u gelangen. He had to shorten his nights, sleeping only four hours, to
gain time for reading. And here Winckelmann made a step forward in
culture. He multiplied his intellectual force by detaching from it all
flaccid interests. He renounced mathematics and law, in which his reading
had been considerable,--all but the literature of the arts. Nothing was
to enter into his life unpenetrated by its central enthusiasm. At this
time he undergoes the charm of Voltaire. Voltaire belongs to that
flimsier, more artificial, classical tradition, which Winckelmann was one
day to supplant, by the clear ring, the eternal outline of the genuine
antique. But it proves the authority of such a gift as Voltaire's that it
allures and wins even those born to supplant it. Voltaire's impression on
Winckelmann was never effaced; and it gave him a consideration for French
literature which contrasts with his contempt for the literary products of
Germany. German literature transformed, siderealised, as we see it in
Goethe, reckons Winckelmann among its initiators. But Germany at that
time presented nothing in which he could have anticipated Iphigenie, and
the formation of an effective classical tradition in German literature.

Under this purely literary influence, Winckelmann protests against
Christian Wolff and the philosophers. Goethe, in speaking of this
protest, alludes to his own obligations to Emmanuel Kant. Kant's
influence over the culture of Goethe, which he tells us could not have
been resisted by him without loss, consisted in a severe limitation to
the concrete. But he adds, that in born antiquaries, like Winckelmann,
constant handling of the antique, with its eternal outline, maintains
that limitation as effectually as a critical philosophy. Plato, however,
saved so often for his redeeming literary manner, is excepted from
Winckelmann's proscription of the philosophers. The modern student most
often meets Plato on that side which seems to pass beyond Plato into a
world no longer pagan, based on the conception of a spiritual life. But
the element of affinity which he presents to Winckelmann is that which is
wholly Greek, and alien from the Christian world, represented by that
group of brilliant youths in the Lysis, still uninfected by any spiritual
sickness, finding the end of all endeavour in the aspects of the human
form, the continual stir and motion of a comely human life.

This new-found interest in Plato's dialogues could not fail