ARTICLE IV.—A PIONEER OF GERMAN ART:

ASMUS JAKOB CARSTENS.

ASMUS JAKOB CARSTENS, the unremembered subject of this sketch, was born in 1754, in the same decade that first saw Goethe, Mozart, and Schiller, as though the generation which was to grow up with the great masters of letters, music, and song were loth to do without a leader in the sister art of design. Although his surroundings and influences were to be eminently German during his life, Carstens' birthplace and family were Danish, the former being at his father's mill of St. Jürgen near Schleswig, while the latter was of a long Scandinavian descent. The prospects and position of the household, when Asmus was nine years old, were seriously altered by the miller's death, and beyond the authority of a remarkable mother, whose spirit and capacity kept the family together, the boy was thrown at this early age almost entirely upon himself for guidance and instruction. He must have been endowed with some instinct for culture to have preferred the fight for a schooling to an easy decline into mere breadgaining; but this we may not unjustly attribute to the mother, who was an extraordinary instance of the femme savante for her time, being conversant not alone with Greek and Latin and the politer modern tongues, but able also to sketch an embroidery design or color her own drawings of the Fates or Graces with a cleverness that showed some proficiency in as well as predilection for the fine arts. Her son accordingly attended classes, though his private inclination leaned not at all, it must be confessed, toward the dull round of dead languages taught there; St. Jürgen being so near Schleswig as to allow the boy to trudge of a morning to the town school and return by night, his early days were pretty free from the direct interference of the learned old mother. And here first we catch a charming glimpse of the child's awakening to a love for art,-when he stole into the cathedral to munch his noonday crust and his eye found a humble little altar-piece by one Jürgen Ovens, an obscure pupil of Rembrandt's, which

inspired the common-place urchin's soul with a spirit of grace that quickened and directed his entire life towards the highest aims. Again and again he visited the darkened chapel to contemplate this picture, and once, he tells us, falling on his knees he 'prayed that Almighty God would some day grant him power and skill to produce such a beautiful painting as the one hung in this holy place.' The impress was not a light one upon the young mind, and from this experience dates the beginning of a life devoted to art and art alone, in the face of every obstacle that came between him and his goal. It may be noted in passing as rather a curious fact that though stirred to such remarkable enthusiasm by this example of the Dutch school, his own compositions never revealed the least likeness to the great Rembrandt's manner.

Carstens now came to regard his school-books with increasing repugnance, preferring to dream of fine pictures and such graceful fancies as his fond imagination could create. The mother did not, perhaps, altogether despise this trace of inheritance from herself, and may have even given him some helpful hints on drawing when she discovered him with childish energy practising on his slate. He certainly from this time. forward put all his spare moments to use in this direction, and passed the remainder of his boyhood intent solely upon this one delight. At the age of sixteen he left school 'knowing nothing,' as those exclaimed who were baffled in the trial of bringing his education into conformity with the acquirements of others, and he himself confesses in a letter written many years later that his indifference to subjects he did not fancy was so complete as to earn him the title and reputation of dunce in all branches but one. In drawing, by dint of hard practice (though without a teacher) he was fairly proficient. Already he had been taken up by an unknown painter of Schleswig and informed upon a few of the technical details in his art, but he left him with no great loss when the family moved to Cassel, and there all but sank the talent that was in him in the unfortunate and contaminating influence of one Tischbein, a painter big with local pride and fame, an apostle of the miserable and degraded thing called art in those benighted days.

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