miracle of the Resurrection has come to seem so unimportant and uninteresting to educated men, it might be a wise economy to connect its poetry with this experience, that great and creative characters can raise men better worth knowing than Lazarus from the dead. Nietsche thought that Shakespeare had brought Brutus back to life, (though he knew very little of Roman history), and that Brutus was the Roman best worth knowing. "Of all peoples, the Greeks dreamt the dream of life the best," Goethe said; and again, "For all other arts we have to make some allowance; to Greek art alone we are for ever debtors." To feel the truth of these sayings with a passion similar to that shown in the passages quoted above from Dürer, must surely be a great help to an artist. Such a passion is an end in itself, or rather is the only means by which we can win spiritual freedom from some of the heavier fetters that modern life lays upon us. It freed Goethe even from Germany. CHAPTER IV BEAUTY I How is beauty to be judged?--upon that we have to deliberate. A man by skill may bring it into every single thing, for in some things we recognise that as beautiful which elsewhere would lack beauty. Good and better in respect of beauty are not easy to discern; for it would be quite possible to make two different figures, one stout, the other thin, which should differ one from the other in every proportion, and yet we scarce might be able to judge which of the two excelled in beauty. What beauty is I know not, though it dependeth upon many things. I shall here apply to what is to be called beautiful the same touchstone as that by which we decide what is right. For as what all the world prizeth as right we hold to be right, so what all the world esteemeth beautiful that we will also hold for beautiful, and ourselves strive to produce the like. There are many causes and varieties of beauty; he that can prove them is so much the more to be trusted. The accord of one thing with another is beautiful, therefore want of harmony is not beautiful. A real harmony linketh together things unlike. Use is a part of beauty, whatever therefore is useless unto men is without beauty. The more imperfection is excluded so much the more doth beauty abide in the work. Guard thyself from superfluity. But beauty is so put together in men and so uncertain is our judgment about it, that we may perhaps find two men both beautiful and fair to look upon, and yet neither resembleth the other, in measure or kind, in any single point or part; and so blind is our perception that we shall not understand whether of the two is the more beautiful, and if we give an opinion on the matter it shall lack certainty.