Page:A History of Wood-Engraving.djvu/94

92 he was not touched by the modern spirit; in thought and feeling he remained deeply religious, fantastic, picturesque, mystical—in a word, mediæval. He did not possess the modern sense of limitation, the power to restrict himself to realizing a definite conception, the power to disregard and refuse what cannot be clearly seen and expressed, which the modern age, when it came, gave to the perfect artist; he was not content to embody his idea simply, directly, and forcibly; he supplemented it with secondary thought and subordinate suggestion in unmeasured profusion; he did not know when his work was done, but kept on adding to it in the true wandering, Gothic spirit, which never finishes its task, because its main purpose does not control it; he allowed his fancy to encumber the noble work of his imagination, and allegory to obscure the truth he uttered; he was not master of himself, but was hurried on by the fire and speed of his own genius along paths which led only to the obscure and the inaccessible. His imagination, was deeply suggestive, straightforward, and marvellously fertile in invention; but he interpreted the imaginative world in terms of daily, and often homely life; he represented ideals characters, not under ideal forms, but realistically under forms such as he saw about him: he knew beauty only as German beauty, and life and its material surroundings only as German life and German civilization; and thus his works are characterized by an uncouthness which offends minds not habituated to German taste. But there is no need to be irritated at this realism, this content with gross forms, or to wish with Vasari that he had been born in Italy and had studied antiquity at Florence, whereby he would have missed that national endowment which individualized him and gave