When the actual relics of the antique were restored
to the world, in the view of the Christian ascetic it was as if an
ancient plague-pit had been opened. All the world took the
contagion of the life of nature and of the senses. And now it was
seen that the medieval spirit too had done something for the new
fortunes of the antique. By hastening the decline of art, by
withdrawing interest from it and yet keeping unbroken the thread
of its traditions, it had suffered the human mind to repose itself,
that when day came it might awake, with eyes refreshed, to those
ancient, ideal forms.
The aim of a right criticism is to place Winckelmann in an
intellectual perspective, of which Goethe is the foreground. For,
after all, he is infinitely less than Goethe; and it is chiefly because
at certain points he comes in contact with Goethe, that criticism
entertains consideration of him. His relation to modern culture is
a peculiar one. He is not of the modern world; nor is he wholly
of the eighteenth century, although so much of his outer life is
characteristic of it. But that note of revolt against the eighteenth
century, which we detect in Goethe, was struck by Winckelmann.
Goethe illustrates a union of the Romantic spirit, in its adventure,
its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with Hellenism,
[227] in its transparency, its rationality, its desire of beauty--that
marriage of Faust and Helena, of which the art of the nineteenth
century is the child, the beautiful lad Euphorion, as Goethe
conceives him, on the crags, in the "splendour of battle and in
harness as for victory," his brows bound with light.
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