the next generation in France, where _paysage intime_, the most refined and delicate issue of the century, grew to maturity in the very years when German landscape painting roamed through the world with the joy of an explorer. CHAPTER XXIV THE BEGINNINGS OF "PAYSAGE INTIME" How it was that the secrets of _paysage intime_ were reserved for our own century--and this assuredly by no mere accident--can only be delineated in true colours when some one writes a special history of landscape painting, a book which at the present time would be the most seasonable in the literature of art. Wereschagin once declared that in the province of landscape the works of the old masters seem like the exercises of pupils in comparison with the performances of modern art; and certain it is that the nineteenth century, if it is inferior to previous ages in everything else, may, at any rate, offer them an equivalent in landscape. It was only city life that could produce this passionately heightened love of nature. It was only in the century of close rooms and over-population, neurosis and holiday colonies, that landscape painting could attain to this fulness, purity, and sanctity. It was only our age of hurry and work that made possible a relation between nature and the human soul, which really has something of what the Earth Spirit vouchsafed to Faust: "to gaze into her heart as into the bosom of a friend." In France also, the tendency which since the eighteenth century had made itself felt in waves rising ever higher, had been for a short time abruptly interrupted by Classicism. Of the pre-revolutionary landscapists _Hubert Robert_ was the only one who survived into the new era. His details of nature and his _rococo_ savour were pardoned to him for the sake of his classic ruins. At first there was not one of the newer artists who was impelled to enter this province. A generation which had become ascetic, and which dreamed only of rude, manly virtue, expressed through the plastic and purified forms of the human body, had lost all sense for the charms of landscape. And when the first landscapes appeared once more, after several years, they were, as in Germany, solemn stage-tragedy scenes, abstract "lofty" regions such as Poussin ostensibly painted. Only in Poussin a great feeling for nature held together the conventional composition, in spite of all his straining after style; whereas nothing but frigid rhetoric and sterile formalism reigns in the works of these newer painters, works which were created at second-hand. The type of the beautiful which had been borrowed from the antique was worked into garden and forest with a laboured effort at style, as it had been worked into the human form and the flow of drapery. A _prix de Rome_ was founded for historical landscapes.