If the newspapers in this country bother to say anything about an outstanding artist who was born in their country and who is already of international importance and enjoys international fame, they always talk about a certain artist, because in this way they can do him much greater harm in his native land than if they were simply to write down what they really and truly think of this artist, who, because he comes from their own land and belongs to their generation—which has not produced much that is notable—incurs their hatred as nothing else on earth does and is pursued by their hatred to the end of his life and theirs. They never forgive him for giving up on them, at a certain point, for the sake of his art and his science and for continually demonstrating his greatness and their pettiness with work that was always at the cutting edge. If they cannot avoid writing about this—in their opinion—common renegade because the rest of the world is writing about him, they do so, but only in order to drag down into the mire the man they have been persecuting all his life. They do not notice that in so doing they themselves sink deeper and deeper into the mire. With their envy and their hatred they drove my friend to Newcastle in Australia, where he sacrificed himself for his science. When, tormented with homesickness, he told me years ago that he was going to leave Newcastle and return to his native land, I immediately sent him a telegram warning him about returning to his native land, drawing his attention to the fact that this native land was, in truth, nothing more than a common hell in which the intellect is incessantly defamed and art and science are destroyed and that his return would mean his end. He did not follow my advice. He is a terminally ill man, for whom the lunatic asylum am Steinhof has for years been his regular though hideous dwelling place.