Does not that weigh at least as heavy as
the economic question of the timber? In the contrast between the forest
and the field is manifest the most simple and natural preparatory stage
of the multiformity and variety of German social life, that richness of
peculiar national characteristics in which lies concealed the tenacious
rejuvenating power of our nation.
The century of the pig-tail possessed no eye for the forest and, in
consequence, no understanding of the natural life of the people.
Everywhere in the German provinces they removed the princely
pleasure-seats from the woody mountains to the woodless flat country.
But then, to be sure, the art of the pig-tail age was almost entirely
un-German. For the artists of the pig-tail the forest was too irregular
in design, too humpbacked in form, and too dark in color. It was shoved
into the background as a flat accessory of the landscape, while, on the
contrary, the landscape painters of the preceding great period of art
drew the inspiration for their forest pictures from the very depths of
the forest solitudes. No painter of Romance origin has ever painted the
forest as Ruysdael and Everdingen did; they in their best pictures place
themselves right in the midst of the deepest thickets. Poussin and
Claude Lorraine have made magnificent studies of the forest, but
Ruysdael knows the forest by heart from his childhood, as he knows the
Lord's Prayer.
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