There there are battles, conflagrations, floods, and earthquakes; heaven and earth are in commotion. Giants hurl rocks at one another, and try, like Jupiter, to shake the earth with their frown. All of them delight in force, and bring their muscles into play like athletes. But the painter himself is no athlete, no giant as Thorwaldsen called him, and no genius as he fancied himself to be. _Le singe des génies_, he conceived the notion of "great art" purely in its relation to space, and believed himself greater than the greatest because his canvases were of greater dimensions. When the ministry thought of making him Director of the Antwerp Academy, after the departure of Wappers, he wrote the following characteristic sentences: "I gather from the newspapers that I may be offered the place of Wappers." If in the moment when the profound philosopher is pondering over sublime ideas people were to say to him, "Will you teach us the A, B, C? I believe that he whose dwelling-place is in the clouds would fall straight from heaven to earth." Living in an atmosphere of flattery at home, and overpowered by the incense which was there offered to his genius, he could not set himself free from the fixed idea of competing with Michael Angelo and Rubens. Below his picture of "The Childhood of Mary" he placed the words: "Counterpart to the picture by Rubens in Antwerp treating the same subject." He offered his "Triumph of Christ" to the cathedral there under the condition of its being hung beside Rubens' "Descent from the Cross." "The Rising up of Hell" he wished to exhibit of an evening in the theatre when it was opened for a performance. During the waits the audience were to contemplate the picture while a choir sang with orchestral accompaniment. But all these offers were declined with thanks. Such failures make men pessimists; but it was through them that Wiertz, after being an historical painter, became the child of his age. He began to hurl thunderbolts against the evils of modern civilisation. He preaches and lashes and curses and suffers. The forms of which he makes use are borrowed from the old masters. The man of Michael Angelo, with his athletic build, his gigantic muscles, his nude body, the man of the Renaissance and not the man of the nineteenth century, strides through his works; it is only in the subject-matter of his pictures that the modern spirit has broken through the old formula. All the questions which have been thrown out by the philosophy and civilisation of the nineteenth century are reflected as vast problems in his vast pictures. He fashions his brush into a weapon with which he fights for the disinherited, for the pariahs, for the people. He is bent on being the painter of democracy--a great danger for art. [Illustration: WIERTZ. THE THINGS OF THE PRESENT AS SEEN BY FUTURE AGES.]