[In the following excerpt from his book The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, originally published in German in 1948, Snell declares Callimachus the 'father of Hellenistic poetry" and compares him at length to Germany's Goethe. According to Snell, Callimachus's defining characteristic was his "post-philosophical" enhancement of technique and playfulness above moral instruction, the province of earlier eras in Greek literature.]

Father Bromius!
Thou art genius,
Century's genius,
Art what inward glow
To Pindar was,
What to the world
Is Phoebus Apollo …

Jupiter Pluvius!
Not by the elm tree
Didst thou visit him,
With his brace of doves
In his affectionate arm,
Crowned with the friendly rose,
Playful him, flower-revelling
Anacreon,
Storm-breathing deity!

Not in the poplar grove
On the Sybaris' banks,
Nor at the mountain's
Sunlight-radiant brow
Didst thou seize him
Singing of bees,
Prattling of honey,
Genially beckoning
Theocritus.

When the wheels rattled
Quickly wheel upon wheel around the goal,
Up soared
Victory-flushed
Youths' cracking of whips,
And dust was rolling
As from the mountains
Downward the shower of stones,
Thy soul glowed perils, Pindar,
Heart …

When the twenty-two year old Goethe was 'passionately singing to himself this half-nonsense', the Wanderer's Storm Song, he probably did not reflect that there was a literary precedent for his distinction between the sublime grandeur of Pindar and the playfulness of Anacreon and Theocritus. And yet the turning-point from the age of the rococo to the era of the 'untutored genius' stands in a significant relation to that other turning-point, in the history of Greek literature, when the contrast between playfulness and pathos was first officially enunciated. Goethe himself, granted that he had been willing to acknowledge this literary debt, could have referred only to the Roman middleman who supplied him with his Greek concept. For the Greek work which may be regarded as his ultimate model has only recently become known through an Egyptian papyrus. It is all the more significant that Goethe in many respects came closer to the spirit of the original than the derivative work with which he was acquainted.

In his poem, Goethe looks at Pindar through the spectacles of a literary tradition rather than with his own eyes. He admits this much himself, for in the following year, in the middle of July 1772, he tells Herder: 'I have now made Pindar my home, and if the splendour of the palace could make a man happy, I should be so.' He goes on to confess: 'Yet I feel what Horace was able to say, what Quintilian praises'. In point of fact the image: 'As from the mountains downward the shower of stones,' is a quotation, or a variation, of Horace's poem (4.2) which has fixed our conception of Pindar since the Renaissance:

Monte decurrens velut amnis, imbres
Quem super notas aluere ripas,
Fervet.

Following this model, the writers of the baroque and the rococo identified Pindar with the grand or sublime style, unfettered by the strict rules of prosody. Again, Goethe's view of Theocritus as the representative of pastoral poetry, and of Anacreon as a light-hearted singer of wine and love; both standing at opposite poles from Pindar, is purely conventional. To cite an example which happens to occur to me: Goldoni says in his Memoirs (1.41) about Metastasio's arias, that 'some are written in the spirit of Pindar, others after the manner of Anacreon'. This shows, incidentally, that at that time the name of Anacreon was associated less with the genuine lyrics of the archaic poet than with the so-called Anacreontic poems which were ascribed to him.

But although Goethe fell in with the literary jargon of his time, he went much further. Nor did his readings in Horace, who deprecated his own trifles by comparison with the grandeur of Pindar, set a limit to his thought. In more than one way, Goethe managed to return to an ancient source whence the tradition in which he moved had first sprung up.

