so near to us all the while. How mistaken and roundabout
have been our efforts to reach it by mystic passion, and monastic
reverie; how they have deflowered the flesh; how little they have
emancipated us! Hermione melts from her stony posture, and the lost
proportions of life right themselves. Here, then, we see in vivid
realisation the native tendency of Winckelmann to escape from abstract
theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch. Lessing, in the
Laocoon, has theorised finely on the relation of poetry to sculpture; and
philosophy can give us theoretical reasons why not poetry but sculpture
should be the most sincere and exact expression of the Greek ideal. By a
happy, unperplexed dexterity, Winckelmann solves the question in the
concrete. It is what Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der griechischen
Kunst, his FINDING of Greek art.

Through the tumultuous richness of Goethe's culture, the influence of
Winckelmann is always discernible, as the strong, regulative
under-current of a clear, antique motive. "One learns nothing from him,"
he says to Eckermann, "but one becomes something." If we ask what the
secret of this influence was, Goethe himself will tell us--elasticity,
wholeness, intellectual integrity. And yet these expressions, because
they fit Goethe, with his universal culture, so well, seem hardly to
describe the narrow, exclusive interest of Winckelmann. Doubtless
Winckelmann's perfection is a narrow perfection: his feverish nursing of
the one motive of his life is a contrast to Goethe's various energy. But
what affected Goethe, what instructed him and ministered to his culture,
was the integrity, the truth to its type, of the given force. The
development of his force was the single interest of Winckelmann,
unembarrassed by anything else in him. Other interests, practical or
intellectual, those slighter talents and motives not supreme, which in
most men are the waste part of nature, and drain away their vitality, he
plucked out and cast from him. The protracted longing of his youth is not
a vague, romantic longing: he knows what he longs for, what he wills.
Within its severe limits his enthusiasm burns like lava. "You know," says
Lavater, speaking of Winckelmann's countenance, "that I consider ardour
and indifference by no means incompatible in the same character. If ever
there was a striking instance of that union, it is in the countenance
before us." "A lowly childhood," says Goethe, "insufficient i