What survives of Cornelius is only the man, the individual. Posterity will doubtless always honour him for the unflinching energy with which he upheld his ideal from youth to failing age; for his courage in propounding and defending what seemed right to _him_; for refraining from putting on velvet gloves with the multitude, but frankly showing them his nails. This high-mindedness of Cornelius, and his lofty conception of the aims of art, must always command our respect. All his works are the product of a serene, great, and noble soul. His is a physiognomy with a proud, vigorous profile, which expresses an intellectual tendency, and can never be forgotten. He was a man--as a painter, a curse to German art, but a self-conscious, aristocratic mind. As he himself said: "Art has its high-priests and also its hedge-priests"; and when at the end of his life he made his profession: "Never, under any circumstance of my life, have I lost my pious reverence for the divinity of art; never have I sinned against it," we none of us refuse to accept his word. [Illustration: KAULBACH. PRINCE ARTHUR AND HUBERT.] This unfailing earnestness which suffuses Cornelius's work raises him high above _Wilhelm Kaulbach_, and secures for him lasting fame, when that of Kaulbach shall have been buried with the last of the "cultured" patrons for whom he worked, and by whom he was placed on a pedestal. Look at both of them from a purely artistic point of view, comparing them with the old masters, and both of them sink equally into insignificance. But if we come to accept the problem of art criticism as a matter of psychology rather than of æsthetics, if we search for the relations between the work of art and the soul of its author, we cannot but look upon Kaulbach as by far the inferior. Cornelius endeavoured to raise the masses to his level, paid for his idealism with unpopularity, and was never understood. Kaulbach, the humble servant of the public, changed the Spartan iron of the art of Cornelius for the base coin of the art unions; to tickle the multitude, he clothed voluptuous sensuality in the stately garment of the earnest Muse, and was hailed with jubilation throughout his life. But the valise with which alone, according to the fairy-tale, one can enter upon the journey to immortality, was still lighter in his case. Idealistic painting, as professed by Cornelius, had skimmed all the cream from religious and mythological subjects; so Kaulbach tried to give something more actual in its stead. He found this in the philosophy of history, in the images of epochs in the history of the world which were then so much in vogue, and handed his public, eager for knowledge, a printed programme upon which he had catalogued the gigantic thoughts and even weightier references which the picture was said to contain. As the masses were awed by the severity of the Cornelian conception of forms, he softened it down with superficial calligraphic elegance: what was sturdy and