eplied Hermon, "but I probably owe the success
of the Demeter to the circumstance that I found a model whose mind and
nature correspond with those of the goddess to a rare degree."

The monarch shook his fair head, and protested in a tone of positive
superior knowledge: "As to the model, however well selected it may be, it
was not well chosen for this work, far less for you. I have watched your
battle against beauty in behalf of truth, and rejoiced, though I often
saw you and your little band of young disciples shoot beyond the mark.
You brought something new, whose foundation seemed to me sound, and on
which further additions might be erected. When the excrescences fell off,
I thought, this Hermon, his shadow Soteles, and the others who follow him
will perhaps open new paths to the declining art which is constantly
going back to former days. Our time will become the point of departure of
a new art. But for that very reason, let me confess it, I regret to see
you fall back from your bold advance. You now claim for your work that it
cleaves strictly to Nature, because the model is taken from life itself.
It does not become me to doubt this, yet the stamp of divinity which your
Demeter bears is found in no mortal woman. Understand me correctly! This
is certainly no departure from the truth, for the ideal often deserves
this lofty name better than anything the visible world offers to the eye;
but hitherto you have done honour to another truth. If I comprehend your
art aright, its essence is opposed to the addition of superhuman dignity
and beauty, with which you, or the model you used, strove to ennoble and
deify your Demeter. Admirably as you succeeded in doing so, it forces
your work out of the sphere of reality, whose boundary I never before saw
you cross by a single inch. Whether this occurred unconsciously to you in
an hour of mental ecstasy, or whether you felt that you still lacked the
means to represent the divine, and therefore returned to the older
methods, I do not venture to decide. But at the first examination of your
work I was conscious of one thing: It means for you a revolution, a
rupture with your former aspirations; and as--I willingly confess it--you
had been marvellously successful, it would have driven you, had your
sight been spared, out of your own course and into the arms of the
ancients, perhaps to your material profit, but scarcely to the advantage
of art, which needs a renewal of its vital energie