Now this characteristic art is the only genuine art. If only it comes fresh from the inner soul, expressing the original, unique sensibilities, untroubled, indeed unconscious of any external element, it may spring from rough savagery or from cultivated sensitiveness, yet it will always be complete and alive. This you can see among nations and individual men in countless degrees. The more the soul rises to the feeling for relations, which alone are beautiful and from eternity, whose master-chords one can demonstrate, whose mysteries one can only feel, in which alone the life of the divine genius seeks expression in enraptured melodies; the more this beauty pervades the soul of a genius so that it seems to have originated with him, so that nothing else satisfies him, so that he can bring nothing else out of himself, the more fortunate is the artist, the more splendid is he, and the more reverently do we stand there and worship God’s anointed. From the level to which Erwin has mounted no one will drag him down. Here stands his work; gaze at it and appreciate the deepest feelings for truth and beauty and proportion, working out of a strong, sturdy, rough German soul, out of the narrow, somber, priest-haunted “medium aevum.” And our own “aevum”? It has neglected its genius, driven forth its sons to collect strange excrescences for their corruption. The agile Frenchman, who in unscrupulous fashion collects where he will, has at least an ingenuity in working together his booty into a sort of unity; he builds his wonderful church of the Magdalene out of Greek columns and German arches and vaults. From one of our architects, who was requested to design a portal for an old German church, I have seen a model of perfect, stately antique column-work. How hateful our varnished doll-painters are to me I cannot express. By their theatrical positions, their false tints, and gaily-colored costumes, they have captured the eyes of women. But, manly Albrecht Dürer, whom these novices laugh at, your woodcut figures are more welcome to me. And you yourselves, excellent men, to whom it was given to enjoy the highest beauty, and now come down to announce your bliss, you do prejudice to genius. It will soar and progress on no alien wings, even though they were the wings of the morning. Its own original powers are those which unfold in the dreams of childhood, which grow during the life of youth, until strong and supple like the mountain-lion he starts out after his prey. Nature does most in training these powers, for you pedagogues can never counterfeit the multifarious scene which she provides for a youth to draw from and enjoy in the measure of his present strength.