Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/176

154 they have emancipated us! Hermione melts from her stony posture, and the lost proportions of life right themselves. There, is an instance of Winckelmann's tendency to escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch. Lessing, in the Laocoon, has finely theorised 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