A few words may be ventured here on the debasement and sterility of what men flattered with the name of art in the 18th century when Carstens arose as a prophet to lead his people across this dead sea of unworthiness and pretense. The dreary taste which in architecture, trusting wholly to profuse ornamentation for effect, had produced such palaces as those of Versailles, Fontainebleau, and the Dresden Zwinger; which in sculpture had evolved the inanities that simpered from the niches and parapets of public buildings; which in painting strove to depict life as one long mid-summer festival for polite shepherds and shepherdesses, and which from its peruked dandies that covered every canvas, had been dubbed the "pig-tail," or "topknot style," such ideals reigned supreme in all forms of art. It was the last throb of the Renaissance, when, caprice and fashion ruled in foolish elegance, and exuberance everywhere took the place of order. No other age could have created those Baroque and Rococo buildings which are found to-day in uninhabitable grandeur in certain provincial towns of Germany. These were styles which even in their perfection (as perhaps in Dresden) exhibit tendencies dangerous in the extreme, but when affected by people whose knowledge of art was due not to instinctive love of form but only to the cultivation of their betters, their influence was pernicious beyond all estimate. The century was frankly one of trivial things and of little excellencies, a period that delighted most in fantastic decorations on porcelain, in the monsters and gewgaws brought from the re-discovered East, and drew its inspiration largely from the grotesque. It is necessary to keep trace of these popular predilections in order to appreciate properly the cause and development of certain modes throughout the broad field of culture which appear in our age totally unreasonable.

From a professional upholder of such artistic folly as the century preferred for its expression, Carstens took his first serious lessons in the use of oil colors. We cannot but imagine that the self-centered youth must have felt some moments of uneasiness under the restraint of such mannerisms as his teacher recommended, but whatever the trial may have been it did not endure long, for the resolute and cultured old mother died soon after their removal to Cassel, and the little family's

affairs were put in charge of guardians, plain plodding men of business with no weakness or indulgence for the useless calling of painting; they decided directly that Asmus must leave the breadless pursuit of art and follow some useful trade. Whether this change in his fortunes was an unlucky one for the unprofitable lad' it is not altogether easy to say. Perhaps it was in the end better that he should escape at any cost from the toils of such a wooden-handed master as Tischbein, yet the alternative was a very slavery within the gates of the Philistines, a seven-years apprenticeship to a wine-merchant of Eckernförde, where he must put aside all thoughts of pallet and brush. Five years of his slavery wore away, his days passed in the wine cellar, his evenings and few precious holidays devoted to his pencil and to a treatise or two on art that ventilated the arid theories of Raphael Mengs and his contemporaries. At length, falling in with a friendly lawyer, who explained that an arrangement might be made with the wine-seller to release him at once, the angry boy jumped up from the bed where a passing fever had for some days confined him, to buy his freedom with all possible speed and hasten to Copenhagen, there to devote his whole strength to his vocation. The consciousness of having by dint of his own promptness and energy broken the fetters that had, through no fault of his own, impeded the natural development of his genius, must have quickened and encouraged a will as independent and determined as his.

Copenhagen afforded Carstens his first glimpse of a collection of works of art. "There I first saw," he exclaims in one of his written reminiscences, "the loftiest and best in art, of which I had heard and read and dreamed so much, by which I had so often warmed my imagination, but about which I could as yet form no adequate conception-and how unspeakably it surpassed the fondest expectation in which my fancy had basked! What works of art I had till this time seen seemed the productions of mere men, and I had even thought that some day I too might come to make the like of them; but the forms before me now savored of a higher essence fashioned by some superhuman artists, and it no more entered my head that I or any other mortal would ever achieve the distinction of

creating such shapes as these. Here for the first time I saw the Vatican Apollo, the Laocoon, the Farnese Hercules, and the rest, and there came upon me suddenly a holy impulse as of worship that almost moved me to tears; it was as though that higher life for which I had so often prayed with bursting heart were now really vouchsafed me, that now at length I had been accounted worthy and my prayer was heard. I could neither imagine nor wish for a greater blessedness than always to live in the contemplation of these glorious figures; and this happiness was now really within my grasp!" It is this spirit of devotion, after all, that wins the fight of life-this abandoning one's self to a single aim into which no corruption of the outer world enters-that if we but possessed it in sufficient degree might make heroes or geniuses of every one of us.

