rn culture is a peculiar one. He is not of the
modern world; nor is he 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 that union of the Romantic spirit, in its
adventure, its variety, its profound subjectivity of soul, with
Hellenism, 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.* Goethe illustrates, too,
the preponderance in this marriage of the Hellenic element; and that
element, in its true essence, was made known to him by Winckelmann.

*Faust, Th. ii. Act. 3.

Breadth, centrality, with blitheness and repose, are the marks of
Hellenic culture. Is that culture a lost art? The local, accidental
colouring of its own age has passed from it; the greatness that is dead
looks greater when every link with what is slight and vulgar has been
severed; we can only see it at all in the reflected, refined light which
a high education creates for us. Can we bring down that ideal into the
gaudy, perplexed light of modern life?

Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its
entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many
preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with
ourselves, in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the
Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever,
the intellect demands completeness, centrality. It is this which
Winckelmann imprints on the imagination of Goethe, at the beginning of
his culture, in its original and simplest form, as in a fragment of Greek
art itself, stranded on that littered, indeterminate shore of Germany in
the eighteenth century. In Winckelmann, this type comes to him, not as in
a book or a theory, but importunately, in a passionate life or
personality. For Goethe, possessing all modern interests, ready to be
lost in the perplexed currents of modern thought, he defines, in clearest
outline, the problem of culture--balance, unity with oneself, consummate
Greek modelling.

It could no longer be solved, as in Phryne ascending naked out of the
water, by perfection of bo