But the beauty of art demands a higher
sensibility than the beauty of nature, because the beauty of art,
like tears shed at a play, gives no pain, is without life, and must
be awakened and repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of
culture is much more ardent in youth than in manhood, the
instinct of which I am speaking must be exercised and directed to
what is beautiful, before that age is reached, at which one would
be afraid to confess that one had no taste for it."
[193] Certainly, of that beauty of living form which regulated
Winckelmann's friendships, it could not be said that it gave no
pain. One notable friendship, the fortune of which we may trace
through his letters, begins with an antique, chivalrous letter in
French, and ends noisily in a burst of angry fire. Far from
reaching the quietism, the bland indifference of art, such
attachments are nevertheless more susceptible than any others of
equal strength of a purely intellectual culture. Of passion, of
physical excitement, they contain only just so much as stimulates
the eye to the finest delicacies of colour and form. These
friendships, often the caprices of a moment, make
Winckelmann's letters, with their troubled colouring, an
instructive but bizarre addition to the History of Art, that shrine of
grave and mellow light around the mute Olympian family. The
impression which Winckelmann's literary life conveyed to those
about him was that of excitement, intuition, inspiration, rather
than the contemplative evolution of general principles.
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