Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/226

204 have been easy for Goethe, with the gift of a sensuous nature, to let it overgrow him. It is easy with the other-worldly gifts to be a schöne Seele; but to the large vision of Goethe that seemed to be a phase of life that a man might feel all round and leave behind him. Again, it is easy to indulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life.

But Goethe's culture did not remain 'behind the veil'; it ever abutted on the practical functions of art, on actual production. For him the problem came to be—Can the Allgemeinheit and Heiterkeit of the antique be communicated to artistic productions which contain the fulness of the experience of the modern world? We have seen that the development of the various forms of art has corresponded to the development of the thoughts of man concerning himself, to the growing relation of the mind to itself. Sculpture corresponds to the unperplexed, emphatic outlines of Hellenic humanism; painting to the mystic depth and intricacy of the middle age;