been narrowed to mean a certain kind of physical
beauty which no more exhausts the possibilities of external
attractiveness than the respectability of a Clapham builder exhausts
the possibilities of moral attractiveness.

The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been the
Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have
wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against
the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have
long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a
stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the
Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism--an
asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish
severity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that men
lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees
of blood certain consequences might follow. But they did not starve
their instinct for contrasts and combinations; their prophets gave two
wings to the ox and any number of eyes to the cherubim with all the
riotous ingenuity of Lewis Carroll. But the Greeks carried their police
regulation into elfland; they vetoed not the actual adulteries of the
earth but the wild weddings of ideas, and forbade the banns of thought.

It is extraordinary to watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters
of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The
chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have
been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie
a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Who ever feels
that the giants in Greek art and poetry were really big--big as some
folk-lore giants have been? In some Scandinavian story a hero walks for
miles along a mountain ridge, which eventually turns out to be the
bridge of the giant's nose. That is what we should call, with a calm
conscience, a large giant. But this earthquake fancy terrified the
Greeks, and their terror has terrified all mankind out of their natural
love of size, vitality, variety, energy, ugliness. Nature intended every
human face, so long as it was forcible, individual, and expressive, to
be regarded as distinct from all others, as a poplar is distinct from an
oak, and an apple-tree from a willow. But what the Dutch gardeners did
for trees the Greeks did for the human form; they lopped aw