poch is marked by that style which Winckelmann describes as the
still harsh and severe, from which the next or lofty style was able to
develop itself by the mere enhancement of the Characteristic into the
Sublime and the Simple.

For in the statues of the most perfect or divine natures not only
all the complexity of form of which human nature is capable had to
be united, but moreover the union must be such as may be conceived to
exist in the system of the Universe itself--the lower forms, or those
relating to inferior attributes, being comprehended under higher, and
all at last under one supreme form, in which they indeed extinguish
one another as separately existing, but still continue in Essence and
efficiency.

Thus, though we cannot call this high and self-sufficing Beauty
characteristic, so far as herewith is connected the notion of
limitation or conditionality in the manifestation, yet still the
characteristic continues efficient, though indistinguishable, within;
as in the crystal, although transparent, the texture nevertheless
remains; each characteristic element has its weight, however slight,
and helps to bring about the sublime equipoise of Beauty.

The outer side or basis of all Beauty is beauty of form. But as
Form cannot exist without Essence, wherever Form is, there also is
Character, whether in visible presence or only perceptible in its
effects. Characteristic Beauty, therefore, is Beauty in the root,
from which alone Beauty can arise as the fruit. Essence may, indeed,
outgrow Form, but even then the Characteristic remains as the still
efficient groundwork of the Beautiful.

That most excellent critic,[6] to whom the gods have given sway over
Nature as well as Art, compares the Characteristic in its relation to
Beauty, with the skeleton in its relation to the living form. Were we
to interpret this striking simile in our sense, we should say that
the skeleton, in Nature, is not, as in our thought, detached from the
living whole; that the firm and the yielding, the determining and
the determined, mutually presuppose each other, and can exist only
together; thus that the vitally Characteristic is already the whole
form, the result of the action and reaction of bone and flesh, of
Active and Passive. And although Art, like Nature, in its higher
developments, thrusts inward the previously visible skeleton, yet the
latter can never be opposed to Shape and Beauty, since it has always
a determining share in