ation
of its literary significance. Their eyes are open upon the aspect of
material things and they paint flesh that is palpitating with life,
forms that live and move, and color that vibrates.

Here again as with Liebermann and Truebner the idea and the execution
are in harmony, but with the Scholle painters the idea is apt to be a
very simple one, depending upon straightforward representation for its
impressiveness. Above all it reflects the national temper of mind, for
all these individualists are German to the core and not to be mistaken
for any other race.

One characteristic of this national temper is directness. Not
necessarily simplicity, of course, since the German painter as well as
the German writer has frequently complex thoughts to express and uses
corresponding elaborations of expression. But he does not often say one
thing while seeming to say another; he does not often give double and
contradictory meanings to the same subject. He does not present for your
contemplation the disheartening spectacle of sophistication masquerading
as innocence, or duplicity masquerading as frankness. To that extent he
is an optimist, however deep his native pessimism may go in other
directions.

There is, for example, a picture by the French artist Jacques Blanche,
entitled "Louise of Montmartre," and known to many Americans, in which
the girl to whom Paris irresistibly calls is shown in her boyish blouse
and collar, her youthful hat and plainly dressed hair, in a nonchalant
attitude, pretty and plebeian, with honest eyes, yet revealing in every
line of her frank and fresh young face the potentiality of response to
all the appeals made by the ruthless spirit of the city. It is
impossible to discern at what points the artist has betrayed that
artless physiognomy in order to reveal the secrets of temperament, but
the thing is done.

It is not what the German is interested in doing. His imagination works
subjectively, giving form to his own conceptions, rather than
objectively or as an interpreter of others. Hence the downright, and, in
a sense, confiding aspect of so much of this brave art. Hence, also, its
affinity with the American spirit, for the American still bends a rather
unsuspecting gaze upon life and accepts character and temperament as
they choose to present themselves. The German, however, is articulate
and ratiocinating where we are more purely instinctive. We are not
inclined to reason about our moods and w