ious or
political, was merged in the artistic. But then the artistic interest was
that by desperate faithfulness to which Winckelmann was saved from the
mediocrity, which, breaking through no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless
routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the
intellect. There have been instances of culture developed by every high
motive in turn, and yet intense at every point; and the aim of our
culture should be to attain not only as intense but as complete a life as
possible. But often the higher life is only possible at all, on condition
of the selection of that in which one's motive is native and strong; and
this selection involves the renunciation of a crown reserved for others.
Which is better?--to lay open a new sense, to initiate a new organ for
the human spirit, or to cultivate many types of perfection up to a point
which leaves us still beyond the range of their transforming power?
Savonarola is one type of success; Winckelmann is another; criticism can
reject neither, because each is true to itself. Winckelmann himself
explains the motive of his life when he says, "It will be my highest
reward, if posterity acknowledges that I have written worthily."

For a time he remained at Dresden. There his first book appeared,
Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art in Painting and
Sculpture. Full of obscurities as it was, obscurities which baffled but
did not offend Goethe when he first turned to art-criticism, its purpose
was direct--an appeal from the artificial classicism of the day to the
study of the antique. The book was well received, and a pension supplied
through the king's confessor. In September 1755 he started for Rome, in
the company of a young Jesuit. He was introduced to Raphael Mengs, a
painter then of note, and found a home near him, in the artists' quarter,
in a place where he could "overlook, far and wide, the eternal city." At
first he was perplexed with the sense of being a stranger on what was to
him, spiritually, native soil. "Unhappily," he cries in French, often
selected by him as the vehicle of strong feeling, "I am one of those whom
the Greeks call opsimatheis.--I have come into the world and into Italy
too late." More than thirty years afterwards, Goethe also, after many
aspirations and severe preparation of mind, visited Italy. In early
manhood, just as he too was FINDING Greek art, the rumour of that high
artist's life of Winckelmann in Italy had s