But you were surely too severe, poor friend of mine. There were just men even in Askelon--upright, religious, and intelligent, full of good works. What if this clever conveyancer had appropriated to himself enough to buy him a fine house? Was it not in the very air of Askelon that he should do such a thing--that he, like others, should at any rate establish himself comfortably? and will not some honester man than himself live after him in the fine house? Come now, confess, I used to say, that you yourself, in his place, might not have done much better: confess, at least, that when you were a boy you put your fingers into the sugar-bowl when you should have kept them out, when you well knew that you ought to keep them out! And then my friend would confess the pressure of the "environment," the power of the "Zeit-Geist," as we have learned to call it since then. Poor man! That was long ago; and things have changed greatly in Askelon of latter years. They tell me that everybody there has now grown honest, and that nobody goes around any more reading invisible writing on the houses. And all the fine buildings are still standing, it appears; though the journals of that city remark that some of the Grecian architecture has peeled off from the fronts of the houses in the Pentodon, having been insecurely fastened on, it seems, at first. And how my poor friend used to criticise those very palaces in his dry, technical way! One thing in particular that he said I remember by the antithesis, the turn of it; he used to say that the architects of Askelon were never certain whether to construct ornament or to ornament construction.
Well, he is gone now; he will never blame Askelon again, or run down Gath. He died in Philistia. Perhaps he served his purpose there, but I am sure he would have done more if he had been a little less Quixotic in his notions.
But let us not grow tristful again. How many a happy escape, as we said, has been made from Philistia; how many a clear spirit has made its way out of the darkness to a true honor. If many who have had the higher endowments have perished in the shadow, princes dying behind the iron mask, yet not all have failed; some have broken away to a career. Of two such in particular let us conclude by speaking--Winckelmann and Heine. Both were Prussians, and each one migrated from the north into a southern country, a fugitive from "the power of the night, the press of the storm." Each waited long before his opportunity came; each learned that the "tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours." But each found his opportunity; and by what an instinctive escape! For Winckelmann it was his first journey out of Prussia, when, in 1755, he set his face toward Rome; still it was a homing flight like that of a carrier pigeon; for in Rome he found his appointed place, and there he spent in congenial work the remaining years of his life. Yet he could say, in the bitterness of his spirit, on reaching Rome, "I have come into the world and into Italy too late." Nor may we contradict that bitter cry, even in view of Winckelmann's great critical achievement; we have to ask, Might it not have been greater still, had he not been thus _serus studiorum_, as Horace phrases it--thus unluckily belated in his culture?