A visit to the National Gallery of Berlin makes me gnash my teeth. The sight of so much misspent labour, of the acres of canvases deluged with dirty, bad paint, raises my bile. We know that all things are relative, and because Germany has produced few painters worthy of the name that after all it doesn\'t much matter—there is Italy and Holland to fall back on; not to mention the Spain of El Greco, Velasquez, Goya, and the great Frenchmen. But there is something singularly exasperating in German painting, whether old or new, that sets us to wondering whether such museums as the National Gallery, Berlin; the new Pinakothek, Munich, and other repositories of ugly colour and absurd mythologies do not cause a deterioration in public taste. It is almost pathetic to see not only the general visitor but also students gazing admiringly at the monstrous art of Kaulbach, Schadow, Cornelius (the Nazarene school), or at the puerilities of the Swiss, Arnold Boecklin and his follower, Franz von Stuck, of Munich, who has simply brutalised the eternal [Pg 180] Boecklin themes. It is all very well to say that these galleries, like the modern collection upstairs in the Dresden gallery (with its wonderful Rembrandts and Vermeers down-stairs) serve to preserve the historical art chain. But bad art should have no significance, history or no history—let such history appeal to the professors of ?sthetics and other twaddlers. Furthermore, the evil example of Boecklin and the rest, shows in German contemporary painting. I don\'t mean the Cubists and other freaks, but in current art, the art that sells, that receives respectful critical treatment. We are continually forced to look at the menagerie, mermaids, and frogs, and fauns, painted in imitation of the hard, violent tones of Boecklin, himself a scene-painter, but not a great painter.

The critics in Germany don\'t bother themselves over paint quality, beautiful surfaces, or handling, but with books about the philosophy of the painter, his "weltanschauung," his ethics; you all the while wondering why he uses such muddy paints, why he is blind to the loveliness of atmosphere, pure colours, and sheer pictorial quality. Style and quality are, I believe, suspected in Germany as evidences of superficiality, of a desire to add ornament where plain speech should suffice. Like German prose and German singing—oh, how acrid is the Teutonic tone-production, a lemon in the larynx!—German painting limps heavily. Nietzsche is right; in certain matters the Germans are the [Pg 181] Chinese of Europe; they refuse to see the light of modern discoveries in art.

Here is a violent instance: On the top floor of the National Gallery, Berlin, there is a room with fourteen masterpieces on its walls. Nothing in the galleries below—not even Zorn\'s Maja—nothing in all Berlin, excepting the old masters in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, can be mentioned in the same breath with these beautiful compositions, condemned to perpetual twilight. The............