It was not given to painting to proceed straight forward in this course, for through favour, partly of the changed current of literature, partly of the revolution, the flame of reactionary classicism shot up brightly once more before it expired. CHAPTER III THE CLASSICAL REACTION IN GERMANY A hundred years ago there lived a man of the name of Asmus Carstens; and he was the pioneer and founder of the new German art. That has become since Fernow a standing maxim in manuals of the history of art. Dilettantism, however, is not an element, but an end. It is on this account, therefore, that later times will see in Carstens, not a pioneer, but only one of the close followers of that tendency of which the founders were the brothers Caracci, and the offshoots Lebrun, Lairesse, and Van der Werff. It is, at all events, historically clear that Hogarth and Gainsborough, Watteau, Greuze, Chardin, and Goya were the men to whom the future belonged. Their art survived the overthrow of the Classicalism represented by Mengs and Carstens, which, through external circumstances, once more got the upper hand for a short time, and it became the foundation on which, after the disappearance of this tendency inherited from the past, the moderns built further. The former represented progress, because they moved forwards; Carstens and David, reaction, because they looked backwards--backwards to an age which had long ago been buried. There is always danger to a living art in the contact with any great art of the past. Only those who are themselves highly gifted may hope to emulate the great ones of the earlier centuries; lesser geniuses perish in the attempt. Painters like Leonardo and Raphael, like Titian and Poussin, taking the Greeks as their masters, produced immortal works, and Goethe and Schiller proved to us that the Hellenic spirit is still alive and active in our midst. But would anyone dare to mention Mengs and Carstens in the same breath with these giants?