered worthy to be

handed on to posterity in memoirs and books of anecdote, and whoever

wanted to be a gentleman was obliged, in some particulars at least, to

be a fool. The romantic adventures of the Middle Ages returned again in

a new costume, in less fantastic but far more humorous forms; Don

Quixote exchanged his helmet for a wig.

For the nineteenth century original types of this kind--where they still

happen to exist--are quite adventitious; for the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries they were essential.

That capricious glorying in the most baroque personality possible, that

leaning toward individual caricature, inborn in the whole age, agrees

indeed very well with the arbitrarily fantastic taste of the Rococo

period--of the seventeenth century--but it stands in sharpest contrast

to the tendency of the Pigtail in the eighteenth. For to prune down the

natural growth, to sober down the fantastic, to make the luxurious poor,

emaciated, and uniform, and to weave life, art, and science on the same

loom of academic rule--all this is a characteristic which distinguishes

the Pigtail from the Rococo. This leaning toward individual caricature

nevertheless was maintained throughout the entire age of the Pigtail.

Indeed the very figure in the escutcheon of this period, the pigtail of

hair, grew out of the contradictory effort to restrain and render

uniform the natural luxuriance of the hair, and yet at the same time to

append to men's backs a pure freak, a little, absolutely original

scroll.

One might say, in short, one extreme challenged the other. When people

had banished the old professional clown from the stage, they felt the

necessity of running about themselves as clowns. The sober, enlightened

age protested against the old folk-tales with goblins, gnomes, elves,

and other kindred sprites, but, to make up for it, thousands of living

caricatures played in their own rooms the part of goblins and gnomes,

and lady shepherdesses appropriated the roles of the elves, nixies, and

nymphs.

This phenomenon, however, leads to facts of much deeper significance for

the history of culture. Let us first define the conceptions. The words

"rococo" and "pigtail" at first applied only to the plastic arts; we

are, however, gradually becoming accustomed to employ them to designate

the whole period of culture. That is right and commendable, for those

words have been taken from real life, from experience by the senses,

whereas, as a rule, we almost always fabricate lifeless scholastic terms

for such things.

The Rococo--in the plastic arts--presupposes the Renaissance, and I

believe it has even been called the Renaissance gone crazy. One might

say more justly that when the Renaissance got intoxicated it became the

Rococo. And if the Rococo is the drunken debauch of the Renaissance then

the Pigtail would be the seediness which follows after it.

But I must rein in my steed to a quieter pace and give a more scholastic

definition.

In the Renaissance, antique forms were born again, at first within and

beside the medieval, finally replacing them entirely. But the new age of

the sixteenth century had new needs, new senses, new passions, which

the antique could satisfy no more fully than could the Gothic. When a

person is no longer an old Roman he cannot quite build and fashion like

the old Romans. For this reason the antique was pulled and stretched and

fitted on the new man as well as could be managed. It is, however, just

as hard to adapt forms of art as to alter coats which have been cut out

for some one else's body. Only a few of the greatest architects and

sculptors succeeded for a little while in reconciling the inner

contradiction between the new life and the old art. No period of art had

so short a flourishing period as the genuine Renaissance; when it came

into the world it bore the birthmark of mannerism on its forehead.

This mannerism in its fulness and maturity is the Rococo. The burly men

and women bubbling over with life, in whom the stormy spirit of the age

of discovery and invention, of social revolution and religious

reformation, had not yet spent itself, finding the forms of the antique

too confined and yet not wishing to give them up, pulled and stretched

them, added to them scrolls and crossettes, nay, even shattered them to

fragments and then held fast to their ruins, indeed even went so far as

to find these caricatures and ruins more beautiful than the original.

The Rococo is violent in chains, insolent in constraint, drunken in

sobriety. It is the art of a rich, voluptuous, mystic, restless age.

Then came war and desolation, poverty and misery. Decadent men become

dry and pedantic. Oppression and tyranny without engender pedagogism

within. Thus the art of the Rococo became in the eighteenth century

poor, sober, squeezed into rules, deprived of every passionate impulse

which formerly might have reconciled us to its efflorescence. Mannerists

of genius can glitter alluringly, pedantic ones are deterringly boring.

