It is this entirely one-sided conception of the antique which is gradually evolved from that expressed in _Götter, Helden und Wieland_, and which finally leads Goethe to write Homeric poems like _Achilleïs_. Thorvaldsen's position to the antique is influenced by the same ideas and presents a succession of almost parallel movements. In some of his earliest bas-reliefs--Achilles and Briseïs, for example--we observe that greater daring in the rendering of the antique with which Goethe started; but all his later representations of Greek subjects have been inspired by the ideal of peaceful, subdued harmony which superseded the vigorous tendency. This new, Germanic-Gothic conception of Hellas is that with which all my (Danish) readers have been brought up, which they have imbibed from conversation, from newspapers, from German and Danish poetry, and from the Thorvaldsen sculptures. It is the conception which with us is not only regarded as the Danish and German, but as the only, the absolutely correct one. The view which I venture to express here for the first time is, that the Greece of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Thorvaldsen is _almost_ as un-Greek as that of Racine and that of Barthélemy in _Le Jeune Anacharse_. Racine's style has too strong a flavour of the drawing-room and the court to be Greek; Goethe's and Thorvaldsen's (framed on Winckelmann's theories) is, in spite of the surpassing genius of these two great men, too chastened, too limpid, and too cold to be Greek. I believe that the time will come when Goethe's Iphigenia will not be considered appreciably more Greek than Racine's, when it will be discovered that the German Iphigenia's dignified morality is as German as the French Iphigenia's graceful refinement is French. The only question that remains is, whether one is more Greek when one is German or when one is French. I am perfectly aware that I am dashing my head against a wall of Germanic-Gothic prejudice when I declare myself on the side of the French. I am not ignorant of the firmly-rooted conviction that of the two European streams of culture one is Latin, Spanish, French, the other Greek, German, Northern. I know of the plausible arguments, that German poetry with Goethe at its head has an antique bias, and is more or less Hellenic; that Germany has produced Winckelmann, the re-discoverer of the antique, and the philologists who have interpreted Greece to us; while France has only produced Racine, who turned the Greek demigods and heroes into French courtiers, and Voltaire, who considered Aristophanes a charlatan. And yet, when in comparing the two Iphigenias I asked myself the question: Which of the two, the Frenchman's or the German's, more resembles the Greek? the answer I gave myself was--The Frenchman's.