The practice is even here somewhat different from the pure theory. The deceased is no longer “Excellency,” “Professor,” not even “Mr.” But the usage of contemporaries to give him a title is still expressed in the respectful tone in which they pronounce his now naked name, and in which one possessed with a delicate sense of hearing perceives the rustle of all the tinsel that surrounded him when alive. In this tone, however, the name becomes familiar to the younger ones, who, without thinking, continue this veneration, unconscious that their accent expresses respect because the bearer of the name so pronounced was once a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour and an Academician. Thus, my dear Schiller, are your confident words to be understood, you who would never perceive the weft of vulgarity in the ways of man: “He who has satisfied the best men of his time has lived for all time.” Certainly, if by “best” we would understand the best placed, best paid, invested with the best office, or the best decorated. He who during his lifetime has belonged to those favoured by the grace of official newspapers, who has been gauged by them and provided with a “full” mark, will be recognised for all time as full without further test. The Pantheon is the continuation of the minister’s official rooms, the golden book of spiritual history an anthology from the Official Gazette and the Army List, for the use of the children of later centuries. If I must emphasise the essential: the appraisement even of the artist, therefore of the most individual man that exists, is the outcome of social, not individual, factors, or of the latter only when they are socially successful, and, therefore, themselves become social factors. There are, I admit, always proud—perhaps only haughty—natures with an anarchistic, anti-social trait, who will not recognise any arrangement or fixing of the community, not even its hierarchy of fame, and clench their fists against laurel crowns just as they do against crowns. Their rebellion, however, is seldom successful. I know of no case of a bomb-thrower having destroyed a Pantheon. But as we do not take ourselves tragically, do not begin our own verdict with the threatening formula, “In the name of the Law,” and do not exact any submission from others, we are always entitled to be of our own opinion, and to let the dead influence us without prejudice, untroubled by the distinctions of rank which were bestowed on them in life, and were buried with them. Such a method of observation is unhistorical, but subjectively fruitful; it leads to self-emancipation from many superstitions.