And this indicates the further course which development was obliged to take. When Hogarth was left behind, painting had once more gained the independence which it had had in the great periods of art. The painter was forced to cease from treating secondary qualities--such as humour and narrative power--as though they were of the first account; and the public had to begin to understand pictures as paintings and not as painted stories. An "empty subject" well painted is to be preferred to an "interesting theme" badly painted. Pictures of life must drive out _tableaux vivants_, and human beings dislodge character types which curiosity renders attractive. Rather let there be a moment of breathing reality rendered by purely artistic means of expression than the most complete village tale defectively narrated; rather the simplest figure rendered with actuality and no thought of self than the most suggestive and ingenious characterisation. A conception, coloured by the temperament of the artist, of what was simple and inartificial, expressing nature at every step, had to take the place of laborious composition crowded with figures, the plainness and truth of sterling art to overcome what was overloaded and arbitrary, and the fragment of nature seized with spontaneous freshness to supplant episodes put together out of fragmentary observations. Only such painting as confined itself, like that of the Dutch, "to the bare empirical observation of surrounding reality," renouncing literary byplay, spirited anecdotic fancies, and all those rules of beauty which enslave nature, could really become the basis of modern art: and this the landscape painters created. When once these masters resolved to paint from nature, and no longer from their inner consciousness, there inevitably came a day when some one amongst them wished to place in the field or the forest, which he had painted after nature, a figure, and then felt the necessity of bringing that figure into his picture just as he had seen it, without giving it an anecdote mission or forcing it arbitrarily into his compositions. The landscapist found the woodcutter in the forest, and the woodcutter seemed to him the ideal he was seeking; the peasant seemed to him to have the right to stand amid the furrows he had traced with his plough. He no longer drove the fisher and the sailor from their barks, and had no scruple in representing the good peasant woman, laden with wood, striding forwards in his picture just as she strode through the forest. And so entry was made into the way of simplicity; the top-heavy burden of interesting subject-matter was thrown aside, and the truth of figures and environments was gained. The age contained all the conditions for bringing landscape painting such as this to maturity. CHAPTER XXIII LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN GERMANY