However, one must not go too far. In familiar conversation Feuerbach once said of himself that when the history of art in the nineteenth century came to be written, mention would be made of him as of a meteor. So isolated, and so much out of connection with the artistic striving of his contemporaries, did he believe himself to be, that he held himself justified in saying: "Believe me, after fifty years my pictures will possess tongues, and tell the world what I was and what I meant." In truth, he owes his resurrection less to his pictures than to the _Vermächtniss_. A book has opened the eyes of Germany to Feuerbach's greatness, and since that time the worship of Feuerbach has gone almost into extremes. Throughout his lifetime--like almost every great artist who has died before old age--he was handled by the Press without much comprehension. The critics blamed his grey tones, the connoisseurs complained of his unpatriotic subjects or missed the presence of anecdote. His admirers were the refined, quiet people who do not praise at the top of their voices. He never met with recognition, and that poisoned his life. It is generous of posterity to make up for the want of contemporary appreciation. But when he is set up as a pioneer, whose work pointed out the art of the future, the judgment becomes one which a _later_ posterity will subscribe to only with hesitation. [Illustration: FEUERBACH. MOTHER'S JOY.] Feuerbach presents a problem for psychological rather than artistic analysis. Whoever has read the _Vermächtniss_ feels the personal element in these works, sees in them the confessions of a proud, unsatisfied, and suffering soul, and in their author no son of the Renaissance born out of due season, but a modern who has been agitated through and through by the _décadent_ fever. In his book Feuerbach appears as one of the first who felt to his inmost fibre all the intellectual and spiritual contradictions which are bred by the nineteenth century, and who cherished them even with a sort of tenderness, as contributing to a high and more subtilised condition of soul. He was one of the first who, in the same way as Bourget and Verlaine, studied moral pathology under the microscope, and who, with a tired soul and worn-out feelings, sought for the last refinement of simplicity. And this weary resignations seems also to speak from his pictures. Not one of the old painters has this modern melancholy, this air of dejection which hovers over his works. Even the ladies round Dante are filled with that sadness which comes over youth on the evenings of sultry summer days, when it is struck by a presentiment of the transitoriness of earthly things. It is as if these figures would all some day or other vanish into the cloister, or, like Iphigenia, sit lonely upon the shore of a sea, whither no ship should ever come to release them. And it is certainly not by chance that Iphigenia had such a hold upon the artist; he repeatedly set himself to