The Pigtail is the dried-up Rococo, trimmed according to academic rules.

The luxurious Rococo flora, composed of all kinds of plants, poisonous

herbs, and weeds is presented to us, in the age of the Pigtail, as a

dead herbarium on blotting-paper.

The periods of the history of art are measured only in round numbers.

Thus the plastic artist may well say that the Renaissance belongs to the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Baroque to the seventeenth, and

the Rococo and the Pigtail to the eighteenth. But for the historian of

culture, on the other hand, this calculation is a little too round.

German literature during a good part of the Rococo period already

belongs to the Pigtail, and it frees itself from the Pigtail in the very

densest Pigtail period of the architect and the sculptor. Palestrina and

Orlando di Lasso represent the aftermath of the Middle Ages in the

period of the Renaissance; Händel and Bach, in the eighteenth century,

would have stood much closer to the Rococo than to the Pigtail, if they

had not been such original and peculiar geniuses that one cannot quite

classify them under these heads at all.

And yet the Rococo strikes a key-note which resounds through the whole

history of culture of the seventeenth century, just as the Pigtail does

through that of the eighteenth. On that account one need not give up the

general character of the period, and yet one can see how the Rococo

still presses forward in the Pigtail age. For in the battle of spirits

the columns do not advance with even step and even front like the

battalions on the parade ground, but here the file-leaders are often a

century in advance of the centre.

When, therefore, the history of art and morals of the previous century

shows us how at that time discordant spirits nevertheless wrestled with

one another on common ground, the excess of fantastic arbitrariness with

the most sober, universal pedantry, I call it simply a struggle of the

Rococo with the Pigtail.

Men despised real history and broke with it, to be subjected all the

more to the tyranny of historical ghosts. While the poets were fettered

in blind worship of the unities of Aristotle as of a fundamental

historical law, Houdart, without understanding a word of Greek,

corrected Homer, whose poetry did not seem to conform sufficiently to

rule.

In the characters of the great sovereigns of the eighteenth century,

who created new, stricter, more regular forms of government, the same

contrast appears between personal arbitrariness and devotion to this

universal law founded by them. Frederick the Great, Joseph II.,

Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa, Charles XII., Peter the Great, could

none of them quite escape from the eccentricity which was considered the

necessary attribute of genius. They furnished material, therefore, for

countless anecdotes; by personal whims, freaks, and caprices they freed

themselves at times from the new spirit of social uniformity and

political legal equality. One could not reconcile such anecdote-business

with the picture of the antique and medieval hero-kings. In the last two

centuries, on the contrary, a king had to be witty if his greatness was

not to be considered tedious by the people of the Pigtail. The

scandalous chronicle of the Courts was at least as important as the

political chronicles of the kingdoms. Through his mother-wit and his

good jokes Old Fritz became a popular figure even among his adversaries,

and among the people outside of Prussia he still lives on today in the

anecdotes of his private life rather than in his princely actions. All

the kings and heroes of the Rococo age therefore are rather material for

the historical _genre_ picture of the novel and the comedy, than for the

genuine historical picture of the epic and the tragedy. One can fully

characterize them only by painting a hundred individual traits

expressive of their peculiarity and their caprice, and this is

incompatible with the great epic style. It is by no means accidental

that Scherenberg is unable to get away from the most arbitrary crabbed

versification in his historical _genre_ poems celebrating Frederick the

Great. The capricious heroes with pigtails do not tolerate smooth

verses. The favorite verse-form of their day, however, the stiff

alexandrine, characterizes the Pigtail exclusively, not the Rococo.

The small princes imitated the great, and what in the latter had been

original traits of character, became in the former amusing caricatures.

