from the incidents of a
passionate intellectual life. He classes him with certain works of art,
possessing an inexhaustible gift of suggestion, to which criticism may
return again and again with renewed freshness. Hegel, in his lectures on
the Philosophy of Art, estimating the work of his predecessors, has also
passed a remarkable judgment on Winckelmann's writings:--"Winckelmann, by
contemplation of the ideal works of the ancients, received a sort of
inspiration, through which he opened a new sense for the study of art.
He is to be regarded as one of those who, in the sphere of art, have
known how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit." That it has
given a new sense, that it has laid open a new organ, is the highest that
can be said of any critical effort. It is interesting then to ask what
kind of man it was who thus laid open a new organ. Under what conditions
was that effected?

Johann Joachim Winckelmann was born at Stendal, in Brandenburg, in the
year 1717. The child of a poor tradesman, he passed through many
struggles in early youth, the memory of which ever remained in him as a
fitful cause of dejection. In 1763, in the full emancipation of his
spirit, looking over the beautiful Roman prospect, he writes--"One gets
spoiled here; but God owed me this; in my youth I suffered too much."
Destined to assert and interpret the charm of the Hellenic spirit, he
served first a painful apprenticeship in the tarnished intellectual world
of Germany in the earlier half of the eighteenth century. Passing out of
that into the happy light of the antique, he had a sense of exhilaration
almost physical. We find him as a child in the dusky precincts of a
German school, hungrily feeding on a few colourless books. The master of
this school grows blind; Winckelmann becomes his famulus. The old man
would have had him study theology. Winckelmann, free of the master's
library, chooses rather to become familiar with the Greek classics.
Herodotus and Homer win, with their "vowelled" Greek, his warmest
enthusiasm; whole nights of fever are devoted to them; disturbing dreams
of an Odyssey of his own come to him. "He felt in himself," says Madame
de Stael, "an ardent attraction towards the South." In German
imaginations even now traces are often to be found of that love of the
sun, that weariness of the North (cette fatigue du nord), which carried
the northern peoples away into those countries of the South. A fine sky
brings to birth