What now began was a necessary making good what had been so long neglected. For craftsmanship is the necessary presupposition of all art, which can no longer suffer any one to be called a master who has not learnt his business. In the atmosphere of incense which surrounded Cornelius in Munich, the dogma that salvation was to be found in German art alone, and that the German nation was the chosen people of art, had reached a height of self-adoration which came near to megalomania. In the proud enthusiasm of those times, great in their aims as in their errors, the Germans had as false an opinion as possible of the art of foreign countries. In the very years when the first railways were ousting the old mail-coaches the mutual interchange of endeavour and ability between the various nations was slower and scantier than ever before. How German artists had wandered abroad in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in that great age when Dürer crossed the Alps on Pirkheymer's pony, and when Holbein obtained from Erasmus letters of introduction for England! With what joy Dürer, in his letters and in his journal, gives an account of the recognition accorded him in artistic circles in Italy and the Dutch cities! Nearly all the German painters had, in the course of their long wanderings, made acquaintance with either the Netherlands or Italy. They knew exactly what was going on in the world around them. Dürer and Raphael used to send drawings to each other, "so as to know each other's handwriting." It was only in the first half of the nineteenth century that the Germans, once proud in the consciousness of possessing the finest comprehension of, and the greatest receptivity for, foreign intellectual wares, lived apart in timid isolation. Into the suburban still-life of the German schools of art not a sound made its way of what was taking place elsewhere. Only thus was it possible for the Germans to imagine that among all modern nations they alone had a vocation for Art. No one had the least idea that in England, the land of machines and beefsteaks, there were men who painted; and people went so far as to proclaim piety, morality, thoroughness, accurate draughtsmanship, and diligent execution the monopoly of German art; and superficiality, frivolity, and "empty straining after effect" the ineradicable national failing of that of France. [Illustration: SCHWIND. THE FAIRIES' SONG.]