The lower class, peculiarly enough, under pressure of new ways of living, is disappearing, just as in the Eighteenth Century there was no effective middle-class. A social chasm results with disappearing at top of the aristocrat. Fromentin wrote some time ago: “_Vers 1828 on vit du nouveau_” and “_le dixhuitième siècle brisa beaucoup de formules_.” It was the sensitive artists, not thinkers, who felt it first. In serious consideration of facts of living, the artist is not to be despised. The decay of the great age of Louis XIV was heralded by great artists beginning to lessen in number or lose their luster. In this general destruction, excesses must be expected. In the on-rushing tidal-wave of mediocrity against the Lords, wrong will be done. Sometimes _Cubism of the Spirit_ will insist pearls are the best food for hogs. It will not be easy to find that absolute, that prepared outspread level of mind, suitable for pearls to roll on. Some of the pearls may melt, become invisible forever, such as pity, sympathy, old-fashioned kindliness. I suppose it is significant that Marquis de Sade was writing, in prison, his book _Le Roman Philosophique_, which shows a cruel mind, just one year before the outbreak of the French Revolution. Changes that come so stealthily they could not be chronicled, preceded this. The human skull, the physical eye, have been gradually formed differently. The old, carefully drawn, punctiliously painted figure, with details insisted upon, hurts the modern eye trained to stenographic seeing. It does not wish to be pelted with fact that way. Seeing is not to be done alone by the painter but partly by the looker on! Increasingly insistent _self_ demands share. The picture is to be a _starting point_, instead of an end. It is to be something for the seer to help make. Before the Great War line and color began to disintegrate, to feel their way back to primal selves; this was a step toward new creation, beginning over. The end of a cycle had come. New standards followed. There was a _re_-valuation. The middle age of the modern man had begun. The old tenements of the mind were being torn down and swept away. When one reaches the top of the hill, there is nothing to do except to find the path that leads down. This is not genius. It does not deserve praise for perception or novelty. It has too great resemblance to necessity. If change means destruction, it likewise means growth, or the level upon which change is permitted to begin, on the other, _the south side_, of the hill. But Dostoievsky exclaimed when he was living in Germany: “_In der neuen Menschheit ist also die æsthetische Idee volkommen betrübt_.” Dostoievsky was not only an artist, but a sensitive one. He felt quickly the chill breath of the new order.