very good people, much better people than most of us think, or than many of us are; but there are better people alive now than the best of them, and lovelier people to be seen now than the loveliest of them.

Right.

It is better to be right than

to be beautiful.

Then, what are the merits of this Greek art, which make it so exemplary for you? Well, not that it is beautiful, but that it is All that it desires to do, it does, and all that it does, does well. You will find, as you advance in the knowledge of art, that its laws of self-restraint are very marvelous; that its peace of heart, and contentment in doing a simple thing, with only one or two qualities, restrictedly desired, and sufficiently attained, are a most wholesome element of education for you, as opposed to the wild writhing, and wrestling, and longing for the moon, and tilting at windmills, and agony of eyes, and torturing of fingers, and general spinning out of one's soul into fiddlestrings, which constitute the ideal life of a modern artist.

Also observe, there is entire masterhood of its business up to the required point. A Greek does not reach after other people's strength, nor out-reach his own. He never tries to paint before he can draw; he never tries to lay on flesh where there are no bones; and he never expects to find the bones of anything in his inner consciousness. Those are his first merits-sincere and innocent purpose, strong common sense and principle, and all the strength that comes of these, and all the grace that follows on that strength. 110

But, second Ac Greek art is always exemplary in disposition of masses, which is a thing that in modern days students rarely look for, artists not enough, and the public never. But, whatever else Greek work may fail of, you may be always sure its masses are well placed, and their placing has been the object of the most subtle care. Look, for instance, at the inscription in front of this Hercules of the name of the town-Camarina. You can't read it, even though you may know Greek, without some pains; for the sculptor knew well enough that it mattered very little whether you read it or not, for the Camarina Hercules could tell his own story; but what did above all things matter was, that no K or A or M should come in a wrong place with respect to the outline of

the head, and divert the eye from it, or spoil any of its lines. So the whole inscription is thrown into a sweeping curve of gradually diminishing size, continuing from the lion's paws, round the neck, up to the forehead, and answering a decorative purpose as completely as the curls of the mane opposite. Of these, again, you cannot change or displace one without mischief; they are almost as even in reticulation as a piece of basket-work; but each has a different form and a due relation to the rest, and if you set to work to draw that mane rightly, you will find that, whatever time you give to it, you can't get the tresses quite into their places, and that every tress out of its place does an injury. If you want to test your powers of accurate drawing, you may make that lion's mane your pons asinorum. I have never yet met with a student who didn't make an ass in a lion's skin of himself, when he tried it.

Granted, however, that these tresses may be finely placed, still they are not like a lion's mane. So we come back to the question,-if the face is to be a man's face, why is not the lion's mane to be like a lion's mane? Well, because it can't be like a lion's mane without too much trouble;-and inconvenience after that, and poor success after all. Too much trouble in cutting the die into fine fringes and jags; inconvenience after that,―because Great art often fringes and jags would spoil the surface of a coin; poor success after all,-because, though you can easily stamp cheeks and foreheads smooth at a blow you can't stamp projecting tresses fine at a blow, whatever pains you take with your die.

sacrifices detail to largeness.

6

So your Greek uses his common sense, wastes no time, loses no skill, and says to you: Here are beautifully set tresses, which I have carefully designed and easily stamped. Enjoy them; and if you cannot understand that they mean lion's mane, heaven mend your wits.'

See then, you have in this work, well-founded knowledge, simple and right aims, thorough mastery of handicraft, splendid invention in arrangement, unerring common sense in treatment, -merits, these, I think, exemplary enough to justify our tormenting you a little with Greek Art. But it has one merit more than these, the greatest of all. It always means something worth

saying. Not merely worth saying for that time only, but for all time. What do you think this helmet of lion's hide is always given to Hercules for? You can't suppose it means only that he once killed a lion, and always carried the skin afterwards to show that he had, as Indian sportsmen send home stuffed rugs, with claws at the corners, and a lump in the middle which one tumbles over every time one stirs the fire. What was this Nemean Lion, whose spoils were evermore to cover Hercules from the cold? Not merely a large specimen of Felis Leo, ranging the fields of Nemea, be sure of that. This Nemean cub was one of a bad lit

ter. Born of Typhon and Echidna,-of the whirlwind and the snake,-Cerberus his brother, the Hydra of Lerna his sister, -it must have been difficult to get his hide off him. He had to be found in darkness too, and dealt upon without weapons, by grip at the throat-arrows and club of no avail against him. What does all that mean?

now.

