The _salons_, the art exhibitions, are in our time the annual marts of success for painters. In these they have to seek fame and its train-bearer—payment in cash. In these they must strive amongst a thousand or two thousand competitors to astonish at any price. By special beauty or special nobility? This means will be chosen by the very fewest. Firstly, not one in a thousand has it in his power. In the second place, even an artist not in the front rank has enough Philistine contempt to be convinced that nobility and beauty are the last things for which the crowd has a taste. His hunger for success—a fitting form of his instinct for self-preservation—gives the artist sense and understanding of the psychology of the multitude, whose elementary law is that it is obtuse to that which is common and reacts on what is uncommon. The artist who works with an eye to exhibiting where his work will be one of two thousand, has only one endeavour, viz., to be as different as possible from these, and by this means possibly to make a striking impression amongst them. The contrary is the greatest difference possible. That is the polar line, the angle of 180 degrees. Logic, which unconsciously proceeds geometrically, brings the artist to this. He also looks sharply at what the others are doing; puts himself to trouble to find out what they have in common, and in what respect they resemble each other; and when he has discovered this, or thinks he has done so, he proceeds to do the exact reverse.