Fortunately we, in our days, find great difficulty in entering into the spirit which gave birth to these productions. A world lies between it and the present, just as between the Germany of to-day and the Germany of 1830. Men of the younger generation, who were still at school when Bismarck spoke his word of blood and iron, can hardly understand how this modern, realistic Germany can have been, two generations ago, a sentimental Germany. Now the significance of the Düsseldorf school in the history of civilisation lies in the fact that they are the real representatives of that age of sentimentality. A generation that melted away in tearful dreamings must needs enthusiastically recognise its own flesh and blood in those knights and damsels, squires and pages, monks and nuns, who, infinitely amorous or infinitely religious, were all infinitely sentimental; and things that now only evoke a smile or a shrug must needs have moved them to tears. Look where you will, you meet the same world. It hung on the walls, it displayed itself in engravings, lithographs, and coloured prints; if one lay down for a siesta, one found a lovelorn knight and damsel or a praying nun stitched on the cushion; if one put one's foot on a carpet, one trod upon noble hunting-dames on horseback, falcon on wrist; one carried them in one's pockets on cigar-cases and handkerchiefs; the traveller and the cheap tripper took them abroad on their knapsacks. [Illustration: _Seemann, Leipzig._ BENDEMANN. THE LAMENT OF THE JEWS.] Technically, the pictures of this school were not without their merits. "The greatness of Michael Angelo" may not have been Bendemann's, and Sohn's carnations are far removed from "the melting colouring of Titian." But as opposed to the one-sidedness to which fresco painting at Munich was given up, the encouragement of oil-painting at Düsseldorf must be looked upon as praiseworthy. These painters were the first in Germany to try again to learn how to paint in oils. The extreme artistic clumsiness that had reigned under Cornelius was followed by a period in which, under Schadow, earnest studies and serious work were devoted to an effort again to master a technical medium. Their friendly emulation led to surprising progress, which assured to the Düsseldorf school a technical superiority over all the other German schools of the period. [Illustration: SOHN. THE RAPE OF HYLAS.]