ght-effects. One might think that
sun, air, and clouds, water and mountains and trees and rocks, had
altered in the course of the centuries, that nature itself had been
transformed, if we did not know only too well that it is the eye of man
alone which has altered in the mean time, that every generation _sees_
in a different style.

The masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries looked at natural
scenery in a very much more objective manner than we do. Wherever there
is bright springtime or summer, wherever all the trees are green and the
flowers blooming, wherever the cloudless sky is glittering in deepest
blue, and all forms stand out detached from one another in the luminous
clearness of the full, joyous, midday sunlight--there for them is
genuinely beautiful natural scenery. It was not lack of technique that
prevented the artists of that period from painting faded yellow autumn
pictures, or thunder-storms and rain landscapes as we do. With regard to
more difficult points they were technically so far advanced that they
could surely have produced a gray sky instead of a blue, and yellow-red
trees instead of green, if they had seriously tried to do so. But with
their far brighter eyes they saw the landscape far brighter than we do,
and therefore, of necessity, they painted it so. Whoever compares
medieval lyrics, where the same sunny, springlike tone plays through all
the verses, with modern lyrics, will become more deeply conscious of
this necessity.

And as those men found their calm nature reflected in the midday
clearness of the most peaceful of spring days, so it is necessary for us
to seek the mirror of our own passionate agitation in the pathos of the
stormy, mournful, autumnally decaying, desolate, savage landscape. 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