But just there Greek thought finds its happy
limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not yet
learned to boast 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 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 the proper range of 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 [207] 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 that 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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