pagan, in the Catholic religion. Casting the dust of Protestantism off his feet—Protestantism which at best had been one of the ennuis of his youth—he might reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supreme tradition of beauty. And yet to that transparent nature, with its simplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity must have been a real loss. Goethe understands that Winckelmann had made this sacrifice. He speaks of the doubtful charm of renegadism as something like that which belongs to a divorced woman, or to 'Wildbret mit einer kleinen Andeutung von Fäulniss.' Certainly at the bar of the highest criticism Winckelmann is more than absolved. The insincerity of his religious profession was only one incident of a culture in which the moral instinct, like the religious or political, was lost 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
