takes its models, supplies itself from the great sources of
Mother Nature, who, spite of her apparently unfettered,
limitless freedom, still moves according to eternal laws
which the Creator ordained for himself and which cannot be
passed or violated without danger to the development of the
world.

"Even so it is in art; and at the sight of the beautiful
remains of old classical times comes again over one the
feeling that here too reigns an eternal law that is always
true to itself, the law of beauty and harmony, of the
aesthetic. This law is given expression to by the ancients
in so surprising and overpowering a fashion, in so
thoroughly complete a form that we, with all our modern
sensibilities and with all our power, are still proud, when
we have done any specially fine piece of work, to hear that
it is almost as good as it was made nineteen hundred years
ago.

"But only almost! Under this impression I would earnestly
ask you to lay it to heart that sculpture still remains
untainted by so-called modern tendencies and currents--still
stands high and chastely there! Keep her so, don't let
yourselves be misled by human criticism or any wind of
doctrine to abandon the principles on which she has been
built up.

"An art which transgresses the laws and limits I have
indicated is art no more. It is factory work, handicraft,
and that is a thing art should never be. Under the often
misused word 'freedom' and her flag one falls too readily
into boundlessness, unrestraint, self-exaggeration. For
whoever cuts loose from the law of beauty, and the feeling
for the aesthetic and harmonious, which every human breast
feels, whether he can express it or not, and in his thought
makes his chief object some special direction, some specific
solution of more technical tasks, that man denies art's
first sources.

"Yet again. Art should help to exercise an educative
influence on the people. She should offer the lower classes,
after the hard work of the day, the possibility of
refreshing themselves by regarding what is ideal. To us
Germans great ideals have become permanent possessions,
whereas to other peoples they have been more or less lost.
Only the German people remain called to preserve these great
ideas, to cultivate an