A rejuvenation seemed to come over Puvis when he seized once more on the Géneviève theme which had occupied him from the days of his youth. This theme was to him what the theme of Faust was to Goethe: while the octogenarian was engrossed in it, something of the flame that glowed in the young man of twenty fired him, and the last cry of _Una pænitentium_[5] is still an after-thrill of Gretchen’s passion. Puvis, too, appears to have thought or felt “_Ihr naht euch wieder, schwankende Gestalten!_” when he set about painting this concluding picture of the Géneviève cycle; and for the last strophe of his ballad, which dies away so sadly, he found again some of the power and unction which secures to its predecessors their glorious place in the century’s Art. If the brazen foreheads of the babblers who have the chief say in the art criticism of the time were at all capable of a decent blush, they would turn red with shame at his series of frescoes in the Pantheon. People had the audacity to claim Puvis for some “modernity” or other, in which certain moods of our time were said to be incorporated. The only time when one can wholly surrender oneself to him, he is absolutely of no time. What, in that instance, fascinates in him is nothing relating to the present, and still less to the future, but the past and the remote past, the atavistic. His life’s great work is a legend of a saint, which he has treated after the manner of a legend with the feelings of a primitive who, in the manner natural to him—the manner of about the fourteenth century—tells a story that is to him a living verity, in which he believes, as those souls believe it for whose edification he presents it, and which moves and touches him as it does the beholders who will fold their hands devoutly before his work. Puvis cannot reckon on such a reception from his contemporaries, for whom he designs his creation. To us the legend is strange; it is a bit of learned literature which we look at critically, and in which we cannot be expected to plunge believingly. If Puvis, nevertheless, overcomes our opposition, and can suggest to us for moments the child-like faith and all the emotions of dead and gone times that are connected with that faith, he has achieved something more difficult than the primitives, for whom the spirit of their time was no opponent, but a confederate.