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to escape from the depressing condition of German affairs, had done what in them lay for the dissemination of this cult. The rising generation of the forties had been driven by Heine's notices of the Salon into an almost hostile attitude towards the dominant art schools of Germany, the schools of Düsseldorf and Munich. The stylists on the Isar and the sentimental elegiac painters on the Rhine met with the same antipathy from the younger generation. The appearance of the two Belgian historical pictures, which were really nothing more than offshoots of the great French school, gave nourishment of doubled strength to this tendency to seek salvation in Paris. The German painters were startled out of contentment with their beloved cartoons, and to many a man it seemed as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. They perceived what an admirable thing it is that a painter should be able to paint. What they could have learnt long before from any good old picture, and in their turbulent enthusiasm for ideas had not learnt, was made suddenly clear to them by these new paintings. They came to the conclusion that it was impossible for God Almighty to have poured light and colour over the objective world with the intention that painters should transform it into a world of shadowless contours. They recognised that the style of cartoon work had led away from all painting, and that it was therefore necessary to do honour once more to the despised handiwork and technique of art, as the fundamental condition of its well-being. However much the æsthetic party might warn them not to renounce
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and not
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the demand for colour, which had been so long neglected, asserted its rights more and more loudly. King Ludwig's saying was repeated as though it were a new revelation:
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The painter must be able to paint. Colour was the battle-cry of the day, the battle-cry of youth, to whom the world belongs. In place of the ideal of contour came the ideal of hue and pigment. Cartoons, in the sense of the old cartoon school, no one would draw any longer. To paint pictures, finished pictures, was the tendency of the day. And since painting is to be learnt from the living only, and such as could paint lived in Germany no longer, they packed their trunks, and set out to learn from the
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As Rome had been hitherto, so was Paris now, the high school of German art.
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To Paris! and
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Painting!
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: beings who united with a Titanic force of will an actual achievement which is hardly worth mentioning; who regarded the mere handicraft of art as beneath their dignity; who, in their revelations to mankind, were resolved to burden their spirit as little as possible with any sensuous expression of their genius, and, above all, meant not to degrade themselves by the manual labour of learning to paint, and thereby wasting their valuable time. The latter were not ashamed of painting. By devoting themselves with vehemence to the colouring and technique of oil-painting, they accomplished the necessary revolution against the abstract idealism of the school of Cornelius. In their opulence of ideas the draughtsmen of cartoons had made a notch in the history of art by casting the technical tradition overboard. To have reinstated this as far as they could, with the aid of the French, is the peculiar merit of the generation of 1850.