Horace, in his ode on Pindar, refuses to celebrate the deeds of Augustus in the solemn accents of a Pindaric song; instead he selects a slender and graceful form. Like other Romans who voice the same idea he thus follows the lead of Callimachus, the father of Hellenistic poetry.… Both Callimachus and Goethe stood on the threshold of a new age. After more than a century of enlightenment in the course of which the ancient religious beliefs had been dissolved, they had finally become weary of the spirit of rationalism. A new important era of poetry was about to begin. Still, so radically did the rhythm of antiquity differ from the trend of the modern age that Callimachus, and with him his age, decided in favour of a slender delicacy in poetic writing, whereas Goethe, and he too as the leader of his contemporaries, turned in the opposite direction, toward pathos and emotional fervour.

Despite some external similarities, the early Hellenistic age differed greatly in its intellectual situation from the last phase of the eighteenth century. For one thing, it lacked the storm and stress, the revolutionary ardour, of the later period. When, beginning with the third century B.C., after a century of prose writing …, poetry re-entered the scene with productions of high calibre and great authority, it kept intact the ancient poetic forms, particularly the spoken verse of the archaic period. Its spirit was new, but this newness was not of the sort to be proclaimed as a revelation, or to be championed with impassioned zeal. These Hellenistic poets are, if we may say it in one word, post-philosophical, while the earlier poets are pre-philosophical. The earlier poetry is ever intent to stake out new areas of the mind, and philosophy and science, the rational assimilation of the newly-found material, formed its natural sequel. In the realm of the epic, the heroic sagas furnished the seeds for lonian historiography, and the theogonies and cosmologies opened the way for lonion natural philosophy and its search for the arche. The lyric led to Heraclitus, the drama to Socrates and Plato. But with the beginning of Hellenistic poetry, the great age of continuous philosophical creation approached its end. The fourth century had witnessed the achievements of Plato, Aristotle and Theophrastus; its close coincides with the foundation of the two schools of philosophy which were to remain sovereign in the generations which followed: the Garden of Epicurus and the Stoa of Zeno. Greek philosophy, that is, had reached the point which, generally speaking, it was not destined to surpass. That was the moment when in a new intellectual centre, in Egyptian Alexandria, the residence of the Ptolemies, a number of poets, among them Theocritus and Callimachus, their most important figure, joined together in a circle which carried poetry to new heights.

These poets are post-philosophical in the sense that they have ceased to believe in the possibility of mastering the world by a theoretical control. As against Aristotle who had credited poetry with a philosophical nature … they have no use for the universal in poetry, and so they devote their special attention to details. Callimachus in particular shows himself to be post-philosophical because he entertains theories concerning the potentialities of poetry in his age. This is his innovation in the history of literature; he lays down his views regarding the art of writing in the form of programmatic utterances, especially in the lines against his foes with which he prefaced his longest and most important work, the Aitia. Similar statements appear also in the body of other works, and finally in a few single epigrams. Callimachus raises the question: What sort of poetry should we write? This implies that there are various genres of poetry, and in fact the writers of the period were engaged in the composition of epic as well as dramatic and lyric poetry. We consider it only natural, but an earlier age would have found it hard to understand, that there should be one 'literature' comprising a number of categories; that the poet could exercise his own free choice of the genre to which he wanted to devote his skill.

This first theoretical argument by a poet on behalf of his own art was, of course, preceded by numerous discussions of other people's works, such as Aristophanes' biting criticism of Euripidean tragedy, Plato's reflections on the value of poetry, the Poetics of Aristotle, and many other examples which are now mostly lost to us. Callimachus readily avails himself of some of these earlier critiques; his defence of the brevity of his poetry tallies with the opinion of Aristotle, and his justification of the delicate and unimpassioned style—the ideal which through Horace remained in force long after him—is intimately connected with certain motifs in Aristophanes.…

Nor were the influences which moulded the thought of Callimachus restricted to the field of literary criticism. In the prologue to his Aitia (lines 25 ff.) he says that Apollo warned him at the outset of his poetic undertaking not to take the broad, much-travelled roads, but to hew out his own path, however narrow. The notion that man has two roads before him, and the behest not to take the one which is easy and populous, but that which is narrow and deserted: this idea derives ultimately from the Works and Days of Hesiod (lines 287 ff.), whence Prodicus took it and worked it into his fable about Heracles. In Hesiod and Prodicus the narrow path leads to virtue, the broad avenue to vice; similarly Callimachus decides that the narrow path is the right one, but he fails to tell us where the two roads lead. This shows that he has dropped the moral for whose sake the image had originally been invented; even Apollo does not inform him why he should choose the one path and not the other.

