; all of them fanatics for at any cost I specially mention Delacroix, the nearest related to Wagner; all of them great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the loathsome and dreadful, still greater discoverers in effect, in display, in the art of the show shop; all of them talented far beyond their genius, out and out with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic and of the straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the self contradictory; as men, Tantaluses of the will, plebeian parvenus, who knew themselves to be incapable of a noble or of a in life and action think of Balzac, for instance, unrestrained workers, almost destroying themselves by work; antinomians and rebels in manners, ambitious and insatiable, without equilibrium and enjoyment; all of them finally shattering and sinking down at the Christian cross (and with right and reason, for who of them would have been sufficiently profound and sufficiently original for an philosophy?); on the whole, a boldly daring, splendidly overbearing, high flying, and aloft up dragging class of higher men, who had first to teach their century