descended from the clouds and took up the simple burdens of the world. Prospects majestic and precipitous were levelled into brown fields dotted with patient souls who toiled from dawn till dusk. The smooth, saccharine coloring of former generations became clear or sombre, permeated with the white glare of the sun or the drifting vapor from meadow or sea. The new conception of art rigorously debarred all obvious sentiment or romance. In order to make sure of telling no pretty lies, as Knaus, Vautier and Defregger had done, the modern peasant painter became a confirmed pessimist. Actual economic pressure and distress are doubtless partially responsible, but, whatever the contributing cause, it is certain that such masters as Kalckreuth and Mackensen record only the trials and hardships of the laborer bending over his task, or seated, forlorn and infirm, by the wayside.

And thus, while this vast movement toward nature and truth which carried all before it in Prussia and the north generally has chastened art, it has also subdued art. There are of course crisp, sprightly talents such as Skarbina, or effective ones such as Hans von Bartels and Gotthard Kuehl, or vigorous ones such as Dettmann and Kampf, but for the most part their work is tinged with austerity. Painters of the town are only gay in a feverish, frenetic sort of way, and the landscape recluses of Worpswede and the Markish plain are apt to give us a mournful canal or a stretch of lonely moor with a few straggling trees and a bare strip of sky. Even in their lyrical moods men like Carl Vinnen, Hans am Ende, and Oskar Frenzel are restrained and sedate. Into their consciousness, and, more particularly with the painters of character, has crept something monotonous and abject. Perhaps, like Richard Voss and Hermann Sudermann in the field of letters, they may have paid too high a price for their penetrant vision and unflinching sense of fact. Yet this art as a whole is the true product of its time, and of that standardizing tendency of modern life, that mania for uniformity and system, which is at once the strength and the weakness of the Teutonic social machine.

In art as in thought there are, however, two Germanys. One is practical and realistic, the other is poetic and idealistic.

One looks out across the wind-swept sands and fisher huts of the North Sea or the Baltic, the other gazes fondly toward the Alps and down their slopes to the sunlit terraces and marble villas of Italy. If Adolf von Menzel is the embodiment of the former type, Arnold Böcklin is no less the incarnation of the latter. It is difficult to imagine just what modern Teutonic art would have been without Böcklin. With a magic all his own he revived the waning imagination of his generation. In Böcklin slumbered all that love of myth and fable, all that rich Latinity, and longing for light and warmth to which Germany is a rightful heir. Arnold Böcklin was a reawakened pagan. He strode across the pallid face of contemporary existence scattering fancy in his path and leaving behind him a splendor of coloration the like of which had not been seen since the Renaissance. Singlehanded he led a great counter-revolution against the enslavement of the human spirit. Over against the prosaic conquests of the realists he set the sovereign claims of the ideal. He literally remade the world of art after his own image.

Born a dozen years later than Menzel, Böcklin's career was as full of struggle and heroism as Menzel's was well ordered and successful. The son of an impecunious silk merchant of Basle, the lad finally secured the reluctant consent of his parents to study painting and departed for Düsseldorf where he entered the classes of Hildebrand and Schirmer. He stayed in Düsseldorf just long enough to catch a faint thrill of romance from the canvases of Schirmer and then proceeded to Antwerp, Brussels, and Paris. He was in the French capital during the sanguinary days of 1848, but a year later found him in Rome, a member of that friendly circle of his countrymen which included the poets Victor von Scheffel and Paul Heyse, the painters Feuerbach and Franz-Dreber, and the sculptor, Reinhold Begas. Blue-eyed and powerful, endowed with epic strength and force of will, and feeling within him the fire of undoubted genius, Böcklin, during those early, formative years did everything that was splendid and audacious. He married, on a single day's acquaintance, a beautiful Roman girl from across the Tiber, he painted pictures that were flung into the street by an outraged censor, and, like a

No painter's odyssey reads more picturesquely than that of Arnold Böcklin. He wandered ceaselessly over Germany and Italy in quest of beauty and inspiration, not to mention the bare necessities of existence. He resided by turns in Basle, Hamburg, Munich, Weimar, Zürich, Rome, and Florence, finally dying, amid peace and the mellowness of ripe accomplishment, at his villa on the heights of Fiesole. Recognition, which did not come until after years of effort, finally burst upon him with

was unknown outside a narrow group of enthusiasts. By seventy the magic of his brush had made converts from the Alps to the North Sea and from Vienna to Paris. Attaining maturity when the quaint imaginings of Moritz von Schwind were all that remained of pure romance, Böcklin left German art incomparably richer than he found it. While certain early canvases, such as "Pan Among the Reeds" and "The Villa by the Sea," clearly revealed the man's potentiality, it was in "The Sacred Grove," "The Fields of the Blessed," and "The

Island of the Dead" that he succeeded in epitomizing the fundamental emotions, the deepest longings and aspirations of the Teutonic soul.

