Inhumanity: even in the "Antigone," even in Goethe's "Iphigenia."

The want of "rationalism" in the Greeks.

Young people cannot understand the political affairs of antiquity.

The poetic element: a bad expectation.


79

Do the philologists know the present time? Their judgments on it as
Periclean, their mistaken judgments when they speak of Freytag's[7]
genius as resembling that of Homer, and so on; their following in the
lead of the littérateurs, their abandonment of the pagan sense, which
was exactly the classical element that Goethe discovered in Winckelmann.


80

The condition of the philologists may be seen by their indifference at
the appearance of Wagner. They should have learnt even more through him
than through Goethe, and they did not even glance in his direction. That
shows that they are not actuated by any strong need, or else they would
have an instinct to tell them where their food was to be found.


81

Wagner prizes his art too highly to go and sit in a corner with it, like