These opinions have now vanished entirely. A more extended intercourse with the old masters and with the art of other countries has gradually cured the Germans too of that mental hypertrophy from which they suffered in their view of art--a complaint whose characteristic symptom was the entire lack of sensuousness, of that sensibility to beauty of form and external charm which always has been and always must be the predominating mood of a society in which art is to flourish. They have gradually reached the point at which one interests one's self in a picture for the sake of the painting of it, looks first at the picture, and only then asks what the painter's idea may have been, or what the spectator is to gather from it. No poem will find favour which offers acceptable thoughts in badly worded, halting, unmelodious verse; nor do the loftiest thoughts in themselves suffice to make a work of art. Profundity of thought is a thing that has little to do with pure art; and the subject alone, however world-stirring the ideas in it may be, never makes a thing artistic. We have learnt to find the most intense enjoyment in the mere contemplation of Titian's "Earthly and Heavenly Love," although we may not yet know what this picture is really meant to convey. And we know none the less that what renders Raphael's "School of Athens" immortal is not its catalogue of ideas, which has been drawn up by an anonymous pedant, but the master's artistic power, the intensity with which he expresses what was barely showing bud in the material, the self-reliant strength and sureness with which the form and colour have succeeded in outlining and creating every figure and every movement in the picture. [Illustration: PETER CORNELIUS. 'LET THERE BE LIGHT'.] [Illustration: CORNELIUS. FROM THE FRESCOES IN THE FRIEDHOFSHALLE, BERLIN.]