the
circumstances; which can show them a part of the great whole, by harmony
or discord with the whole universe, down to the flowers beneath their
feet. This, too, had to be done: how it became possible for even the
genius of a Shakespeare to get it done, I may with your leave hint to you
hereafter. Why it was not given to the Greeks to do it, I know not.

Let us at least thank them for what they did. One work was given them,
and that one they fulfilled as it had never been fulfilled before; as it
will never need to be fulfilled again; for the Greeks' work was done not
for themselves alone but for all races in all times; and Greek Art is the
heirloom of the whole human race; and that work was to assert in drama,
lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic, the dignity of man--the dignity of
man which they perceived for the most part with their intense aesthetic
sense, through the beautiful in man. Man with them was divine, inasmuch
as he could perceive beauty and be beautiful himself. Beauty might be
physical, aesthetic, intellectual, moral. But in proportion as a thing
was perfect it revealed its own perfection by its beauty. Goodness
itself was a form--though the highest form--of beauty. [Greek text]
meant both the physically beautiful and the morally good; [Greek text]
both the ugly and the bad.

Out of this root-idea sprang the whole of that Greek sculpture, which is
still, and perhaps ever will be, one of the unrivalled wonders of the
world.

Their first statues, remember, were statues of the gods. This is an
historic fact. Before B.C. 580 there were probably no statues in Greece
save those of deities. But of what form? We all know that the usual
tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or less monstrous.
Their monstrosity may have been meant, as it was certainly with the
Mexican idols, and probably those of the Semitic races of Syria and
Palestine, to symbolise the ferocious passions which they attributed to
those objects of their dread, appeasable alone by human sacrifice. Or
the monstrosity, as with the hawk-headed or cat-headed Egyptian idols,
the winged bulls of Nineveh and Babylon, the many-handed deities of
Hindostan--merely symbolised powers which could not, so the priest and
the sculptor held, belong to mere humanity. Now, of such monstrous forms
of idols, the records in Greece are very few and very ancient--relics of
an older worship, and most probably of an older race. From the ear