Earlier he had said: a victim should be fat, but a poem slender. Aristophanes, in his Frogs, had taken the opposite stand and preferred the grand and imposing to the delicate. Again Callimachus fails to produce a reason such as had served Aristophanes to justify his opinions. Aristophanes had rated the grandiose style of Aeschylus higher than the refined manner of Euripides because, in his view, Euripides corrupted the people, while Aeschylus instructed them in noble thoughts. In Callimachus we look in vain for similar moral evaluations. Once more, therefore, we must ask the question: What are the motives of Callimachus for the choice he makes? His answer appears in the words (lines 17 f.): 'Judge my poetry (literally: my wisdom, sophie) by its art (techne), not by the Persian cubit.' The only criterion which he acknowledges is that of his skill, of art itself; the two words sophie and techne are so closely related as to be practically synonymous; art is to be measured in no terms but its own

In the earlier period all Greek poetry strove for some meaning lying beyond the limits of the writing itself. Even after poetry, in the course of time, had relinquished more and more of its social function, the poets endeavoured to seize upon a new concrete reality. In the end this objective became progressively more elusive, so that finally the poet abandoned his search to the philosopher. This element in art which points beyond art was, by Aristophanes, narrowed down to the didactic function of poetry. He thus attached to art a moral purpose; it was his way of preserving for poetry a task transcending its own boundaries even though this task was no longer founded in fact. Callimachus gives all that up, and proceeds to gauge art by itself. He addresses himself to a new audience all his own; for while Attic tragedy had still spoken to the mass of the people, Callimachus calls upon a small circle of cultured men to pass judgment on him. Plato's insistence that the experts should do the judging is here applied to a wisdom which is not the knowledge of the ultimate good, but culture, education, and good taste.

The wisdom of Callimachus is, above everything else, a matter of form. He manipulates his verse with the same delicacy and purity of line which Archilochus espoused, but which had been observed neither in the hexameters of the epic nor in the trimeters of drama. His ear is exceptionally sensitive to the effect of sounds, his vocabulary is rich and varied, and he chooses his words with a masterly feeling for cadence and emphasis, constantly reminding the educated reader of some significant reference. His skill in varying his diction, composition, and metrical scheme is unrivalled. Whenever Callimachus speaks of his wisdom, these are the things which he has chiefly in mind; the content is of lesser importance.

He was a scholar; his immense and careful learning is everywhere present in his work. But he did not employ it to write a didactic poem, as might be expected of an artist who cites the example of Hesiod for his art. The only use he makes of his erudition is to introduce a wealth of colourful and interesting material. He is a collector, with a preference for curiosities; he exhibits his wide knowledge less in order to teach his listeners a lesson than to entertain or even confuse them. Instead of talking about things generally known he surprises us by turning up a rare variant, by playing hide-and-seek, guessing-games and all sorts of tricks and pleasantries. His sense of humour provokes him to combine matters which in actuality are entirely unrelated. In his Hymn to Zeus he asks the question: Was Zeus born at the Cretan mount Ida or at mount Lycaeus in Arcadia? Since the former version was the one commonly accepted, he naturally decides for the other, far-fetched as it is, and cites in support of his choice the famous words of Epimenides of Crete: 'All Cretans are liars.' And then he scores once more with the remark that the Cretans also show a grave of Zeus, although everybody knows—and this has been skilfully anticipated in the invocation—that Zeus is immortal. His wit, his spirited handling of the sources, is obviously based on a great deal of learning, but this learning is not made to further the case of knowledge; its only service is to bask in its own glory. Later in Seneca, who inherited this amalgamating of myths from Callimachus through the mediation of Ovid, the learning is used to embellish and aggrandize the style; in Callimachus who loathes pathos it is a source of fun and sparkling ingenuity.

