Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/182

160 its bars, the sombre aspect, the alien traditions, the still barbarous literature of Germany, are far off; before him are adequate conditions of culture, the sacred soil itself, the first tokens of the advent of the new German literature, with its broad horizons, its boundless intellectual promise. Dante, passing from the darkness of the 'Inferno,' is filled with a sharp and joyful sense of light which makes him deal with it in the opening of the 'Purgatorio' in a wonderfully touching and penetrative way. Hellenism, which is pre-eminently intellectual light—modern culture may have more colour, the mediæval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism is pre-eminent for light—has always been most successfully handled by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements predominate. So it had been in the ages of the Renaissance. This repression, removed at last, gave force and glow to Winckelmann's native affinity to the Hellenic spirit. 'There had been known before him,' says Madame de Stäel, 'learned men who might be consulted like books: but no one had, if I may say so, made himself a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity.' On exécute mal ce qu'on n'a pas conçu soi-même —words spoken