here Greek thought finds its
happy limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not begun to
boast of its independence of the flesh; the spirit has not yet absorbed
everything with its emotions, nor reflected its own colour everywhere.
It has indeed committed itself to a train of reflexion which must end in
a defiance of form, of all that is outward, in an exaggerated idealism.
But that end is still distant: it has not yet plunged into the depths of
religious mysticism.

This ideal art, in which the thought does not outstrip or lie beyond its
sensible embodiment, could not have arisen out of a phase of life that
was uncomely or poor. That delicate pause in Greek reflexion was joined,
by some supreme good luck, to the perfect animal nature of the Greeks.
Here are the two conditions of an artistic ideal. The influences which
perfected the animal nature of the Greeks are part of the process by
which the ideal was evolved. Those "Mothers" who, in the second part of
Faust, mould and remould the typical forms which appear in human history,
preside, at the beginning of Greek culture, over such a concourse of
happy physical conditions as ever generates by natural laws some rare
type of intellectual or spiritual life. That delicate air, "nimbly and
sweetly recommending itself" to the senses, the finer aspects of nature,
the finer lime and clay of the human form, and modelling of the dainty
framework of the human countenance:--these are the good luck of the Greek
when he enters upon life. Beauty becomes a distinction, like genius, or
noble place.

"By no people," says Winckelmann, "has beauty been so highly esteemed as
by the Greeks. The priests of a youthful Jupiter at Aegae, of the
Ismenian Apollo, and the priest who at Tanagra led the procession of
Mercury, bearing a lamb upon his shoulders, were always youths to whom
the prize of beauty had been awarded. The citizens of Egesta, in Sicily,
erected a monument to a certain Philip, who was not their fellow-citizen,
but of Croton, for his distinguished beauty; and the people made
offerings at it. In an ancient song, ascribed to Simonides or Epicharmus,
of four wishes, the first was health, the second beauty. And as beauty
was so longed for and prized by the Greeks, every beautiful person sought
to become known to the whole people by this distinction, and above all to
approve himself to the artists, because they awarded the prize; and this
was for the artists an opportuni