Yet even _his_ pictures have the failings of his time. Compared with Dürer, he seems like a gifted amateur; there are manifold empty, dead spaces to be observed among his figures; their action is at times misconceived and puppet-like; and his sense of colour was always limited. One may be permitted to look forward to some master, at the head of a coming epoch in art, who shall combine with Schwind's German fairy imagination the sensuous, dashing colour-elf that possessed Boecklin. There might a school of art arise, to follow for the future the path which Franz Stuck has struck out. As to technique, Schwind was a child of the cartoon era; as regards tenderness of feeling, he is a modern. It is difficult to persuade a non-German of Schwind's greatness, in presence of the _pictures_; but when they are reduced to black-and-white they appeal to every one. The heliogravure enables one to imagine what the original does not show; it incites the soul to further poetic creation, it announces what Schwind would be were he alive to-day. An elfland kingdom of enchantment, full of genuine poetry and beauty, opens out before us; a fairy garden, where the "blue flower" pours forth the whole of its sense-benumbing perfume. Count von Gleichen; the boy's miraculous horn; the mountain spirit Rübezahl, wandering along through the wild mountain forest; the hermits; the elves' dance; the erlking; the knight and the water nymph,--they are flooded with all the enchantment of Romanticism, they possess deep feeling without mawkishness, the old-German note of fairy legend and Hans Memlinc's childlike simplicity, yet at the same time the life of the present day, full of feeling and rich in delicate shades. How strong and brave are the men; how tender, noble, and charming the women! What a modest, maidenly art it is! just as its master was an innocent, harmless, and joyous being. [Illustration: SCHWIND. FROM THE WARTBURG FRESCOES.] His works, in comparison with those of his contemporaries, who were devising systems by means of which art should be brought back to the classical, bear the stamp of naïve creations in which no hypocrisy, no decorative nothingness finds expression. As against the erudite treatises of the Cornelius school, they preached for the first time the doctrine, that in works of art what is important is not the quantity of learning displayed therein, but the quality of the feeling exhibited. With all their inequalities, all their incorrectness, all their weak points, they are inspired, sung, dreamed, and not put together in cold blood according to recipes: in them is the pulsation of a human heart, a tender human heart full of delicate feeling. This it is which constitutes his magical attraction to-day, which makes him the firm bond of connection between the moderns. He was no imitator, no soulless calligraphist performing laborious school exercises after the manner of the old masters; he spoke the language of his time.