nencumbered. We feel that Blake, with all his struggle to utter truth
by means of symbol, never allows his mind to lose the idea that "Living
form is eternal existence," but in Boecklin's pictures "living form" is
often buried beneath his colored clays.

Thus we see that it cannot truly be said of him and his followers that
the idea is of first importance to them. It is their material that is of
first importance, otherwise they would learn so to subordinate their
material as to support and disclose their idea. This is the more obvious
that their idea is emotional and therefore perfectly suited to
expression through the medium of art. Liebermann's ideas although they
are intellectual are not of a kind that cannot appropriately be
translated into pictures, and his respect for them leads him to fit his
manner of expression closely to their requirements. Like Leibl he is a
painter and a thinker in one, and the faculties of the two work in
complete coordination.

Painters of Boecklin's type, on the other hand, wish to produce in the
observer a strong emotion, but they become slaves to their medium
because their own emotion is not sufficiently powerful to conquer their
minds, which become diverted by the colors and forms they produce. One
of Blake's swift upward soaring lines has more power to carry the
imagination heavenward than all the versions of Boecklin's "Island of
Death."

Against Boecklin's followers, whose minds are more or less befogged by
their lack of appreciation of paint as a means to an end, we must place
Wilhelm Truebner who is a clear thinker and a great painter, with more
warmth than Liebermann and with a reticent color sense, a feeling for
expressive form, a love of reality, and no apparent desire to re-invent
the grotesque. His elegance of line in itself sets him apart from most
of his compatriots, and his knowledge of how to extract from his color
scheme its essential beauty is greater than that of most modern
painters, whatever their nationality. His blacks have the depth and
luster without unctiousness characteristic of black as the great
colorists use it, and in his touches of pale refined color enlivening a
black and white composition, we have the delightful effect so often
given by Manet, as of a bunch of bright flowers thrown into a shadowy
corner.

If young Germany were content to follow in Truebner's footsteps we
should soon have a revival of the ancient craftsmanship and conscience
that ani