In his iambic verses Callimachus brings on the stage the Seven Sages who since the archaic period had, for the Greeks, embodied the ideal of wisdom. Callimachus, however, does not tell any of the numerous stories in which they were shown searching for knowledge, passing just judgment, or doing any of the noble things for which they were famous. In his view, their claim to wisdom is proved by their lack of vanity. The Arcadian Bathycles has left a golden bow which after his death is to become the property of the wisest man. His son carries it around from sage to sage, each one of them remonstrating that not he, but the next man was the wisest, until ultimately Thales, when the bowl reaches him the second time, dedicates it to Apollo. The reason why Callimachus tells the story is to upbraid the Alexandrian scholars for their quarrels; as far as he was concerned the savants disagreed not because each of them took his convictions and findings seriously, but because they were tainted with pretentiousness and vanity, the congenital vices, as he thought, of the world. In his story about the strife between the olive and the laurel he succeeded once more in taking his stand against presence and ostentation, two evils which have always lain in wait for those who, without following an objective task, possess enough cleverness and talent to live only for the effect. Of the one and only protection against these vices, self-irony, Callimachus is a past master.

He often stresses the playful nature of his poetry by casting himself in the role of the ingenu. The tale of Berenice's lock, for instance, which was sacrificed by the queen on the altar of Aphrodite and thence translated into the sky, is reported by the innocent little lock itself. Ancient myths whose truth he finds hard to credit, and stories invented by himself, he tells with a semblance of childish seriousness. This is one of the most peculiar forms of his wit. In his Hymn to Delos he describes how Hera, in her anger at Leto, issues an order to all places in Greece not to offer the unhappy mother a haven for bringing Apollo into the world. All cities, rivers, and mountains are, according to the old religious belief, supposed to possess their own divinities. This is the concept which Callimachus, in his own waggish way, seems to take seriously: no sooner does Leto appear at any one place than the nymphs and demons take to their heels. The result is a general exodus of all localities, until there is no place left for Apollo to be born.

In these poems, and others like them, Callimachus is not just acting the clown. His exaggeratedly ironical pathos is so lively and rich in nuances, and behind it all there is so much genuine joy in the naive and the primitive, so much charm and grace in spite of his raillery, that the finished product is as intriguing as it is hard to puzzle out. He himself calls his poetry 'childish play' (paizein and paignion). He constructed his slender works 'like a child' (pais hate), as the Telchines say of him in the prologue to the Aitia (line 6).

Because Callimachus is genuinely filled with the spirit of childhood, he was the first among Greek poets to be able to picture the behaviour of children in true colours, though, of course, with an admixture of irony which guarded him from losing himself entirely to the world of the child. In his Hymn to Artemis he introduces the goddess as a little girl sitting on the lap of her father Zeus and begging him (lines 6 ff.):

Please, daddy, let me keep my virginity for ever and let me have many names, so that Apollo cannot keep up with me. And give me arrows and bow—or no, father, I do not ask for a quiver, and I do not want a big bow from you. The Cyclopes will rightaway make the shafts for me, and also a well-curved bow. But allow me to carry torches and to wear a knee-high dress with a bright hem, so I may kill off the wild beasts. Also give me sixty Ocean-daughters for my companions in the dance.…

and so she prattles on and produces one request after another. All this furnishes a picture, and in part a very learned picture, of the nature and activities of Artemis. But the way in which Callimachus looks at the little Artemis has something grandfatherly about it; yet he is not sentimental about her, he does not dispense with the superior perspective of the grown-up: he does not become an artificial child himself.

