They
therefore really painted pictures of mood just as we do. Only they
strove, as it were, to preserve the most general elemental mood of
natural beauty, while we strain ourselves in depicting individual
changeable moods. Do we not actually see at present stage-scenery
painted like sentimental mood-pictures, trees in the foreground, for
example, on whose deformed greenish-brown foliage an elegiac
late-autumnal tinge rests? And these are shoved into position regularly
each evening for every dialogue scene, and every light comic
situation--a satire on the inner eye of our time. In a German metropolis
of art one can even see sign-boards of sausage manufacturers on which
sausages, hams, salted spare-ribs and swards are appetizingly painted
with brilliant technique; and they too are conceived like mood-pictures,
since that soft melancholy mist, with which our landscape painters are
so fond of coquetting, spreads likewise over these sausages and hams,
almost making them look as though they had all grown moldy. That is
another indication of the eye for natural scenery of our time.
Change of styles that great masters had made conventional, the
degeneration and progress of technique, etc., play a large part, to be
sure, in all these things, with and beside the changing eye. How much,
however, essentially depends upon the latter we can notice very plainly
when the question is one of architectural landscapes and, in general,
of the portrayal of old works of sculpture and architecture, which men
have seen very differently in different ages and represented
accordingly, while the originals have, in truth, remained the same
throughout the centuries.
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