unites, too, a
profound respect for the art of antiquity with a stout modern sentiment,
a union that gives to his better work both dignity and force. What he
seems to lack is the one impalpable, delicate, elusive quality that
makes for our enjoyment of so many imperfect productions, and the lack
of which does so much to blind us to excellence in other directions--the
quality of charm, which in the main depends upon the possession by the
artist of taste.

Max Klinger was born in Leipzig on the eighteenth of February, 1857. His
father was a man of artistic predilections, and in easy circumstances,
so that the choice of a bread-winning profession for the son was not of
first importance. As Klinger's talent showed itself at a very early age,
it was promptly decided that he should be an artist. He left school at
the age of sixteen, and went to Karlsruhe, where Gussow was beginning to
gather about him a large number of pupils. In 1875 he followed Gussow
to Berlin, where he came also under the influence of Menzel. Gussow's
teaching was all in the line of individualism and naturalism. He led his
pupils straight to nature for their model, and encouraged them to paint
only what they themselves saw and felt. For this grounding in the
representation of plain facts Klinger has been grateful in his maturer
years, and looks back to his first master with admiration and respect as
having early armed him against his tendency toward fantasy and idealism.
His early style in the innumerable drawings of his youth is thin and
weak, without a sign of the bold originality characterizing his recent
work, and he obviously needed all the support he could get from frank
and sustained observation of nature. His first oil-painting, exhibited
in Berlin in 1878, showed the result of Gussow's influence in its
solidity and practical directness of appeal, but a number of etchings,
executed that year and the next--forerunners of the important later
series--indicate the natural bent of the young artist's mind toward
symbolic forms and unhackneyed subjects.

[Illustration: BEETHOVEN

_From a statue in colored marble by Max Klinger_]

About the art of drawing as distinguished from that of painting he has
his own opinions, expressed with emphasis in an essay called _Malerei
und Zeichnung_. Drawing, etching, lithography and wood-engraving he
considers preeminently adapted to convey purely imaginative thoughts
such as would lose a part of their evanescent su