The one copies Peter the Great's wedding of dwarfs; the other the giant

guard of Frederick Wilhelm I. A prince with such a wonderful passion for

the bass viol as Duke Maurice of Saxe-Merseburg, who even laid a small

bass viol in the cradle of his new-born daughter, was possible only in

the eighteenth century. It may be that his subjects did not even call

him a fool, but only a man of princely whims. A prince who wields the

fiddle-bow instead of the sceptre and thereby keeps his hands "clean

from blood and ink atrocities," is a true representative of the Rococo,

not of the Pigtail. That Landgrave of Hesse who wished to create a

second Potsdam in Pirmasens, and was made blissful by the thought that

he could hold his court in the tobacco-reeking guard-room, who

celebrated the greatest triumph of his reign when he had his entire

grenadier regiment manoeuvre in the pitch-dark drill-hall without the

least disorder occurring in the ranks, he is a real Rococo figure, for

by his mad fancies he humorously destroyed the long pigtail appended to

his actions.

A prince in those days had to be a virtuoso of personality. At the same

time the etiquette of the Courts, which amounted to the most rigid

conformity to rules, formed a strange contradiction to the ambition of

the individual prince to shine as an original. It is this same

contradiction which also characterizes the art and science of that time,

the contradiction between academic conformity to rules and the most

arbitrary scroll work, the contradiction between the Pigtail and the

Rococo. An old hack-blade of a German prince of the Empire, finding at a

state dinner that a foreign prince had loaded too much meat upon his

plate, without more ado took away half of it, and this incident

admirably denotes the struggle of the age between arbitrariness and

etiquette. In order to revenge the slight offense committed against

etiquette by the prince, and guest, the host is guilty of a far greater

one, and his act was without doubt admired as a real stroke of genius.

In the highest circles of society people often believed they could not

amuse themselves better than by voluntarily submitting to the most

severe despotism of an external constraint, in order to allow the utmost

latitude to personal whims. Herein lies the colossal humor, the deep

self-mockery of the age. One of the most remarkable monuments of this

self-mockery was founded by a Margrave of Baireuth in the Hermitage near

Baireuth. In order to enjoy the pleasures of a sojourn in the country

the whole Court had to play at being monks and nuns. By silence and

solitude, by painfully shackling themselves with all sorts of wearisome

rules imitated from religious orders, the "hermits" had to prepare for

social pleasures and Court festivities. In order to enjoy Court life in

a new way people disguised it under the serious mask of the cloister;

people tortured and bored themselves in order to be merry, and buckled

social intercourse into a straitjacket, in order to give it the

appearance of an entirely new and free movement.

Even German Pietism, which in the beginning of the eighteenth century

gained so many adherents in the world of fashion, showed a piece of

Rococo in the Pigtail. It, too, was founded, in part, on a mixture of

the most subjective freedom and arbitrariness with the most rigid

constraint of a new religious order; therefore it often appeared

revolutionary, reformatory, and reactionary, all at the same time. They

burst the fetters of benumbed dogmatism and petrified church government

in order to inclose every free breath in new fetters. Even the last,

most involuntary act of life--dying--had to be performed systematically.

Pietistic literature of this time produced a work in four volumes which,

with the most minute detail, submits the last hours of fifty-one lately

departed persons to a sort of comparative anatomy, so that people could

learn from it, scholastically as it were, the best way to die. The

author of this work, a Count von Henkel, congratulates a friend, who had

been a witness of the "instructive death" of a certain Herr von Geusau,

in these words: "It was worth while to have heard a _Collegium

privatissimum_ on the art of dying like a Christian, especially from

such a _professore moribundo_."

