cosmos. And if it were possible to make his realization, his one work, generally accessible, the virtues from such vulgarization would be forthcoming. But such accessibility can be obtained only after the overcoming of countless difficulties which, while relatively superficial, are in their totality unsurmountable. Among the thousand texts which are offered to mankind, surely one must contain the remedy. How shall they grasp the one, which came from some remote place, removed from the daily rounds of life? One could just as well turn a Central African negro into a follower of Christ.
Darkness lies over the Hesperides of our Hans von Marées. This envelops him, makes judgement difficult. The tragic is a matter of will; this darkness is inevitable. It does not simply envelop him, but is at the same time rooted in his work, a protest against the zealous conquest of light which a generation of painters in France undertook at just that moment when Europe was beginning to darken. Was this bewitching conquest only the fruits of victorious instincts; was it not also a recourse to light in order to escape the demands of a permissible past (for instance, Delacroix) which Hans von Marées rated more highly? The stride into Impressionism occasioned brilliant enthusiasm. The enthusiasm of a day when war is declared against dark enemies. This enemy must perish, to make room, to make a new structure possible. It was a very legitimate and generous enthusiasm. But the persistency of this movement, the consequence of its programme, was an admission of the weakness of the times. Rationalism took the place of enthusiasm. Even the taste and the tact of the French did not succeed in covering the gaps in this degeneration of the pictorial. There was no more mention of composition. The picture, which was to be made more brilliant, lost its reality. The world was disintegrated into a coloured film. A recipe was left. Thanks to it, Rembrandt became a dirty spot on the wall of fashion, and the plastic of the primitives became arbitrary and barbaric.
German Impressionism is a sorry chapter. People painted away at it, substituting an obvious temperamentalism for the tact and taste of the French. At times it was wildly obvious, but sufficed, considering relative merits, to draw out some possibilities from the system which was being completely exploited in Paris, the imitation of the Dix-huitième without rococo. The world of the Germans remained outside. Not one of these facile temperaments suspected that a few generations previously the enthusiasm for light
