This the common realism has not comprehended, which broke in on art with a din, and dared to call upon the democracy. The genuine people has never had a mind to realism of this sort, but has always dismissed it roughly. The rough proof of a hateful and tedious reality, such as the pictures of Courbet or Bastien Lepage, has never attracted any but the superfine, and this only, by the well-known psychological law of contrast, whereby an impression that is the exact opposite of the usual impression can impart a pleasurable feeling for a short time. The rich and luxurious like to see works of ugliness and misery; the poor and afflicted do not like them. It is the same in regard to literature. Reluctant protests have frequently become loud, in these socialistic days, against the realism which a party organ offers its readers. The working class do not wish to know anything about this realism which professes to be modern and democratic, yet is, in reality, only wretched and repulsive. It coops them up in the narrowness of their everyday existence, but their wish is to get out of it. Pictures such as Millet’s, sculptures such as Constantin Meunier’s—works which seek to show the dignity and beauty of the occupations of the masses, which constitute a hallowing of work, an apotheosis of the tragedies and idylls, of all the sweet and bitter emotions of the people’s life—these works, to my thinking, exhibit the type of future art. Some great genius will, perhaps, find another formula. What one may, however, say for certain is this, that the art of the future will not be realistic in the narrow sense of the word. But it will not be mystical and æsthetic either. The people will never interest themselves in half-tone angels of boundless length, in violet-hued Virgins with lilies in their hands in a conventional bush, in enigmatical, mysterious verses. And esoteric art will never give the people what they need, viz., the liberating ideal. The art of the cultivator of the Ego, the _dilletante_, of the snobs of a Talmi-aristocracy, presumes to demand the future for itself. Is that to be an art of the future, an art of progress? One can only laugh at the notion. The art of the future will be no “little chapel,” but a mighty cathedral, wide enough to admit the whole of mankind. And that will be exactly its vocation: to be the hallowed place wherein mankind will rise again to the childship of God for which religion has educated them in past stages of evolution. II SOCIALISTIC ART CONSTANTIN MEUNIER