The French Neo-Romanticists, who declare war in the most decided manner

against all literary traditions of the eighteenth century, nevertheless

absolutely revel in material furnished by that time; the gentlemen in

wigs have become their most profitable heroes, and in real life, as well

as in our novels, we can find no more modern way to decorate our parlors

and our furniture than by covering them with the scroll work of the

wig-age. This is only an apparent contradiction. It is not the Pigtail

but the Rococo that we are reviving so industriously, not the academic

constraint of rules, but the subjective arbitrariness, the spirit of the

original, freakish types. This untrammeled caprice of the Rococo age

seems to us as fresh as nature compared with the well planned symmetry

of our modern conditions, which no longer permit one to be a real fool,

and therefore do not allow any dazzling figures of romance to come to

the surface, just as the eighteenth century, on its part, no longer

engendered any real dramatic characters. If Rousseau, as soon as the

spirit of coarseness came over him, hurls the most spirited abuse at

everybody, if the peasant poet, Robert Burns, "a giant original man," as

Thomas Carlyle calls him, suddenly appearing among the puppets and

buffoons of the eighteenth century, is gaped at like a curiosity in the

salons of Edinburgh on account of his rough simple nature, then we too

can find delight in the natural strength which is hidden in the Pigtail

under the form of the Rococo. Even the historian of art, who grows

indignant over the extinction of the historic sense in that age, over

the vandalism with which an arrogant lack of understanding destroyed the

monuments of the Middle Ages--even he must, at the same time, admire the

self consciousness which speaks in this vandalism, the defiant belief in

the wisdom of their own age, which boldly remolded everything to suit

their own taste because they were finally persuaded that this taste was

the only true one. It is a peculiar sign of conscious strength and of

vitality breaking out in the midst of the sickly life of a degenerate

age. We can almost envy the old pigtails for this blind belief in

themselves, which grows out of the boastful arbitrariness of the Rococo,

in the midst of and in spite of the constraint of the Pigtail, and is

closely connected with the mad cult of originality practised by so many

individual types. We have strong doubts concerning the excellence of our

advanced mental development, while in the days of our great-grandfathers

nobody doubted that that age, which we properly stigmatize with the

sobriquet of the Pigtail Age, was really the golden age of art and

science.

Our South-German peasants still live completely in the Rococo as regards

artistic taste. They have forgotten the Middle Ages and have not yet

found modern art. To the peasant of the Black Forest, the splendid,

baroque, dome-shaped church of St. Blasien is a much greater marvel of

native art than the Freiburg cathedral. Gaudy, exaggeratedly fantastic

Rococo saints are generally considered by Catholic country people very

much more edifying than a picture in the severe style of the Middle Ages

or of the modern school. In the ornamentation of utensils and houses of

our peasants the Rococo style has quite naively been carried along into

our own times, and whoever nowadays wishes to have genuine Rococo chairs

in his parlor not infrequently searches through the peasants' houses.

The pleasure which the peasant takes in the Rococo, which has bravely

survived so many changes in taste, is easily explained. The peasant

himself is an original, rather, 'tis true, as a species than

individually, and the brilliant, fantastic, affected, violent quality of

the Rococo appealed to his rough, sturdy child's nature, just like large

capital letters. On the other hand he never sympathized with the genuine

Pigtail. The scant, niggardly dress-coat of this period was never

adopted as the prevailing costume of the people, any more than the

fashion of wearing the hair in a real pigtail, and the bare facades of

the academic Pigtail architecture never became epoch-making in popular,

architecture. The peasant only appropriated to himself the Rococo out

of the Pigtail of the last century.

We pedantic city people, on the contrary, in the outer construction of

our houses, in their joiner-like, barrack architecture with the

monotonous rows of windows, have all this time remained prisoners of the

Pigtail; but in the gaudy, whimsical decoration of our rooms, on the

other hand, we have reached the Rococo once more, and only very recently

have we begun to improve by going back to the powerful individualism of

the Renaissance--as, for instance, in many of the new streets in Munich.

There is, however, nothing adventitious about this, for, in general, a

more personal, original life is flourishing in our _bourgeoisie_ than

there was twenty years ago.

In the Rococo period there was an endless amount of portrait painting,

and this partiality to having one's picture done in oils, pastel,

engraving, in silhouette and in miniature medallion, maintained itself

throughout the entire Pigtail period. It was conformable to the spirit

of the times and to one's rank to look upon one's own features as

something not to be despised, and not a soul suspected that there was

any personal vanity in it.

In the same way that people had their portraits executed by the

engraver, they also liked to depict their own likeness in their letters,

diaries, and memoirs. The custom came to us from the French in the

seventeenth century, and, as a real child of the Rococo, triumphantly

survived the struggle with the Pigtail, and lasted on into the

nineteenth century. No man nowadays can carry on such extensive friendly

correspondence as was universally carried on from fifty to a hundred

years ago. This self-inspection, this importance attached to little

personalities, disgusts us. The letters of Gleim, Heinse, Jacobi,

Johannes Müller suffice to make us feel fully conscious of this disgust.

