One cannot but feel that out of such thoughts good works must come. * * * * * To quote once more from a personal letter: “I have now been exhibiting for almost fifteen years, and for the same fifteen years I have been hearing (although more rarely of late) that I have gone too far on my way; that in time my exaggerations will most surely decrease, and that I would yet paint in an ‘entirely different manner'; that I would ‘return to nature.’ I had to hear this for the first time when I exhibited my studies painted on the naturalist basis with the horn (spatula). “The truth of the matter is that every really gifted artist, that is, an artist working under an impulse _from within_, must go in a way that in some mystical manner has been laid out for him from the very start. His life is nothing but the fulfillment of a task set for him (_for him, not by himself_). Meeting with enmity from the start, he feels only vaguely and indistinctly that he carries a message for the expression of which he must find a _certain_ manner. This is the period of ‘storm and stress,’ then follow desperate _searching_, pain, great pain--until _finally_ his eyes open and he says to himself, ‘There is my way.’ The rest of his life lies along this path. And one must follow it to the very last hour _whether one wants to do so, or not_. And no one must imagine that this is a Sunday afternoon’s walk, for which one selects the route at will. Neither is there any Sunday about it; it is a working day, in the strongest sense possible. And the greater the artist, the more one-sided is he in _his_ work; true, he retains the ability to do ‘nice’ work of other kind (by reason of his ‘talent'), but _innerly_ weighty, infinitely deep, and immeasurable serious things he can achieve _only_ in his _one-sided_ art. Talent is not an electric pocket lantern, the rays of which one may at will direct now hither and then thither; it is a star for which the path is being prescribed by the dear Lord. “As far as I am concerned personally, I was as if thunderstruck, when for the first time and in only a general manner I began to see my way. I was awed. I deemed this inspiration to be a delusion, a ‘temptation.’