and Vienna--were far removed from the theater of the struggle, just as Rembrandt’s art flowered outside the scene of the Thirty Years War. From a distance the deafening war clangor permeated into the quiet worlds of these rulers in the realm of art; from a distance through transfiguring light appeared to them the new ideas for which the struggle was waged. Such should be the milieu where the greatest art is born--impregnated with the shower of the newly created ideas, but quietly and not to such a degree that its own existence is imperilled. This chance for perspective also makes it possible for the really great artist to judge worldly matters more clearly than the one who lives in the midst of the fray. How much more impartially, for instance, did Beethoven, who otherwise did not care for politics, judge the events of the times than David, who worried about them half his lifetime! Beethoven, also, like the best of his contemporaries, was democratically inclined and applauded the new revolutionary ideas. When Napoleon became First Consul he recognized his greatness and desired to celebrate in his music the hero who had brought the revolution to completion. He began his great symphony, the “Eroica,” and wrote upon the title page the name of Bonaparte next to his own. When the news was brought to him that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, indignant that his illusions had been dispelled and that Bonaparte had become as tyrannical as the crowned heads which the revolution had deposed, he tore up the dedication and began the symphony anew, ending it with the funeral march. The fascination of the art and the personality of David lies in the fact that they reflect the period of the greatest intellectual and social upheaval of his nation--an upheaval such as comes to every nation once in its history, with such a force that through it the whole world is shaken. In such moments of history creations of centuries collapse at one blow. The foundations of faith and of morals waver; the ties of family and friendship are torn apart and even the customary tasks of the day, under other circumstances serving as an anchor alike to the weak and the strong, appear useless and cease: like the flood of the terrific storm which engulfs us, rudely tearing away from the strongest the guiding of their own fate, and forcing the slothful into the maelstrom of the higher general will. What remains for the individual who, hesitating, stands at the edge of the precipice, viewing the tragic drama? Can he do better than to plunge into the stream, keeping afloat as best he may? Happy the one who in such periods succeeds like our artist in preserving so much of his own identity that from out the history of this chaos his name still rings with vibrant life. ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY COPIES PRIVATELY PRINTED FOR FREDERIC FAIRCHILD SHERMAN MCMXXIX FOOTNOTES