If one confronts productions of this kind with the later works of a Schuetz or Reinermann which treat of the same subject, and then again compares both with our modern views of the Rhine, one can often scarcely comprehend how even the same character of scenery is supposed to be reproduced in these widely differing conceptions, much less the identically same landscape.  While in Saftleewen, for example, we always see the Rhine country veiled in a soft mist, seventy years ago it was accounted as a merit of the elder Schuetz that he always gave his pictures of the Rhine and the Main the clearest possible air, and that there was never a trace of mist in the atmosphere!  Let us now compare both of these conceptions with the Rhine views executed in the modern style of a steel engraving, with their heavy, tropically stormy sky, dark masses of clouds, between which thick dazzling streams of light break forth, and similar violent light-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