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.
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