indifference, and directs our otherwise preoccupied attention wholly to the situation portrayed; upon which we must collect and concentrate all our faculties, if we are to enjoy it. Sculpture, in particular, by virtue of its ideal mode of production from the first strikes off all practical relation to the object to the extent that its product at once betrays the fact that it does not belong to this reality. Painting, on the contrary, carries us wholly into the presence of the daily life with which we are in immediate contact, but it furthermore destroys all the threads of practical necessity, attraction, inclination, or disinclination, which draw us to such a Present, or the reverse, and forces us to approach those objects more intimately as ends to themselves in their own particular phase or mode of life. What we meet with here is just the opposite to that which Herr von Schlegel, for example, in the tale of Pygmalion, expresses so very prosily as the return of the completed work of art to common life, that is to a relation of a man's own inclinations and an actual enjoyment, a return which is the very opposite of that alienation, in which the work of art places the objects delineated in their relation to our practical necessities, and, precisely by doing so, sets forth before us their own independent life and appearance. (_ββ_) Just as, then, art, in this particular sphere, re-establishes the forfeited independence of a content, which we otherwise failed to preserve in its unique characteristics, in the same way, _secondly_, it is able to secure in stability such objects as may happen to appear in actual existence in a form we are not accustomed to respect simply as such. The higher Nature stretches in its organization and shifting appearance the more it resembles the actor who only serves the present need. In this connection I have already emphasized the fact as a triumph of art over reality, namely, that it is able to fix that which is most evanescent. This power of art in attaching permanence to _momentary_ things applies not only to the sudden flash of life we find concentrated in certain situations, but also to the magical effect of its external presentment in the rapid changes of its colour. A troop of horsemen, for example, may alter every moment in the mode of its grouping, and the mutual relation of each rider within it. If we were one of such we should have something else to do than consider the lively effect of such changes. We should have to mount, dismount, make up our haversack, eat, drink, rest, groom, drink and feed our horses: or, if we looked on as ordinary folk, we should look at such with wholly different interests. We should want to know what they are there for, what nationality they are, for what reason they have left their barracks, and so forth. The painter, on the contrary, smuggles off the most volatile of the movements, the most evanescent expressions