With the same slightly ironical delight in simple and naive things Callimachus relates in his Aitia the scurrilous customs of primitive cults, exotic tales, and rare events. With impressive seriousness, and yet not with a wholly straight face, he pours out a wealth of information. If we were to look for a unifying idea, for an intellectual objective or a programme of enlarging the mental horizon of his listeners, we would not find them. Instead we find a keen sense for the colourful variety of all the strange happenings around us, and this sense Callimachus possessed in a greater measure than any Greek writer since the archaic period. It is, however, no longer the genuinely child-like amazement of the earlier writers who took the wonders of life to heart, and who felt themselves sustained by the significant forces which they discovered about them. The amazement of Callimachus is of the head-wagging sort: Isn't life full of odd goings-on?

The world of play, which since the days of tragedy had been part and parcel of all Greek literature, is here blended with mature learning, and it is this genial mixture of youthful emotion and intellectual scepticism which makes for the ripe grace of this distinguished art.

The lack of a concrete objective, and altogether of all higher commitments, is evident also in his love poetry. There the beloved person, and the desire for the happiness of possession, fade into the background, and a new element which merits the label erotic in a very modern sense comes to the fore. In one epigram we read this (ep. 41):

One half of my soul has made its getaway. I wonder whether she has once again gone to a boy? And yet, I have so often sent out the order: 'Do not receive the runaway, youths!' … She deserves to be stoned to death (i.e., because she is a deserter) and she is in league with wicked Eros; I know that she is on the loose somewhere there.

This love of Callimachus differs from the love which reigned in the earlier works, for in the writers before him it had always been directed to a beloved person; it had been a 'love for somebody', as Plato's Diotima puts it (Symp. 199 D). The love of Callimachus, on the other hand, lacks this orientation. A part of his soul has made itself independent, and he does not know where it may have strayed. He is in love without really knowing whom he would love.

Another epigram (ep. 31) conveys roughly the following idea: 'The huntsman in the mountains pursues every hare and every deer and delights in the snow. But when he is told: "There, the animal is hit!" he does not want it. My love is like that: it pursues the fleeing prey, but it hurries past that which is readily available.' This happens to be a rebuff to a boy named Epicydes whom Callimachus addresses in the first line, but at the same time it serves him for a general statement of his view on love. Like the huntsman who is more interested in the sport itself than in his quarry, he devotes more attention to the game of pursuing than to that of catching his object. The two epigrams have this in common that the goal, the direction of the love instinct is declared to be unimportant by comparison with the subjective feeling; in the one case it is the mere impulse, in the other the pleasure of the chase which ranks highest in his scale of values.

Two further epigrams (30 and 43) are rather alike in the point which they are designed to make; on both occasions Callimachus notices that someone else is in love, once because of the expression of his features, and the other time because he fetches a deep sigh. His reaction is: I understand, for I feel the same way. Thus Callimachus chooses to confess his own love via the description of another; but he does not do so in the presence of his beloved, to influence him. In the one case he conveys his sympathy to a rival, and the other epigram is addressed to nobody in particular. The indirect form helps him to avoid the open confession 'I love' with its pathos and inelegance, and to deflect his admission into irony. He creates an impression as if this reminder of his passion were merely a passing comment which he had not really intended.

In the last two epigrams which we have discussed, the playful nature of Callimachus' art manifests itself in the lack of seriousness with which his problem is voiced; in the other two it is shown in the fact that his love exists only for its own sake—and in this it, of course, resembles his art which is only for art's sake. All four epigrams, however, agree in one thing, viz. that love is but the subjective psychological state of being in love, and not the intercession of a deity as it had appeared in Archilochus, Sappho, and even Anacreon. Nor is it the love which we encounter in tragedy, the violent passion which stirs up the innermost soul of a man, nor again the metaphysical search for perfection, as Plato thinks of it. On the other hand, it is decidedly not, as might be expected after all this, a base desire for transitory pleasures of the flesh. Obviously the love of Callimachus is not of the sort to inspire him to ponder the mysteries of god, the world, or human existence. All it does is to make him aware of his own sensibilities.

