Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/201

Rh it has not yet plunged into the depths of Christian 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 reflection 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 bones of the human countenance,—these are the good luck of the Greek when he enters into 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 Ægæ, of the Ismenian Apollo, and the priest who at Tanagra led the pro-