further cultivation in France. This school represented commonplace
nature instead of antique beauty, and the manners of a French minuet
instead of antique simplicity and grace. It became bankrupt when, under
Winckelmann's direction, a return was made to the antique school.
Another example is supplied in the painting belonging to the first
quarter of this century. Art was regarded merely as a means and
instrument of mediaeval religious feeling, and consequently
ecclesiastical subjects alone were chosen for its themes. These,
however, were treated by painters who were wanting in earnestness of
faith, and in their delusion they took for examples Francesco Francia,
Pietro Perugino, Angelico da Fiesole, and others like them, even holding
them in greater esteem than the truly great masters who followed. In
view of this error, and because in poetry an analogous effort had at the
same time met with favour, Goethe wrote his parable _Pfaffenspiel_. This
school, reputedly capricious, became bankrupt, and was followed by a
return to nature, which made itself known in _genre_ pictures and scenes
of life of every description, even though it strayed sometimes into
vulgarity.

It is the same with the progress of the human mind in the _history of
literature_, which is for the most part like the catalogue of a cabinet
of deformities; the spirit in which they keep the longest is pigskin. We
do not need to look there for the few who have been born shapely; they
are still alive, and we come across them in every part of the world,
like immortals whose youth is ever fresh. They alone form what I have
distinguished as _real_ literature, the history of which, although poor
in persons, we learn from our youth up out of the mouths of educated
people, and not first of all from compilations. As a specific against
the present prevailing monomania for reading literary histories, so that
one may be able to chatter about everything without really knowing