at the series of coins of the best time of Greek art, which I have just
set before you? Are any of these goddesses or nymphs very beautiful?
Certainly the Junos are not. Certainly the Demeters are not. The Siren,
and Arethusa, have well-formed and regular features; but I am quite sure
that if you look at them without prejudice, you will think neither
reaches even the average standard of pretty English girls. The Venus
Urania suggests at first the idea of a very charming person, but you
will find there is no real depth nor sweetness in the contours, looked
at closely. And remember, these are chosen examples,--the best I can
find of art current in Greece at the great time; and if even I were to
take the celebrated statues, of which only two or three are extant, not
one of them excels the Venus of Melos; and she, as I have already
asserted, in the 'Queen of the Air,' has nothing notable in feature
except dignity and simplicity. Of Athena I do not know one authentic
type of great beauty; but the intense ugliness which the Greeks could
tolerate in their symbolism of her will be convincingly proved to you by
the coin represented in Plate VI. You need only look at two or three
vases of the best time to assure yourselves that beauty of feature was,
in popular art, not only unattained, but unattempted; and, finally,--and
this you may accept as a conclusive proof of the Greek insensitiveness
to the most subtle beauty,--there is little evidence even in their
literature, and none in their art, of their having ever perceived any
beauty in infancy, or early childhood.

195. The Greeks, then, do not give passion, do not give character, do
not give refined or naive beauty. But you may think that the absence of
these is intended to give dignity to the gods and nymphs; and that their
calm faces would be found, if you long observed them, instinct with some
expression of divine mystery or power.

I will convince you of the narrow range of Greek thought in these
respects, by showing you, from the two sides of one and the same coin,
images of the most mysterious of their deities, and the most
powerful,--Demeter, and Zeus.

Remember that just as the west coasts of Ireland and England catch first
on their hills the rain of the Atlantic, so the Western Peloponnese
arrests, in the clouds of the first mountain ranges of Arcadia, the
moisture of the Mediterranean; and over all the plains of Elis, Pylos,
and Messene, the strength and sustenance