frozen into stone.  The men are more beautiful than human; but they are human.  They are splendid unspoiled human beings, reared for utmost bodily perfection; athletes whose whole training had been, you may say, to music:  they are music expressed in terms of the human body.  Yes; but already the beauty of the body outshone the majesty of the Soul.  It was the beauty of the body the artists aimed at expressing:  a perfect body—­and a sound mind in it:  a perfectly healthy mind in it, no doubt (be cause you cannot have a really sound and beautiful body without a sound healthy mind)—­was the ideal they sought and saw.  Very well, so far; but, you see, Art has ceased to be sacred, and the handmaid of the Mysteries; it bothers itself no longer with the other side of the sky.

In Pheidias’ own work we might have seen the influx at that moment when, shining through the soul plane, its rays fell full on the physical, to impress and impregnate that with the splendor of the Soul.  We might have seen that it was still the Soul that held his attention, although the body was known thoroughly and mastered:  that it was the light he aimed to express, not the thing it illumined.  In the work of his pupils, the preoccupation is with the latter; we see the physical grown beautiful under the illumination of the Soul; not the Soul that illumines it.  The men of the Egyptian sculptors had been Gods.  The Gods of these Greek sculptors were men.  Perfect, glorious, beautiful men —­so far as externals were concerned.  But men—­to excite personal feeling, not to quell it into nothingness and awe.  The perfection, even at that early stage and in the work of the disciples of Pheidias, was a quality of the personality.

It was indeed marvelously near the point of equilibrium:  the moment when Spirit enters conquered matter, and stands there enthroned.  In Pheidias himself I cannot but think we should have found that moment as we find it in Aeschylus.  But you see, it is when that has occurred:  when Spirit has entered matter, and made the form, the body, supremely beautiful; it is precisely then that the moment of peril comes—­if there is not the wisdom present that knows how to avoid the peril.  The next and threatening step downward is preoccupation with, then worship of, the body.

The Age of Pericles came to worship the body:  that was the danger into which it fell; that was what brought about the ruin of Greece.  That huge revelation of material beauty; and that absence of control from above; the lost adequacy of the Mysteries, and the failure of the Pythagorean Movement;—­the impatience of spiritual criticism, heedlessness of spiritual warning;—­well, we can see what a turning-point the time was in history.  On the side of politics, selfishness and ambition were growing; on the side of personal life, vice. . . .  It is a thing to be pondered on, that what has kept Greece sterile these last two thousand years or so is, I believe, the malaria; which is a thing that