Again, in the _German Republic of Letters_, in the chapter "On High Treason": "It is high treason for any one to maintain that the Greeks cannot be surpassed." In a letter to Goethe, in the year 1800, Schiller wrote: "The antique was a manifestation of its age which can never return, and to force the individual production of an individual age after the pattern of one quite heterogeneous, is to kill that art which can only have a dynamic origin and effect." Madame de Staël, in her book on _Germany_, says: "If nowadays the fine arts should be confined to the simplicity of the ancients, we should not then be able to attain to the original strength which distinguished them, while we should lose that intimate, composite feeling for life which is especially found in us. Simplicity in art would easily turn with the moderns into coldness and affectation, whereas with the ancients it was full of life." In 1797 Counsellor Hirth published in Schiller's _Horæ_ his well-known treatise on _Beauty in Art_, which, in opposition to the inanimate type of beauty of Winckelmann, upheld the characteristic as the first principle in art. Most remarkable, however, is the breadth of historical outlook which was peculiar to Herder, and the stern actuality with which in his _Plastik_, and in the _Vierten_ _Kritischen Wäldchen_, he turned against "those pitiful critics, those wretched and narrow rules of art, that bitter-sweet prattle of universal beauty, through which the younger generation is being ruined, which is nauseating to the master, and which, nevertheless, the rabble of connoisseurs takes in its mouth as words of wisdom.... Shadows and sunrise, lightning and thunder, the brook and the flame the sculptor cannot model; but is that therefore to be a reason why it should not be done by the painter? What other law has painting, what other power and function, than to depict the great scheme of nature with all her manifestations, in their great and beautiful aspect? And with what magic it does this! They are not clever who despise landscape painting, the fragments of nature of the great harmony of creation, who depreciate it or entirely forbid it to the sincere artist. Is a painter not to be a painter? Is he to turn statues with his brush, and fiddle with his colours, just as it may please their antique taste? To represent the scheme of creation seems vulgar to them; just as though heaven and earth were not better than an old statue.... Doubtless Greek sculpture stands in the sea of time like a lighthouse, but it should be only a friend and not a commander. Painting is a scheme of magic, as vast as the world and as history, and certainly not every figure in it can or ought to be a statue. In a picture no single figure is everything; and if they are all equally beautiful, no one then is beautiful any longer. They become a dull monotony of long-limbed Greek figures with straight noses, who all stand there and parade and take as little part in the action as possible.