We should now call the man a coxcomb who considered his precious ego so

important that he had to carry on, year in and year out, a yard-long

correspondence about himself. General interests have grown, private

interests have shriveled up, but thereby, indeed, the original types of

the old days have become impossible.

That strange union of charlatanism and science, of prognosticating

mysticism and sharp-eyed observation which in the Renaissance had, as

it were, become incorporated in large learned guilds, such as the

astrologers, alchemists, theosophists, etc., dies away in the Rococo

period in isolated strange individuals. Mesmer, Lavater, Athanasius

Kircher, Cagliostro are such Rococo figures in the very midst of the

Pigtail. Professor Beireis, in Helmstädt, who in the eighteenth century

still tried his hand at making gold, carried on an incredible jugglery

with his collection of curios and made his enlightened contemporaries

believe that he possessed a diamond weighing six thousand four hundred

carats, which the Emperor of China had pawned with him, would, in former

times, if he had not been duly burned as a magician, have become the

head of a school. In the eighteenth century he merely remained a

mysterious eccentric type whose gaudy collection was gazed upon with

astonishment by all travelers, half charlatan, half savant--in any case,

however, a marvelous virtuoso of personality. In our day even such an

isolated original type would no longer be possible at all. It is

thoroughly Rococo.

The Middle Ages had had its guild secrets. In the period of the Rococo a

trading in secrets by individual scholars and artists had grown out of

it. Among the painters and musicians especially, even the smallest

master carried on his particular legerdemain with the "secrets" of art,

which he alone ostensibly possessed and communicated only to his pupils.

The profession of court fool had died out. In its place the individual

geniuses of folly appeared in the Rococo age, such as Gundeling, the

passive clown, who was made a fool of by others, and Kyau, the

Eulenspiegel of the eighteenth century, who himself hoaxed other people.

In the learned Athanasius Kircher the charlatan of genius struggles

continually with the pedant; that is the great struggle which continued

throughout the entire age, in religion, art, science, and

statecraft--the struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail. The repugnant

inner lack of truthfulness of so many important personages of this age

has its roots in this unadjusted struggle. In order to appear a real

original, one dared not be quite simple, truthful, and open.

Münchhausen, the notorious liar, is a genuine Rococo caricature in the

Pigtail age.

The most original of all the original people in those days ended up as

caricatures. The Rococo is the conscious humor of the Pigtail; for that

reason it can still be used artistically today, whereas the Pigtail,

which is totally lacking in the humor of self-knowledge, has long been

artistically dead. Even today when a genre-painter wishes to paint real

lifelike caricatures he paints them in Rococo costume. Hasenclever's

Hieronymus Jobs, for example, would appear to us absolutely exaggerated,

if the figures in these pictures did not wear pigtails and wigs. Only in

this unique age of the Rococo does it seem to us possible that such

freaks could have walked the earth in the flesh. And we are not wrong in

so thinking; for the mania to be an original type, a virtuoso of

personality, in that day turned innumerable persons into genuine

caricatures. A certain Count von Hoditz, in the middle of the eighteenth

century, founded a so-called "Maria Theresa sheep-farm" (in honor of the

Empress) on his estate Roswalde, in Silesia, and here his subjects and

villeins had to play at Greece and Rome, year in and year out. Temples

were erected to Thetis, Diana, Flora, etc., and peasants went about

dressed up as haruspices and augurs. The Pontifex slaughtered a sheep on

the sacrificial altar, the oracle was consulted in a cave, and in a

temple dedicated to the sun young priests kept up an ever-flaming fire.