But in spite of the egocentric character of his poetry, Callimachus does not advance to a genuine self-reflexion or self-analysis. Neither in the field of psychology nor in any other area of the human mind does he deserve to be called an innovator or discoverer, unless we are to regard it as a discovery that he was able to look at himself with a smile and to state: So this is what you are like. By stepping back and viewing himself from a distance, he adds an abstract dimension to his consciousness; but neither Callimachus nor his successors combined this abstractness with sufficient philosophic vitality to make it fruitful as a beginning of new thought.

Callimachus' resolve not to take things too seriously, particularly those matters which exceed the horizon of man, is a sign of post-philosophical exhaustion. If he does take anything seriously, it is that which is already known. Though he made merry with the rich literary tradition of Greece supplied to him by the Alexandrian library, he still retains a genuinely scholarly interest in the tracing and preserving of that material. The rules of his sport command him not to disclose the seriousness and the labour expended on his research, and not to allow the dust of the library to tarnish the brilliance of his wit and his fiction. But his poetry would be unthinkable if he had not had a deep sympathy for learned studies, or if he had not enjoyed rummaging in old sources. Among his audience, too, Callimachus expects a wide acquaintance with tradition; they must understand his allusions, and show an interest in far-fetched curiosities. Because he himself moves about with ease and comfort in the vast halls of learning, so he demands that his public too feel at home in them. It is only natural that his public can never be large; his art is decidedly exclusive, choice fare for connoisseurs.

The language in which he couches his jeux d'esprit owes its light touch to its rhetorical background. It is the birthright of Greek rhetoric to incline toward spirited pleasantries and to be less interested in content than in form. The excessive employment of vocal effects for which its founder Gorgias had striven was soon dropped, for reasons of good taste rather than from any conviction that the form of speech ought to be determined by its concrete objective. Euphony and its stimulus upon the emotions, and a playfully contrived richness of word relations, i.e. antithesis, anaphora and so forth, remained the principal goal. The highly developed prose writing of the fourth century had achieved a perfection of these stylistic features, and it had demonstrated how they could be used with discretion. In Callimachus they are less obvious even than, e.g. in Ovid's Metamorphoses, but without a training in the theory of rhetoric his easy mastery of diction could not have been accomplished. This is one case, therefore, in which prose exercised a decisive influence upon poetry. Callimachus is, of course, careful not to adopt the characteristic traits of that prose, such as the overt expression of logical connexions; on the contrary, his thought associations are imbued with a kind of Homeric naïveté.

We have seen that in the time of Callimachus the best minds began to turn away from philosophy and to devote themselves to antiquarian and philological studies, and also to the writing of poetry. Like all earlier attempts of the Greeks to break with the past and to discover new territory, this also was a reaction designed to force a new immediate contact with reality. The philosophers had tried to control the world and life by means of a rational system; the new writers rediscover the great appeal of non-reflective simplicity, and so they turn to the earliest speech of man, to poetry. The cultured men from the big cities are fascinated by primitive customs, by unspoiled manners, by the simple life which is best described by Theocritus, but which also appears in the pages of Herodas and others. But just as in his portrayal of children Callimachus never forgets himself to the point of affecting a false infantility, so also in all other respects he never abandons his irony and his superior wit. Without setting up theories or programmes, he stands for a new, a knowing naivete; his playfulness stems from the strength of his intellect; it is the genial spirit of one who surveys a lost treasure from the heights of his scepticism rather than weeping sentimental tears.

There were other attempts during his time, as well as the preceding age, to return to an immediate experience of the simple life. The factor which puts Callimachus in a special category is that he does not sacrifice the intellect. He does not want the primitivism of the Cynics; he does not admire the Scythian Anacharsis. Conversely he does not preach culture and humaneness, terms which only too easily betoken a spirit of hollow show and self-applause.