Yet his triumphs were not all achieved in the realm of the mysterious or the elegiac, nor on the heights where his "Prometheus" writhes in fruitless anguish. He was also joyous and carnal, as in "Pan Fishing" and "Sport Among the Waves," and herein lies his strength and the source of his immense influence over the younger men of his time. It is in fact due to his marvellous fecundity, his surpassing creative vitality, that most of them owe their very artistic being. The thirst for a free, pagan world was doubtless always in the blood, but it was Arnold Böcklin who called it forth, who gave it form, shape, and color. And close upon his heels have corwded countless latter-day fauns and satyrs of the palette hungering for antique serenity and antique joyousness. At their head stand two notable figures, Max Klinger and Franz von Stuck, while attaching himself to an older and more näive tradition is Hans Thoma. Despite the primitive picturesqueness of their æsthetic imagery, they are all moderns. One and all they are seeking escape from present conditions and striving to

evolve some solution of the eternal enigmas of existence. In common with idealists the world over their heritage is a heritage of unrest. Lacking the Olympian calm of their leader, they are constantly at war with themselves and their surroundings. Now and then they evolve visions of sheer beauty and power, but for the most part their dreams are troubled and distraught. Each offers a different reading of the book of life. For thought-wearied Klinger the key to the mystery lies in stoic fatalism. For vigorous and plastic Stuck it is found in the apotheosis of brutality. Hans Thoma looks backward toward the days of Altdorfer and takes refuge in an archaic ingenuousness, while the sumptuous color-poet, Ludwig von Hofmann, sings only of Hellenic blitheness or frenzied oblivion.

The seed which Böcklin sowed has also given birth to numerous lesser men, among whom are Hans Sandreuter, Hermann Urban, and Hans Unger, not to mention having directly quickened the invention of Adolf Hengler, Ludwig von Zumbusch, Carl Strathmann, Walter Hampel, Julius Diez, and a score of others. Sometimes perverse and sometimes merely merry, their fancies yearly fill the walls of the Secession or the pages of Jugend. Equally

suggestive in landscape, Böcklin also added a touch of heroic breadth to the treatment of wood, sky, and meadow, as witness the canvases of not a few of the outdoor painters of the day. There are, of course, certain individuals even in the south who have not been inundated by this torrent of color and imagination. The mundane Keller, the neurasthenic Habermann, and the strong animalier, Heinrich Zügel, have gone their way undisturbed, yet it is impossible to overestimate the influence of the sovereign symbolist who finds his echo not alone in painting but in the music of Wagner, the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the fairy dramas of Gerhardt Haupt

mann.

With the passing, within a few years, of both Menzel and Böcklin, the two master currents of modern Teutonic art arrived at their flood. The forces of realism and idealism, so constantly at odds in the history of German thought and German life, seem at present to have declared a partial truce. Spent by the fury of the struggle, and somewhat perplexed by the spoils of war, both sides are momentarily marking time or deliberately seeking novelty and

distraction. The crass objectivity of the north has found its antidote in the luxuriant creative fertility of the south. The asperities of naturalism have, moreover, been modified by the coming of impressionism which has taught the salutary lesson that truth is, after all, individual and subjective. With such an artistic inheritance as Germany to-day possesses, it is inevitable that the fantasist should seek the support of fact and the positivist should not remain deaf to the myriad voices of the spirit world. It is probable that the art of the future will seek to offer a synthesis of the two elements which, until now, have stood in direct opposition to one another. Already there are signs of a convergence, for in the stylistic yet accurate and faithful landscapes of such a nature poet as the late Walter Leistikow appear to reside the germs of subsequent development along these lines. In his glimpses of Grunewald forest, glade, and tarn he has manifestly striven for a fitting compromise between actuality and aesthetic convention-between outward beauty and that beauty which lies so mysteriously imbedded in the consciousness of mankind.