On this estate an actor was master of the hunt, librarian, theatre

director, high priest of the sun and--schoolmaster, all in his own

person; and Frederick the Great was so pleased with the Silesian Arcadia

that he celebrated it in a poetic epistle. If one tried nowadays to give

an accurate description of this bare reality in a novel it would look

like the most exaggerated caricature. The Rococo, however, can bear the

strongest laying on of color and the most distorted forms. It was not

without some reason that, in those days, they loved to chisel or carve

on every house door and on the neck of every violin a hideous face which

is making grimaces and sticking out its tongue. Many of the figures in

Moliere's and Holberg's comedies, and in the innumerable farces written

in imitation of them in the eighteenth century, now appear to us clumsy,

extravagant caricatures. But if we recall such historical phenomena as

the above-mentioned Maria Theresa sheep-farm, we will find that for

their age the clumsy figures were well portrayed characteristic types,

far rather than caricatures. In them is mirrored the unmanageable

eccentricity of the more original persons in the Pigtail age, so

abounding in constraint and training.

Without this contrast of arbitrariness and restraint, which presents

itself under the form of a struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail, the

history of culture, and still more the history of art, of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is quite incomprehensible. The

great political revolution of the nineties could never have been a

product of the rigid Pigtail age, but it could very well have been a

result of the Rococo in the Pigtail. In the Rococo there was still life,

mad, ungovernable life; the Pigtail always had a Hippocratic face. The

virtuosos of personality, the strange Rococo original types, were the

forbears of the literary Storm and Stress writers, the artistic

reformers, the big and little demagogues. The pedants of the Pigtail, on

the other hand, were the prophets of the pipe-clay, the bureaucracy, the

rationalistic mechanical training of young and old in church and school.

And this contrast of the Rococo and the Pigtail still continues today,

but veiled and in a new garment, not only on and in our houses but also

in our public and private life. The genuine original types of the

Rococo, however, the fantastic virtuosos of personality, have, indeed,

long since been gathered to their fathers and will not return.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This peculiarity distinguishes Gotthelf's _Bauernspiegel_

from the nearly contemporary _Oberhof_, the episode of Immermann's

_Münchhausen_ which is intended as a popular contrast to the

aristocratic society represented in the larger part of that novel. Cf.

Vol. vii, p. 169.]

[Footnote 2: Editor's note.--Numerous omissions have been made in the

course of the narrative, reducing the length of the original text by

about one fifth. Wherever necessary for the continuity of the story, the

essence of the excluded portions has been supplied by synopses. These

synopses are printed enclosed in brackets.

Permission Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd., London.]

[Footnote 3: This old country saying is founded on the similarity in

sound between _sechse_ (sixes) and _hexe_ (witch).]

[Footnote 4: Permission Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig.]

[Footnote 5: _Translator's note_. In Mecklenburg the cows are always

milked in the fields.]

[Footnote 6: Translator's note. The Kammer is the chief government

office in Mecklenburg, and Mr. von Rambow was a member of it.]

[Footnote 7: A mortgage or lien, a corruption of _Hypothek_.]

[Footnote 8: _Translator's note_.--This story is founded on fact, and

during Reuter's last visit to Stuer (from the 13th of December, 1868,

till the 29th of January, 1869) he discovered this great amusement that

he had been given the very room in which the director of the

establishment told him the hero of the tale had been attacked by a

neighbor's bees while he was lying helpless in the "packing" sheets. See

Duboc's "Auf Reuterschem Boden" in Westermann's "Monats-Hefte."]

[Footnote 9: _Translator's note_.--A common saying in Mecklenburg, the

origin of which is unknown.]

[Footnote 10: From _Bunte Steine_]

[Footnote 11: From _The Natural History of the People_.]

[Footnote 12: Hilly woodland in the eastern part of the Island of

Rügen.]

[Footnote 13: From _Studies in the Culture of Three Centuries_.]

[Footnote 14: Claude Lorraine himself, who according to tradition is

said to have made studies near Munich, did not go into the high

mountains, but, quite in keeping with the eye for natural scenery of his

time, remained on the plateau.]

[Footnote 15: From _Studies in the Culture of Three Centuries_.]

[Footnote 16: France centralizes in this respect also and at present

(1858) a council is being called together in Paris to reestablish the

catholicity of European orchestral pitch.]

[Footnote 17: From _Studies in the Culture of Three Centuries_.]