74 MORE POT-POURRI 



allegorical details in this later one are brought out with 

 greater distinctness. Several of Herr Boecklin's pic- 

 tures have been bought by his native town of Bale, 

 and, later on, I will describe how I spent a night there 

 on purpose to see them. After ray return home I came 

 across an interesting description of Herr Boecklin and 

 his work, in a lately published book called ' The History 

 of Modern Painting/ by Richard Muther, from which 

 the following extract will perhaps make others wish as 

 much as I do to see his pictures. Mr. Muther says of 

 him that : ' He belonged to the very time when Richard 

 Wagner lured the colours of sound from music with a 

 glow and light such as no master had kindled before 

 Boecklin's symphonies of colour streamed forth like a 

 crashing orchestra. The whole scale, from the most 

 sombre depth to the most chromatic light, was at his 

 command. In his pictures of spring the colour laughs, 

 rejoices, and exults. In the "Isle of the Dead," it 

 seems as though a veil of crepe were spread over the 

 sea, the sky, and the trees Many of his pic- 

 tures have such an ensnaring brilliancy that the eye is 

 never weary of feasting upon their floating splendour. 

 Indeed, later generations will probably do him honour 

 as the greatest colour -poet of the century, and, at the 

 same time, they will learn from his works that at the 

 close of this same unstable century there were complete 

 and healthy human beings. . . . The more modern 

 sentiment became emancipated, the more did artists 

 venture to feel with their own nerves and not with those 

 of earlier generations, and the more it became evident 

 that modern sentiment is almost always disordered, 

 recklessly despairing, unbelieving, and weary of life. 

 Boecklin, the most modern of modern painters, possesses 

 that quality of iron health of which modernity knows 

 so little.' 



