Here we have Goethe's early and vigorous new conception of the antique contrasted with Wieland's Frenchified one; and we have at the same time the poetical confession of faith of the man whom his contemporaries called the Great Pagan. This is the philosophy of Spinoza in the form of a daring jest. But Goethe did not retain this bold, naturalistic view of the antique. When his youthful ardour had exhausted itself in _Werther_, in _Götz_, and in his enthusiastic treatise on Gothic architecture, he abruptly turned his back upon the Gothic and upon enthusiasm; and when he returns to the Greeks, it is their serenity and their lucidity, their simple harmonies and their sound common sense which captivate him. All that was passionate, full of colour, and realistic, he put aside and ignored; what was popular, burlesque, sensational, he only admitted in his allegorical farces, such as _Die klassische Walpurgisnacht_ in Faust; and for what was wildly bacchantic or darkly mystical his eyes were closed. With an increasing aversion for Christianity, which finds its chief expression in the Venetian Epigrams, was associated such a repugnance for the Gothic and all Christian art, that when he was at Assisi, a place so rich in famous Christian mementoes, Goethe did not even visit the beautiful Church of St. Francis, but devoted his attention exclusively to the insignificant ruins of the Temple of Minerva. It was in this frame of mind that he wrote his Iphigenia, a work which may be looked upon as typical of the whole Germanic-Gothic renaissance of the antique, and which played an important part in the formation of the art theories of the nineteenth century. It was regarded by German æstheticism under the leadership of Hegel, and by French æstheticism under the leadership of Taine, as a species of model work of art. Hegel considered that only the _Antigone_ of Sophocles was worthy to be compared with it. The spirit by which it is inspired is the same spirit which inspired all Schiller's neo-Hellenic poems, _Die Götter Griechenlands, Die Künstler, Die Ideale, Das Ideal und das Leben_. Men were actually inclined at that time to accept, as representative of the life of the Greeks, Schiller's description of the life of the gods: "Ewig klar und spiegelrein und eben Fliesst das zephyrleichte Leben Im Olymp den Seligen dahin."