“But to-day the thought that Berlin stands there before the whole world with a guild of artists able to carry out so magnificent a project fills me with satisfaction and pride.  It shows that the Berlin school of art stands on a height which could hardly have been more splendid in the time of the Renaissance.

“Here, too, one can draw a parallel between the great artistic achievements of the Middle Ages and the Italians—­that, namely, the head of the State, an art-loving prince, who offered their tasks to the artists also found the master round whom a school of artists could gather.

“How is it, generally speaking, with art in the world?  It 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