Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/14

4 and colour had belonged also to Germany, that long before Monet, quiet landscape painters in Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin had found an Impressionism which did not, to be sure, respond to all the conditions of spectral analysis, but in revenge was free of all rationalism. Runge, Wasmann, C. D. Friedrich, Blechen, even Menzel (I mean the lyric Menzel) have remained without followers. In art we have never learned how to economize. Somewhere, in some remote place, an artist will suddenly arise for no external reason. A bare stone on a cliff covers itself with ravishing little flowers. Wasmann's landscapes from the 'thirties are tiny in size and evince no bold temperament, but they are fragrant. Germany's tenderest spirit is in them. Young Dürer, who painted landscapes in watercolour, belongs here. Suddenly the stone is bare again, and there are no more blossoms. Some corporation puts up a building there, and the flowers are recalled only by some stupid signboard. All of our predecessors, even when they had the significance of young Menzel, remained alone. There are traditions in the German graphic arts—as the development from Chodowiecki through Menzel to Liebermann and Slevogt. A line very much alive, which, since Slevogt, has divided into so many branches and twigs that it is hard to recognize the stem. On a western branch hangs the genial dandy of German graphic artists, Rudolf Grossmann. One aim holds this thriving vegetation together: illustration. For a hundred talented illustrators we have hardly one painter. Things were the same four hundred years ago. Painting without an exterior motive grows up with us accidentally and in isolated instances. Perhaps we think too highly of art; perhaps metaphysics is too much in our way for us to be capable of fashioning traditions.

The generation after Liebermann has a living artist of high calibre, Lovis Corinth. In superficial details he corresponds to the idea which unfriendly foreigners have of Germans. A man from the German wilderness. One can imagine him covered with hair. A cave man who was at the Academy in Munich. He has made many pictures of a useless brutality, of a brutality which is coarsened as much by the academic as by the nature of the subject; and he had made astonishing masterpieces. Beneath the clumsiness of the calibre there is greatness. He cannot choose, but this weakness goes with a victorious power. More important considerations than those of taste are met with surprising accuracy, so that the lacunae