It is what Goethe calls his Gewahrwerden der griechischen
Kunst, his FINDING of Greek art.
Through the tumultuous richness of Goethe's culture, the influence of
Winckelmann is always discernible, as the strong, regulative
under-current of a clear, antique motive. "One learns nothing from him,"
he says to Eckermann, "but one becomes something." If we ask what the
secret of this influence was, Goethe himself will tell us--elasticity,
wholeness, intellectual integrity. And yet these expressions, because
they fit Goethe, with his universal culture, so well, seem hardly to
describe the narrow, exclusive interest of Winckelmann. Doubtless
Winckelmann's perfection is a narrow perfection: his feverish nursing of
the one motive of his life is a contrast to Goethe's various energy. But
what affected Goethe, what instructed him and ministered to his culture,
was the integrity, the truth to its type, of the given force. The
development of his force was the single interest of Winckelmann,
unembarrassed by anything else in him.
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