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. [Illustration: FREDERICK OVERBECK.]