"That is a peculiar result of my development," answered Wilhelm
thoughtfully. "While I was still at the gymnasium I sketched and
painted hard, and after the final examination I went to the Art
Academy for two years; but the further I went into the study of art,
and the more attentively I followed in the beaten track of art-
studies, the clearer it was to me that he who would secure an
abiding success in art must be a blind copyist of nature. Certainly
the personal peculiarities of an artist often please his
contemporaries. It is the fashion to do him honor if he flatters the
prevailing direction of taste. But those of the race who follow
after, scorn what those before them have admired, and exactly what
those of one time have prized as progressive innovations, they who
come after reject as mere aberration. What the artist has himself
accomplished, I mean his so-called personal comprehension or his
capricious interpretation of nature, passes away; but what he simply
and honorably reproduces, as he has truly seen it, lives forever,
and the remotest age will gladly recognize in such art-work its old
acquaintance, unchanging nature."

Fraulein Ellrich hung on his words in astonishment, while her
parents calmly went on eating their fish.

"So," went on Wilhelm, speaking chiefly to his opposite neighbor,
"so, I tried when I drew or painted to reproduce nature with the
greatest truth; but at a certain point I became conscious of a
perception that a hidden meaning in an unintelligible language lay
written there. The form of things, and also every so-called accident
of form, appeared to me to be the necessary expression of something
within, which was hidden from me. The wish arose in me to penetrate
behind the visible face of nature, to know why she appears in such a