history authenticates
the claims of this tradition in human culture. In the countries where
that tradition arose, where it still lurked about its own artistic
relics, and changes of language had not broken its continuity, national
pride might sometimes light up anew an enthusiasm for it. Aliens might
imitate that enthusiasm, and classicism become from time to time an
intellectual fashion. But Winckelmann was not further removed by
language, than by local aspects and associations, from those vestiges of
the classical spirit; and he lived at a time when, in Germany, classical
studies were out of favour. Yet, remote in time and place, he feels after
the Hellenic world, divines the veins of ancient art, in which its life
still circulates, and, like Scyles, the half-barbarous yet Hellenising
king, in the beautiful story of Herodotus, is irresistibly attracted by
it. This testimony to the authority of the Hellenic tradition, its
fitness to satisfy some vital requirement of the intellect, which
Winckelmann contributes as a solitary man of genius, is offered also by
the general history of culture. The spiritual forces of the past, which
have prompted and informed the culture of a succeeding age, live, indeed,
within that culture, but with an absorbed, underground life. The Hellenic
element alone has not been so absorbed, or content with this underground
life; from time to time it has started to the surface; culture has been
drawn back to its sources to be clarified and corrected. Hellenism is not
merely an absorbed element in our intellectual life; it is a conscious
tradition in it.

Again, individual genius works ever under conditions of time and place:
its products are coloured by the varying aspects of nature, and type of
human form, and outward manners of life. There is thus an element of
change in art; criticism must never for a moment forget that "the artist
is the child of his time." But besides these conditions of time and
place, and independent of them, there is also an element of permanence, a
standard of taste, which genius confesses. This standard is maintained in
a purely intellectual tradition; it acts upon the artist, not as one of
the influences of his own age, but by means of the artistic products of
the previous generation, which in youth have excited, and at the same
time directed into a particular channel, his sense of beauty. The supreme
artistic products of each generation thus form a series of elevated
p