Still, all landscapes ought to be approached with caution by the lover
of Ruler-Art; for unless they are treated with an extreme ruler-spirit,
they point too imperatively away from man, to promise a development
that can be wholesomely human.
When it is remembered that landscape painting only became a really
important and serious branch of art when all the turmoil and
contradiction which three successive changes of values had brought
about were at their height--I refer to the blow levelled at Mediæval
values by the Renaissance, to 'the blow levelled at the Renaissance
by the Counter-Renaissance and Protestantism (in its German form of
Evangelism and in its English form as Puritanism), and to the blow
levelled at the artistic spirit of Europe in general by the rise of
modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--and when,
therefore, doubt and confusion had already entered men's minds as to
what was to be believed about Man and Life; when it is remembered also
that it was precisely in the north, where, as we shall see, culture was
less a matter of tradition than in the south, that landscape found its
most energetic and most realistic exponents--from Joachim Patenier[6]
to Ruysdael; and that it was in the north, even after the
Renaissance, that the negative character of Christianity, in regard to
humanity and to Life, found its strongest adherents; the importance of
establishing a very severe canon in regard to all landscape painting,
and of insisting upon very high ruler qualities in this branch of the
art, ought to be clear to all who take this subject to heart.
For, difficult as it may seem to realize it, there is nothing
whatsoever artistically beautiful in landscape.[7] Only sentimental[8]
townspeople, compelled by their particular mode of existence
to gaze daily on their own hideous homes and streets, ever manifest
a senselessly ardent and determined affection for green fields and
hills, for their own sake; and with English psychologists, it would be
quite admissible here to say that all beauty that particular people
believe to exist in country scenery, is the outcome of association. The
ancients liked the sunlit and fruitful valley because of its promise of
sustenance and wealth; but they showed no love of nature as such.[9]