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 way, and not in another.