Prettiness is necessarily untruth, for it is that which is conceived without trouble, which excites no opposition, which compels no strain on the attention and no adaptation on the part of the spectator to the peculiarity of the artist. Its effect is merely the effect of what meets the spectator’s pre-existent thoughts or feelings completely. This pre-existing element is not, however, the result of collective observation and strong feeling, but the dissipated precipitate of the most fugitive, indifferent perception, which is totally unfitted to obtrude into the world of phenomena. The artist whose goal is prettiness, does not glance at reality, but at the soul of the crowd which he wishes to please. He does not portray what he sees, and what makes an impression on him, but what suits the feeble, inexact concepts which the average man forms of things. He is a courtier of the crowd; he flatters their shallowness and incapacity. He wants them to say, with a self-satisfied smile: “This man is a great artist, for he has the same way of looking at things as ourselves.” Prettiness is, in lyric poetry, rhyming “love” with “dove,” “heart” and “part”; in drama, it is rewarding the good characters with advantageous marriages and lucrative posts, and making the wicked fall into the pit they have dug for others. For this is just what the public expects; such is the world-picture which the world has arranged for itself, and it is grateful to the poet that he does not force it to rectify its comfortable way of thinking. In the plastic arts prettiness is the average or typical. Bouguereau paints a pattern, not a person. He has a canon to which he holds; and if he would only go so far as to look at real human beings, and had to admit that nature does not act according to his canon, he would certainly say: “So much the worse for nature.” Superficiality always confuses prettiness with the ideal. One cannot fail to see that prettiness lacks exactness. This inexactness is, however, praised as an improvement on reality: the master of prettiness understands nature better than she understands herself. He guesses what she would, but cannot always, do, and comes with his superior creative power to help the poor incapable. The truth is that prettiness is the exact reverse of the ideal; for the ideal is the presentiment of future developments: prettiness the pompous repetition of what is commonplace. The idealist is impelled by a restless longing after novelty to represent; he seeks in invisible germs which the average soul does not perceive to detect the later glory of blossom. The painter of prettiness shows scant satisfaction in attainment, and his creation is nothing but a sleepy reminiscence of impressions he is accustomed to.