That is what distinguishes him from his contemporaries. The other idealists of those years painted their pictures without hesitation and with the facility of a professor of calligraphy; they remembered, arranged their reminiscences, and rubbed their hands with self-complacency when they came near their model. They did not yet feel the throb of the nineteenth century, and impersonality was their note. Feuerbach, the neurotic brooder, was a personality. After a long mortification, the human spirit, the living, suffering, human spirit, celebrated its renaissance in his works. Under its influence the jejune painting of prettiness practised by others was changed to modern pessimism and sorrowful resignation. The more he gave way to these moods the more modern he became, the more he was Feuerbach and the further he departed from the works of art which were regarded by his contemporaries and himself as eternal exemplars. He has been reproached with oddities and strange eccentricities. The critics reminded him how far he departed from the lines of his models; indignantly they asked him why he, the pale, delicate, sick, neurotic, and overstrained man, the uncertain, faltering, and tortured spirit, did not paint like the blithe, improvising Raphael, like the jubilant and convivial Veronese, like the sensuous, exuberant Rubens. And Feuerbach himself becomes perplexed. Like Gros in France, he is conscious both of his strength and his weakness. He does not stand sovereign above the old painters, like Boecklin and those other idealists of the present. He runs through life in ever fresh astonishment at the novelty which is revealed to him in the works of earlier centuries. The nerves of this latter day vibrate, the blood of the nineteenth century throbs in him--yet he has the wish to imitate. The history of every one of his works is a fight, a desperate struggle, between the individuality of the artist, his own inward feeling, and the "absolute Beauty" which hovered beyond him cold and unpliable.