know. If I did, and could do it, I should be clever indeed. No one
else would be in the race with me. All I do know and feel is that
Delacroix's grand romantic scenes are foundering and splitting, that
Courbet's black painting already reeks of the mustiness of a studio
which the sun never penetrates. You understand me, don't you? We,
perhaps, want the sun, the open air, a clear, youthful style of
painting, men and things such as they appear in the real light. In
short, I myself am unable to say what our painting should be; the
painting that our eyes of to-day should execute and behold.'

His voice again fell; he stammered and found himself unable to explain
the formulas of the future that were rising within him. Deep silence
came while he continued working at the velveteen jacket, quivering all
the time.

Sandoz had been listening to him without stirring from his position.
His back was still turned, and he said slowly, as if speaking to the
wall in a kind of dream:

'No; one does not know, and still we ought to know. But each time a
professor has wanted to impress a truth upon me, I have mistrustfully
revolted, thinking: "He is either deceiving himself or deceiving me."
Their ideas exasperate me. It seems to me that truth is larger, more
general. How beautiful would it be if one could devote the whole of
one's existence to one single work, into which one would endeavour to
put everything, the beasts of the field as well as mankind; in short,
a kind of immense ark. And not in the order indicated by manuals of
philosophy, or according to the idiotic hierarchy on which we pride
ourselves, but according to the full current of life; a world in which
we should be nothing more than an accident, in which the passing cur,