Especially should we wish that the vivifying artist, in whose works we might perhaps have found something to remember, might test our judgments carefully in this way; for everyone who deserves this name is forced in our times to form, as a result of his work and his reflections, a theory, or at least a certain conception of theoretical means, by the use of which he gets along tolerably well in a variety of cases.  It will often be noticed, however, that in this way he sets up as laws such maxims as are in accordance with his talent, his inclination, and his convenience.  He is subject to a fate that is common to all mankind.  How many act in this very way in other fields!  But we are not cultivating ourselves when we merely set in motion with ease and convenience that which lies in us.  Every artist, like every man, is only an individual, and will always lean to one side.  For that reason, man should pursue so far as possible, both theoretically and practically, that which is contrary to his nature.  Let the easy-going seek what is serious and severe; let the stern keep before his eyes the light and agreeable; the strong, loveliness; the amiable, strength; and everyone will develop his own nature the more, the farther he seems to remove himself from it.  Every art requires the whole man; the highest possible degree of art requires all mankind.

The practice of the plastic arts is mechanical, and the training of the artist rightly begins in his earliest youth with the mechanical side; the rest of his education, on the other hand, is often neglected, for it ought to be far more careful than the training of others who have opportunity of deriving advantage from life itself.  Society soon makes a rough person courteous, a business life makes the most simple person prudent; literary labors, which through print come before a great public, find opposition and correction everywhere; only the plastic artist is, for the most part, limited to a lonely workshop; he has dealings almost solely with the man who orders and pays for his labor, with a public which frequently follows only certain morbid impressions, with connoisseurs who make him restless, with auctioneers who receive every new work with praise and estimates of value such as would fitly honor the most superlative production.

But it is time to conclude this introduction lest it anticipate and forestall the work, instead of merely preceding it.  We have so far at least designated the point from which we intend to set out; how far our views can and will spread, must at first develop gradually.  The theory and criticism of literary art will, we hope, soon occupy us; and whatever life, travel, and daily events suggest to us, shall not be excluded.  In closing, let us say a word on an important concern of this moment.