Because Callimachus was on the whole a derivative poet it is not legitimate to speak of him as a discoverer. But his contributions came to be so important for the formation of our European culture that he must be counted among its pioneers. Education or culture is for him tantamount to the faculty of recollection which, aside from cleverly fitting together disparate pieces and thus diverting the listener with surprising effects, enables a man to look down upon the varied manifestations of life with a catholic and sympathetic mind. The cultured man, the scholar, delights in his sensation of standing above the world, without being committed to it. From Callimachus this concept was, through the agency of the Romans, and again primarily through the services of Ovid, handed down to the humanists of the Renaissance. The only difference was that the Romans infused into it the idea of a higher realm of the spirit, of poetry and culture, to which they looked up with a longing admiration. Callimachus lacks this humility; he is too certain of himself, too much at home in his intellectual habitat. His refusal to acknowledge an overall goal of knowledge is matched by his failure to follow any ethical, political, or even simply educational directive. He would be the last to wish to admonish anyone to adopt his cultural convictions. The domain of the spirit in which he dwells is airy and attractive enough to compel the voluntary allegiance of anyone who has a mind for it.

In his Wanderer's Storm Song Goethe had contrasted the grand poetry of Pindar with Anacreon and Theocritus. This was not only a declaration of faith in favour of one of the two styles which baroque literary criticism had posited, nor was it merely a renunciation of the rococo literature with which he himself had been identified a little earlier. It was also his break with the heritage of the traditional humanistic creed.

In his Dichtung und Wahrheit (2.10) Goethe says he had learned from Herder 'that poetry is a possession of the whole world, of the people, and not just the private property of a few refined, cultured men'. These last words are an exact definition of what poetry had become through Callimachus. Since the Renaissance, this exclusive heirloom had been entered upon and cherished by those educated in the classics with many variations, and blending with a good many other influences, the tradition may be detected in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, in Pope's Rape of the Lock, in Wieland's verse tales, and in Byron's Don Juan. Thus we have the paradox that Goethe, in a situation which in many respects resembled that in which Callimachus found himself, turned against the very things which owed their existence to him.

Theocritus and Anacreon—that is, the author of the Anacreontea—the playful, genially beckoning Hellenistic poets, are not visited by the deity, not by Zeus (Jupiter), Apollo, or Dionysus (Bromius). Dionysus is 'genius'—behind this we sense the concept of the untutored, the original genius—he is 'what inward glow to Pindar was, what to the world Phoebus Apollo is.' The 'inward glow' is the poet's participation in the divine spirit. In a letter dated Sept. 13th, 1774, written to K. Schmidt, Heinse describes Goethe himself as a new Pindar: 'Goethe stopped off with us, a beautiful young man of twenty-five, who from top to toe is genius and power and strength, a heart full of feeling, a spirit full of fire with eagle's wings, qui ruit immensus ore profundo'—this being the sequel of Horace's ode on Pindar from which we quoted above. These words are more significant than similar statements about other poets of the period who are praised as a new Pindar or, if a lady, as a new Sappho. Goldoni, for example, says about the improvvisatore Perfetti: 'The poet sang for about fifteen minutes stanzas in the manner of Pindar. Nothing finer than his song. He was Petrarch, Milton, Rousseau … no, Pindar himself.' By way of contrast with so affected and banal an application of historical names, Goethe tries to establish contact with the original experiences of the artist: 'When the wheels rattled … thy soul glowed perils, Pindar, heart.' True, this also has little to do with the real Pindar, for that poet nowhere refers to himself as being passionately involved in the contests which he celebrates, nor does he ever talk of 'victory-flushed youths' cracking of whips.' What we have is, rather, a vague concept of Pindar's victory hymns, constructed on the basis of Horace's simile of the mountain stream, and brought into line with certain views on the role of 'experience' in poetry which were current in Goethe's own time.