The ethical lesson in the Nemean myth.

It means that the Nemean Lion is the first great adversary of life, whatever that may be-to Hercules, or to any of us, then or The first monster we have to strangle, or be destroyed by, fighting in the dark, and with none to help us, only Athena, standing by to encourage with her smile. Every man's Nemean Lion lies in wait for him somewhere. The slothful man says, there is a lion in the path. He says well. The quiet unslothful man says the same, and knows it too. But they differ in their farther reading of the text. The slothful man says I shall be slain, and the unslothful, IT shall be. It is the first ugly and strong enemy that rises against us, all future victory depending on victory over that. Kill it; and through all the rest-of life, what was once dreadful is your armour and you are clothed with that conquest for every other, and helmed with its crest of fortitude for evermore."

Ruskin's theory, the Nature

Allegorical the

CHAPTER III.

Different Theories of the Myth.

There are many theories concerning the origin and meaning of the myths. Taking the preceding chapters as data from which to reason, we find that theory and the Ruskin has accounted for them on the supory combined. position that they have a physical basis, or that they are nature stories; that the operations of nature were explained by comparing them with the actions of men, and so were personified; and so were realized through the imagination, and finally took on moral significance. If this is the allegorical theory, it must be remembered that the myth, at its beginning, was not an allegory, for the allegory comes only with developed intelligence.

"In order to comprehend a problem so complex as that which is offered by mythology," says J. Addington Symonds, "we must not be satisfied to approach it from one point of view. but must sift opinion, submit our theory to the crucible in more than one experiment, and, after all our labor, be content to find that much remains unexplained."

"In order to understand the question, we must make a demand upon our imagination, and endeaver to return, in thought at least, to the conditions of a people in the myth-forming age— the age, that is to say, in which not only were myths naturally made, but all the thinking of a nation took the form of myths. We must go back to a time when there were no written records, when there were no systems of thought, when language had not been subjected to analysis of any kind, when science had not

Symond's the

ory, the myth a

fancy.

begun to exist, when abstract notions were unknown, when history was impossible, and when the whole world was a land of miracles. There was no check then laid upon fancy, because nothing was as yet conceived as thought, but everything existed as sensation. In this infancy the nation told itself stories and believed them. The same faculties of the mind which afterwards gave birth to poetry and theology, philosophy and statecraft, science and history, were now so ill-defined and merely germinal that they produced but fables. The fables they produced were infinite in number and variety, beautiproduct of the tiful, and so pregnant with thought under the guise of fancy that long centuries scarcely sufficed for disengaging all that they contained. Greek mythology had already in itself all Greece, as the seed enfolds the plant. Poetry,' says Vico, 'which was the first form of wisdom, began with a system of thought, not reasoned or abstract, as ours is now, but felt and imagined, as was natural in the case of those primitive human beings who had developed no reasoning faculties but were all made up of senses in the highest physical perfection, and of most vigorous imaginations. In their total ignorance of causes they wondered at everything, and their poetry was all divine, because they ascribed to gods the objects of their wonder, and thought that beings like themselves, but greater, could alone have caused them. Thus they were like children whom we notice taking into their hands inanimate things, and playing and talking with them as though they were living persons. When thunder terrified them, they attributed their own nature to the phenomenon; and being apt to express their most violent passions by howls and roarings, they conceived heaven as a vast body, which gave notice of its anger by lightnings and thunderings. The whole of nature, in like manner, they imagined to be a vast animated body, capable of feeling and passion.""

Perhaps no better illustration of the lack of abstract thought among primitive peoples, and the development of such thought, can be given, than is found in the words of Max Müller.