“What I am saying will be considered irrational paradox, at which one can only be amazed; but for all that I must say what I think; namely, that people of our circle of whom some compose verses, stories, novels, operas, symphonies, and sonatas, paint all kinds of pictures and make statues, while others hear and look at these things, and again others appraise and criticize it all, discuss, condemn, triumph, and raise monuments to one another, generation after generation—that all these people, with very few exceptions artists, and public, and critics, have never (except in childhood and earliest youth before hearing any discussions on art) experienced that simple feeling familiar to the plainest man and even to a child, that sense of infection with another’s feeling, compelling us to joy in another’s gladness, to sorrow at another’s grief, and to mingle soul with another—which is the very essence of art. And therefore these people not only cannot distinguish true works of art from counterfeit, but continually mistake for real art the worst and most artificial, while they do not even perceive works of real art because the counterfeits are always more ornate, while true art is modest.”