Blessed are the ignorant. Their lack of suspicion secures them, whenever they glance at the world, the enthusiasm of discovery and invention, and every phenomenon delights them as something unprecedented. During the lifetime of Puvis de Chavannes his peculiar style was particularly extolled by his eulogists. They exhibited him as a God-sent foundling; as a Moses of painting, without ancestors, himself an ancestor; as a great solitary wandering apart from the multitude through the history of contemporary art. Such phrases can be uttered only by one who rejoices in the most refreshing ignorance of the historical continuity of things. Puvis is of a family. The expert can name his forefathers and relations; he finds their lineaments repeated—often coarsened and disfigured—in him. Puvis, this great, original genius of his admirers, is an impoverished descendant of Cornelius. He represents the worst aberration in art that this century has seen, viz., thought-painting. Nowadays it is no longer necessary to prove that abstraction is the negation and abrogation of plastic art. This maxim, fortunately, has become an æsthetic commonplace. Painting has to do only with sensuous phenomena; abstraction distils from the sensuous one quality, which, since it is common to many phenomena, is reminiscent of many phenomena, yet is itself not phenomenon. He who feels the impulse to paint not views but thoughts, proves that in his innermost soul he is not a painter, but a rhetorician, and that he has deceived himself marvellously as to the method of expression natural and organic to him. Cornelius’s painting presented thoughts, religious, philosophical, and historical dogmas, in a picture-language considerably less clearly than might have been done in well-ordered words. It pleased all those whose soul was seven times sealed against understanding what really constitutes painting. As long as the Cornelius tendency was dominant in Germany, that country was depressingly behind in the art life of the period. As soon as Cornelius and his school were overthrown, a sound development of German painting began. And now, at the close of the nineteenth century in France, in the France which has produced, in landscape, Corot, Rousseau, Diaz, Harpignies: in figure-painting, Millet, Courbet, Bonnat, Roll: from which has come the return to nature and the renaissance of art, the allegorical thought-painting of a Puvis has been praised as the greatest advance, as the latest step in development! The snake biting its own tail still remains the truest symbol of human activity that the self-knowledge of the race has as yet discovered.