ination like the colours of a
dove's wing, or the pattern of a shot silk, interwoven, unsteady, never
completely united into one, never completely separated into several,
were rudely seized, disentangled by art; part was taken, part thrown
aside; what remained was homogeneous, definite, unchanging; it was what
it was and could never be aught else.

Goethe has remarked, with a subjective simplicity of irreverence which
is almost comical, that as God created man in his image, it was only
fair that man, in his turn, should create God in _his_ image. But the
decay of pagan belief was not, as Hegel imagines, due to the fact that
Hellenic art was anthropomorphic. The gods ceased to be gods not merely
because they became too like men, but because they became too like
anything definite. If the ibis on the amulet, or the owl on the
terra-cotta, represents a more vital belief in the gods than does the
Venus of Milo or the Giustiniani Minerva, it is not because the idea of
divinity is more compatible with an ugly bird than with a beautiful
woman, but because whereas the beautiful woman, exquisitely wrought by a
consummate sculptor, occupied the mind of the artist and of the beholder
with the idea of her beauty, to the exclusion of all else, the
rudely-engraven ibis, or the badly-modelled owlet, on the other hand,
served merely as a symbol, as the recaller of an idea; the mind did not
pause in contemplation of the bird, but wandered off in search of the
god: the goggle eyes of the owl and the beak of the ibis were soon
forgotten in the contemplation of the vague, ever transmuted visions of
phenomena of sky and light, of semi-human and semi-bestial shapes, of
confused half-embodied forces; in short, of the supernatural. But the
human shape did most mischief to the supernatural, merely because the
human shape was the most absolute, the most distinct of all shapes: a
god might be symbolised as a beast, but he could only be pourtrayed
as a man; and if the portrait was correct, then the god was a man,
and nothing more. Even the most fantastic among pagan supernatural
creatures, those strange monsters who longest kept their original dual
nature--the centaurs, satyrs, and tritons--became, beneath the chisel of
the artist, mere aberrations from the normal, rare, and curious types
like certain fair-booth phenomena, but perfectly intelligible and
rational; the very Chimaera, she who was to give her name to every sort
of unintelligible fancy,