Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/224

202 by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality. It is this which Winckelmann prints on the imagination of Goethe, at the beginning of his culture, in its original and simplest form, as in a fragment of Greek art itself, stranded on that littered, indeterminate shore of Germany in the eighteenth century. In Winckelmann this type comes to him, not as in a book or a theory, but importunately, in a passionate life and personality. For Goethe, possessing all modern interests, ready to be lost in the perplexed currents of modern thought, he defines in clearest outline the problem of culture-balance, unity with oneself, consummate Greek modelling.

It could no longer be solved, as in Phryne ascending naked out of the water, by perfection of bodily form, or any joyful union with the world without; the shadows had grown too long, the light too solemn for that. It could hardly be solved as in Pericles or Phidias, by the direct exercise of any single talent; amid the manifold claims of modern culture that could only have ended in a thin, one-sided growth. Goethe's Hellenism was of another