And yet in one point Goethe's new image of Pindar comes close to the truth. Goethe emphasizes the religious aspect of that poetry, following the teaching of Herder that genuine poetry does not spring from privacy, from refinement or education, but from the divine. This is the essential difference between Callimachus and Goethe, and between their two ages, that the reaction against rationalism takes two different shapes; once it explodes as religious emotion, as enthusiasm and pathos and dithyrambic excitement, whereas in Alexandria its manifestation was the jeu d'esprit. The elements which Callimachus introduced into poetry were those same evils to which Goethe in his day objected, for rococo poetry was erected on the ideals of good taste and refined wit. In the age of rationalism the poets had managed to move closer than ever to the wellspring of the humanistic tradition, to Callimachus.

The new religious fervour of the Storm and Stress is no return to the ancient beliefs which had ruled supreme prior to the age of enlightenment. Goethe, to be sure, invokes the classical gods. In taking his leave of the humanistic tradition he attaches himself to an even older Greek heritage. But what transpired was not the re-establishment of a religious cult, but the creation of an independent secularized faith which traces the divine powers in the workings of nature and in the soul of the individual. Art furnished a very special revelation of these divine forces; and the Greeks were the great artists par excellence. That is why Winckelmann was able to find in Homer and in classical sculpture an expression of the divine on earth. This recollection of a distant past whose significance had been temporarily obscured made it possible to overcome rationalism without a recourse to scepticism or sleight-of-hand. In the age of Callimachus also, new religious needs had come to the fore and sought satisfaction outside the traditional forms of the native cults. This led to the acceptance of Asiatic and Egyptian gods, to an influx of barbaric material which could not but clash with the Greek culture. Wincklelmann, in a later age, was in a position to return to the foundations of European thought. He went outside the seemingly exhausted tradition of religious beliefs, to look for the revelation of the deity in the visible world. And thus he found himself able once more, despite enlightenment and scepticism, to arouse himself and others to an enthusiastic and passionate acclaim of the significant achievements in history and art. Among the Greeks this reversal from playfulness to seriousness was no longer feasible. But Goethe, in his age, repeated that distinction between the grand and the slender art which Aristophanes had been the first to promulgate

The poetry of the period of Storm and Stress is therefore not post-philosophical in the same sense as we saw it to be true of Callimachus. In its wake there developed a philosophy which was in many respects opposed to rationalism and which, unlike the philosophy of the enlightenment, succeeded in integrating history in its plan. Another consequence of it was—and here again the contrast with the age of Callimachus is evident—a tremendous upsurge of the historical sciences. This development, whatever other stimuli may have been operative to bring it about, owed its chief impulse to the new approach toward antiquity. Moreover, it was probably due to the new understanding of the Greek world as a historical phenomenon, that in the lyric poetry which at the time overran England and France as well as Germany, self-reflexion did not at once turn into the playful irony of Callimachus; that all poets, however personal the sentiments they expressed, acknowledged their membership in a meaningful world and in a life which in spite of all conflicts deserves to be taken seriously. The romantics may have longed for the age of childhood, they may have yearned for a return to the simple and artless forms of life; at the same time, however, Greek culture was, in some shape or other, their ultimate goal. In the course of the nineteenth century we often find a violent rejection of all things classical, and here we may detect the echoes of certain Storm and Stress ideas regarding the primitive genius. But we ought not to overlook the subtle irony of the circumstance that even the raving half-nonsense of the primitive genius is intimately linked with a tradition, a tradition, to boot, which derives from the opposite pole. Let us therefore console ourselves with the knowledge that the tradition of European culture is a reservoir which gives us the strength we need to overcome our spiritual crises. The Greeks did not yet have this reservoir at their disposal; it is all the more imperative that we exploit its energies. In this way, with the help of the Greeks, we shall perhaps be even more successful than they in fighting shy of the wrong turns and blind alleys which hamper our progress.