rooms before finding a creature represented as “breathing in rosy light.” What satires these _salons_ are on the consequential, high-stepping, deep-thinking drivel of professorial and other chatterers, who, to hide their dearth of thoughts, turn out new words, discover in our days a particular “charm” in painting as in other arts, and prove by _a_ + _b_ the necessary, logically offered expression of new spiritual needs of the present generation. Now what has become of the “charm” that calculatingly demanded “free light” and nothing else? And how is it, then, with the spiritual needs of the present generation, to which free light and nothing else corresponded? And how does it stand with the new way, in which favoured artists have taught us to contemplate and to feel nature? Was the “charm” four or five years ago inclined to brilliancy, and is it changed during the night to an insatiable longing for gloom? Did white and violet correspond five years ago to the spiritual needs of the present generation, and does this generation now need black, brown, or olive-green tones? Have we just as quickly again unlearnt to contemplate and feel nature in sun-gold and violet, as favoured artists have taught us to do? Living art goes her way according to her own laws and impulses, and leaves in the lurch the babbling empty heads, with their pretentious threshing of phrases, who tramp after her, expounding and talking wisely interpretations and clever chatter. Not by a particular “incentive” of the period, not from its alleged spiritual needs and currents of thought, are the changes of art creation to be explained, but solely by the psychology of the artists, by their very human, very weakly prosaic needs, by the material and moral conditions under which they are nowadays condemned to work.