curiosities,
standing so far apart in reality and placed so close together by the
poet, have furnished men with an opportunity to abuse the fables of the
bards, not remembering that the human imaginative faculty when it would
represent objects as important always imagines them to be higher than
they are broad, and thus lends more character, seriousness, and dignity
to the picture. I have heard complaints, a thousand times, that an
object known only from description no longer satisfies us when we come
face to face with it. The cause of this is always the same. Imagination
and reality bear the same relation to each other as poetry and prose:
The former conceives objects to be huge and precipitous, the latter
always thinks that they flatten themselves out. The landscape painters
of the sixteenth century, compared with those of our own day, furnish
the most striking example of this."

A number of the most pertinent aphorisms might be developed from this
short remark. For us this one will suffice: On account of their whole
fantastic-romantic ideal of art the medieval painters were forced to
make their landscapes steep and rugged and to crowd them within narrow
confines. The backgrounds of their landscapes--in the sense of the above
remark of Goethe--are composed like poetry rather than like a painting.
It is not the portrayal of the earthly, but an imaginary sacred
landscape, which stood everywhere so alpine-like before their spirit.
This, however, straightway became identified with the actual picture of
nature, and determined the eye for natural scenery of the age.

From the biblical poetry of the Hebrews the Christian world (and not
only the Germanic) had acquired an enthusiasm for the beauties of nature
which could never have been kindled by ancient art. With the deeper
Christian knowledge of God comes also deeper poetic perception of His
beautiful earth, and not until man felt with intense pain the
transitoriness of this beautiful earth did he begin to love it so
ardently. It is therefore a transparent anti-realistic lanscape
painting, like that of the Psalmist, which those pious painters give us;
it strives after elevated forms for the outer senses also, strives
upward, and seeks to gain an insight into an entire world, into a cosmos
of concentrated, natural life, the archetype of which--in spite of all
childish naturalism--it has seen in the paradise of fancy rather than in
reality. The tall luminous mountain peaks,