"We can start from any point and arrive at the sublime, and all is proper to be expressed, provided our aim is high enough. Then what you love with the greatest passion and power becomes a beauty of your own, which imposes itself upon others. Let each bring his own. An impression demands expression, and especially requires that which is capable of showing it most clearly and strongly. The whole arsenal of nature has ever been at the command of strong men, and their genius has made them take, not the things which are conventionally called the most beautiful, but those which suited best their places. In its own time and place, has not everything its part to play? Who shall dare to say that a potato is inferior to a pomegranate?

"Decadence set in when people began to believe that art, which she (Nature) had made, was the supreme end; when such and such an artist was taken as a model and aim without remembering that he had his eyes fixed on infinity.

"They still spoke of Nature, but meant thereby only the life-model which they used, but from whom they got nothing but conventionalities. If, for instance, they had to paint a figure out of doors, they still copied, for the purpose, a model lighted by a studio light, without appearing to dream that it had no relation to the luminous diffusion of light out of doors - a proof that they were not moved by a very deep emotion, which would have prevented artists from being satisfied with so little. For, as the spiritual can only be expressed by the observation of objects 'in their truest aspect, this physical untruth annihilated all others. There is no isolated truth.

"The moment that a man could do something masterly in painting, it was called good. If he had great anatomical knowledge, he made that pre-eminent, and was greatly praised for it, without thinking that these fine acquirements ought to serve, as indeed all others should, to express the thoughts of the mind. Then, instead of thoughts, he would have a programme. A subject would be sought which would give him a chance to exhibit certain things which came easiest to his hand. Finally, instead of making one's knowledge the humble servant of one's thought, on the contrary, the thought was suffocated under the display of a noisy cleverness. Each eyed his neighbour, and was full of enthusiasm for a manner."