And Rubens, who transgressed all limits of contemporary decency, and that, not only in his capacity of painter, but even as a thinker? I hope no one would be ready to question the fact that his powerful but one-sided genius has intermingled the types of the personalities of the Christian religion with those of the heathenish mythology; that his God the Father is the same as his Jupiter of Olympus; that they are portraits of the very same red-cheeked studio model; that his Virgin and his Hebe—one may even say his Venus—are all personalities of the same type, all alike red-cheeked, handsome, and self-satisfied! Who would deny that Rubens, having peopled the Christian heavens with heavy, buxom, healthy, and very immodest ladies and gentlemen, had reversed all traditions and thus had shown himself to be a talented, powerful realist in his time? Doubtlessly, he bewildered and scandalized a good many of his pious contemporaries. And Rembrandt? and the rest of them, all of whom are now held to be idealists, more or less: was not each one of them a representative of realism in his time—realism that has been considerably smoothed down in our days by the hand of time on one side and the onward march of our self-consciousness on the other? Who would think now-a-days of reproaching those painters for all that boldness, which certainly proved astounding to their contemporaries? And yet how many were the disputes concerning those painters, how many lances have been broken in their behalf! As we look back now all that seems strange to us. But is it not a sign of what awaits the noted works of our own time? These also were received inimically, were proclaimed to be too far-reaching, too bold, too realistic, yet will not they also in their turn acquire lasting strength under the influence of onward marching thought and technique? Will not the day come when they will also find themselves, unawares, in the archives of old ideals? * * * * * But we have to count with our irascible and exacting contemporaries. It is generally held to be unpardonable boldness—quite a scandalous proceeding in fact—to recede from formulas, recognized by successive generations, through centuries. Novelists, painters, sculptors, musicians, are all alike invited to make compromises with triviality and absurdity which invariably retard the development of the idea and of the technique. Even such persons as grudgingly admit that we also are “men of thoughts,” that we also are “men of well-developed technique,” even they express their regrets that we should prove false to the traditions of the old masters; that we should not follow the tenets consecrated by great names. Yes, it is true: we differ in many ways. We think differently, we are bolder in our generalization of the facts of the past, the present, and the future; we even work differently and transfer our impressions in a different manner.