The Carstens of two and twenty is much the same as the Carstens of nine who falls in adoration before his ideal and grimly determines to struggle onward toward its realization. In other qualities besides, the boy had shown himself to be the father of the man. Again he breaks off from intercourse with his fellows to pursue his lonely and eccentric way, and again leaves the text-books and traditions of his school-this time an art school to train his talent by himself. He was very backward in the rudiments and technical specialties of his profession, and his taciturn nature rather repelled advances from those willing to assist the strange student. Shame, pride and ambition united to deter him from allying himself with the Academy in Copenhagen; there was 'something foreign, yes, inconceivable', he said, in the school method of studying piecemeal the branch of human anatomy, and drawing from the living model. Accordingly he cut loose from the Academy masters to draw and study in seclusion, going to the only source of inspiration he would accept, the antique casts in the museum; and here after hours of silent contemplation he would in his curious way retire to reproduce the statues on paper entirely from recollection. His eye and artistic memory for form must have been something little short of marvelous, a purely mental quality in its way quite as extraordinary as the not dissimilar power of verbal readiness exhibited by Macaulay, Woodfall, and some other notables. It was a favorite and ineradicable

conviction of Carstens, and one on which he was never tired of enlarging, that it was not the mechanical reproduction of a model before one's face but the retention of its image in the mind which constituted the real and only profitable study of form. Nothing could exceed, it is said, the delicacy and grace as well as the accuracy of his copies from the antique, the subtle quality of which he strove to wrest from these clay impressions in oft-repeated trials and renewed studies. Each sketch was in its way a tour de force, but when completed he would listen neither to commendation nor advice concerning them. And here we have essentially the very inbeing of Carstens-sensitive, proud, willful, original, and grandly imaginative; the Carstens who owing to this peculiar crasis spoiled the material comfort of a lifetime, but who in spite of all advanced to the inevitable mastership which comes from the veneration of undimmed ideals. It is indeed possible that the poverty and distrust which continually impeded the fulfillment of his ardent purpose may have afforded the necessary stimulus upon which his stubborn nature could batten; for there are those who seem to succeed only by obstructions, and Carstens was not one to avoid those found in his way. On the contrary, in spite almost of fate, self-educated, without friends, in perpetual strife with the powerful and acknowledged authorities in art, this untamed and disdainful genius evolved his own theory of classical adaptation and climbed up his own path to fame.

As an instance of his mediocre acquirements at this period, when he was rather a draughtsman with noble purposes than a painter with deft hand, it is related that he chanced to attract the notice of a certain Count Moltke, who professed himself so much pleased with the truth and beauty of an "Adam and Eve" as to order the sketch done in oils, but upon its completion the painting was curtly rejected by the wealthy noble on account of its unskillful execution. It happened at this time that owing to some fine designs the artist found favor in the sight of the Danish Crown-prince Friedrich, President of the Academy, and was summoned to visit him. This resulted shortly afterwards in Carstens' becoming an active member of the institution, where he remained during the better part of a year and entered into competition for the gold medal. But

when the prize by some gross favoritism or unfairness was given to another, and the second or silver medal handed to Carstens, he threw the worthless bauble into the faces of his judges and refused again to go near the Academy. The outraged Directors did, it is true, dismiss him from their establishment, but at the end of another year a peace was in some way patched up and he was invited to try once more for the prize and its six years' salary for study in Rome. The temptation must have been a severe one, for his little inheritance from his mother was now quite exhausted and he had come to a point where a visit to Italy was indispensable to his studies, but the offended painter spurned the hand held out to him and worked henceforth alone and unaided in his poverty.

As mere pot-boilers he was in the habit of making portraits in red chalk, in which medium he had acquired a skill sufficient to please a good number of patrons who were willing to pay for them. He detested the uncongenial work-and it would be difficult to imagine a disposition less adapted to portrait painting than Carstens;-but the dream of a journey to Italy, the home of art, had fastened upon him and inspired him with

a double energy. Without a particle of rest, "often jumping up in the night and working away at my easel until half frozen I was forced to warm myself in bed again by morning"-he tells us,-by prodigies of hard and disagreeable labor, he found himself toward the spring of 1783 possessed of a few hundred thalers and ready to set off toward the South. Seven years of Copenhagen had done little for him but afford the casts from which to extract what proficiency in handling his pencil he could; in worldly estate he was as poor in his thirtieth year as when he first performed his great act of renunciation before his idol of art.

This journey to Italy proved to be almost the saddest fiasco of his sad life. He went not only ill-equipped with money, but woefully ignorant of his best interest, and blundered at the very threshold by listening to an Italian count who proved a feckless friend in advising him to remain in Milan instead of going on to Rome. Carstens had made his way across Germany with a younger brother and entered Italy at Verona, going thence to Mantua. In this city he found the great frescoes of