Our theorist goes on to describe the doings of the first artist, and the slow contagion of his example among men similarly gifted, till the artistic species had filled the land with beautiful things, which were uncritically used by the non-artistic; "and the Amateur was unknown--and the Dilettante undreamed of." Such is the artist's fairy tale of explanation. The probable fact is that the "first artists" in historic Greece were moved to imitative construction by samples of the work of foreigners. If, on the other hand, we decide that the "race" had evolved relatively high artistic capacities before it reached its Greek or Asian home,[320] it will still hold good that the early Ægean evolution owed much to ancient Oriental and Egyptian example. The Greeks as we know them visibly passed from primitive to high art in all things. Having first had fetish Gods of unshapen stone, they made Gods in crudely human shape, at first probably of wood, later of stone. So with vases, goblets, tables, furniture, and ware of all sorts, all gradually developing in felicity of form up to a certain point, whereafter art worsened. What we require to know is the why of both processes. _Pace_ the artist, it is clear that artistic objects were multiplied mainly because they were in steady economic demand. The shaping impulse is doubtless special, and in its highest grades rare; but there must also have been special conditions to develop it in one country in the special degree. That is to say, the faculty for shaping, for design, was oftener appealed to in Greece than elsewhere, and was allowed more freedom in the response, thus reaching new excellence. The early Greeks can have had no very delicate taste, satisfied as they were with statues as primitive as the conventional Assyrian types they copied.