Wiertz made painting a vehicle for more than it can render as painting: with him it begins to dogmatise; it is a book, and it awakens a regret that this rich mind was lost to authorship. There he might, perhaps, have done much that was useful towards solving the social and philosophical questions of the day; as he is, he has nothing to offer the understanding, and only succeeds in offending the eye. A human brain with both great and trivial ideas lays itself bare. But, like Cornelius, from the mere fulness of his ideas he was unable to give them artistic expression. He groped from Michael Angelo to Rubens, and from Raphael to Ary Scheffer, without realising that the artistic utterance of all these masters had been an individual gift. The career of Wiertz is an interesting psychological case. He was an abnormal phenomenon, and he cannot be passed over in the history of art, because he was one of the first who treated subjects from modern life in large pictures. Never before had a genuinely artistic age brought forth such a monster, yet it is impossible to ignore him, or deny that he claims a certain degree of importance in the art history of the past century. CHAPTER XXII THE VILLAGE TALE During the decade following the year 1848 _genre_ painting in Germany threw off the shackles of the anecdotic style, and continued a development similar to that of history, which, in the same country, flourished long after it was moribund elsewhere. After the elder artists, who showed so much zeal in producing perfectly ineffective little pictures, executed with incredible pains and a desperate veracity of detail, there followed, from 1850, a generation who were technically better equipped. They no longer confined themselves to making tentative efforts in the manner of the old masters, but either borrowed their lights directly from the historical painters in Paris, or were indirectly made familiar with the results of French technique through Piloty. Subjects of greater refinement were united with a treatment of colour which was less offensive.