Herein lies the great difference between France and Germany. Although following along new lines, the art of France did not thereby suffer as regards the quality of its execution; in spite of all Classicism it remained the disciplined art of the schools. These favourable preliminaries were lacking in Germany. It was not allotted to German painting to grow up in naïve contentment with the technical inheritance of its forefathers, but, on the contrary, at the entrance of its new career it broke so completely with its predecessor—the art of the eighteenth century—that it could no longer adopt even its technical traditions. It arose out of the negation of earlier art, an absolute negation such as the world had never seen before. It began with a self-made man who had never acquired the charter of craftsmanship, who never learnt to paint. In France, revolutionary pictures inspired with intense pathos, and frankly naturalistic portraits of masterly technique; with Carstens, outlines showing refined feeling, but faulty very generally in execution, sketches drawn roughly with the pencil, crayon, or red chalk.

It had taken many generations of painters, whose lives had been spent in careful devotion to the work, to collect the technical capital which Carstens so carelessly flung to the winds.

The next step along this way was taken by the Nazarenes.

Just as it was inevitable that cold and lifeless Classicism should follow the brightness and animation of rococo, so it was necessary, according to the law of extremes which alternate in every evolution of culture, that, next to the antique, should come its exact opposite, the Gothic or Middle Ages. The antique was so monotonous that people longed for variety of colour again; it was so cold and statuesque that they longed for something soulful, so Greek and pagan and severe that they hankered again after something Christian, would believe again like children.

Even in the young days of the old pagan, Goethe, religion formed the favourite topic of the beaux esprits, and in the same year, 1797, that Carstens died, this cult of the emotional life found, for the first time, expression in literature. In every library one finds a dainty, finely printed book in small octavo, without the author’s name, with the title Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, and with a sort of head of Raphael as a frontispiece, in which, with his prominent eyes, full lips, and long neck, he looks like some intellectual, Christ-inspired, consumptive enthusiast. It is the pale, gentle face of Wackenroder.

FREDERICK OVERBECK.

First Winckelmann, then Wackenroder. In the very personalities of these two the whole opposition between Classicism and the Nazarenes is reflected. A student barely twenty years old, a mild, modest, contemplative soul, who had attached himself from early youth with womanly devotion to his more energetic friend Tieck, and written letters to him that read like a young girl’s effusions to her sweetheart, he entered the Erlanger University with his friend at the Easter of 1793. They saw Nuremberg. More than once they made pilgrimages to the old fashioned town, the treasury of German art; and the spirit of the past powerfully inspired them. Whilst for Lessing and Winckelmann “Gothic” art only meant barbarian art, the wonders of Nuremberg were now observed with fresh eyes. In a sort of intoxication of art the friends wandered through churches, stood by the graves of Albrecht Dürer and Peter Vischer, and a vanished world rose before them. The spires and turrets behind falling walls and ramparts, the old, stately, patrician houses, which jutted out their oriel windows, as it were with curiosity, into the crooked streets, were peopled to their imagination with picturesque figures in bonnet and hose from that great time when Nuremberg was “the living, swarming school of native art,” when “an exuberant, artistic spirit” governed within its walls, when Master Hans Sachs and Adam Kraft and Peter Vischer and Albrecht Dürer and Willibald Pirkheymer were alive. Shortly after that they came to Dresden, and devoted themselves in the gallery there to an enthusiastic cult of the Madonna. The Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, which appeared a year before Wackenroder’s death in his twenty-sixth year, was the result of these wanderings and studies. In this tender production of a visionary youth the spirit of Romantic art found expression.

Winckelmann was an archæologist; Wackenroder, an enthusiast of the Middle Ages; on the one side knowledge only, on the other all feeling; for the one, paganism, for the other, Christ. For it is from the first a leading principle of the “Klosterbruder,” that “the finest stream of life only issues from the streams of art and religion when they flow in company.” He valued the older painters “because they had made painting the true handmaid of religion”; art was to him an object of devotion. Picture galleries, he says, ought to be temples; he would liken the enjoyment of works of art to prayer; let it be a holy feast day to him if he go with a serious and composed mind to their observance; indeed, reverence for art and reverence for God were so closely interwoven that he was fain to kneel down before art, and offer it the homage of an “eternal and boundless love.” This devotion to art, of which he himself was full, he found nowhere in his times. The age of enlightenment was to him an undevout and inartistic age. Only in his wanderings through the uneven streets of Nuremberg did the deepest yearning of his soul seem satisfied. He applied himself to mediæval, and especially to German art. His standpoint is the same which the young Goethe had adopted when he intervened with Herder for “German style and art,” and dedicated his pamphlet on German architecture to the shade of Erwin von Steinbach. He is reluctant that one should condemn the Middle Ages because they did not build such temples as the Greeks, any more than that one should condemn the Indians because they spoke their language and not our own. “It is not only beneath Italian skies, under majestic domes and Corinthian columns, that true art thrives, it lives too under pointed arches, intricately decorated buildings, and Gothic spires.”

OVERBECK.THE ANNUNCIATION.

It was all said so simply and heartily that soon the whole world began to be “Wackenroderite.” The ingenious and enthusiastic youth was succeeded by theoretic reasoners. Tieck, who published his Phantasies upon Art in 1799, after Wackenroder’s death, and amplified it with his own explanations, was no longer a genuine but a counterfeit “Klosterbruder.” He first played with Catholicism, and uttered the momentous sentence: “The best of the later masters up to the most recent times have had no other aim than to imitate some one of the primitive or typical artists, or even several together; nor have they easily become great by any other method than by having successfully imitated somebody.” His Sternbald is still more haunted by the spirit of monastic devotion.