HKB
unimportant, not to say impossible, ugly and unworthy shall pass. But I say, Herewithal is something not phantasmal; of indisputable certainty, home-grown" (CARLYLE: Friedrich, bk. iv. ch. vi., slightly altered).
The Early Flemish and German schools are by no means so completely represented as the nearly contemporary schools of Italy; but there are enough pictures to bring out the characteristics of the northern art. Nothing can be more instructive, and convincing of the value of art as a means of national autobiography, than to compare the early pictures in these rooms en bloc with those in any of the Italian rooms (e.g. the Umbrian). No one can fail to be struck at once by the contrast between what Mr. Ruskin has called "the angular and bony sanctities of the North," and "the drooping graces and pensive pieties of the South." This is the first distinguishing character of the early northern art: there is little feeling, or care, for beauty as such. Look round the rooms, and see whether there is a single face which will haunt you for its beauty. Look at the pictures which interest you most, choose out the brightest and the most exquisitely finished: and see if it is not an almost defiant absence of beautiful feature that characterises them. Coupled with their absence of feeling for the beautiful there is in the work of these artists a strange fondness for death--for agonies, crucifixions, depositions, exhumations. "It is not that the person needs excitement or has any such strong perceptions as would cause excitement, but he is dead to the horror, and a strange evil influence guides his feebleness of mind rather to fearful images than to beautiful ones,--as our disturbed dreams are sometimes filled with ghastlinesses which seem not to arise out of any conceivable association of our waking ideas, but to be a vapour out of the very chambers of the tomb, to which the mind, in its palsy, has approached" (Modern Painters, vol. iv. pt. v. ch. xix. § 16). Thus, in painting scenes from the Passion or stories from the book of martyrs, the Italians of the earlier time endured the painfulness, the northern artists rejoiced in it.
What, then, is it that gives these pictures their worth and has caused their painters to be included amongst the great masters of the world? Look at some of the best, and the more you look the more you will see that their goodness consists in an absolute fidelity to nature--in dress, in ornaments, and especially in portraiture. Here are unmistakably the men and women of the time, set down precisely in their habit as they lived. In this grim, unrelenting truthfulness these pictures correspond exactly to the ideal which Carlyle--himself a typical northerner--lays down, in the passage above quoted, for the art of painting.