The solitary visionaries are despised or regarded as abnormal and eccentric.  Those who are not wrapped in lethargy and who feel vague longings for spiritual life and knowledge and progress, cry in harsh chorus, without any to comfort them.  The night of the spirit falls more and more darkly.  Deeper becomes the misery of these blind and terrified guides, and their followers, tormented and unnerved by fear and doubt, prefer to this gradual darkening the final sudden leap into the blackness.

At such a time art ministers to lower needs, and is used for material ends.  She seeks her substance in hard realities because she knows of nothing nobler.  Objects, the reproduction of which is considered her sole aim, remain monotonously the same.  The question “what?” disappears from art; only the question “how?” remains.  By what method are these material objects to be reproduced?  The word becomes a creed.  Art has lost her soul.  In the search for method the artist goes still further.  Art becomes so specialized as to be comprehensible only to artists, and they complain bitterly of public indifference to their work.  For since the artist in such times has no need to say much, but only to be notorious for some small originality and consequently lauded by a small group of patrons and connoisseurs (which incidentally is also a very profitable business for him), there arise a crowd of gifted and skilful painters, so easy does the conquest of art appear.  In each artistic circle are thousands of such artists, of whom the majority seek only for some new technical manner, and who produce millions of works of art without enthusiasm, with cold hearts and souls asleep.

Competition arises.  The wild battle for success becomes more and more material.  Small groups who have fought their way to the top of the chaotic world of art and picture-making entrench themselves in the territory they have won.  The public, left far behind, looks on bewildered, loses interest and turns away.

But despite all this confusion, this chaos, this wild hunt for notoriety, the spiritual triangle, slowly but surely, with irresistible strength, moves onwards and upwards.

The invisible Moses descends from the mountain and sees the dance round the golden calf.  But he brings with him fresh stores of wisdom to man.

First by the artist is heard his voice, the voice that is inaudible to the crowd.  Almost unknowingly the artist follows the call.  Already in that very question “how?” lies a hidden seed of renaissance.  For when this “how?” remains without any fruitful answer, there is always a possibility that the same “something” (which we call personality today) may be able to see in the objects about it not only what is purely material but also something less solid; something less “bodily” than was seen in the period of realism, when the universal aim was to reproduce anything “as it really is” and without fantastic imagination.