Among Famous Books | Page 8

for it but to slay her. To do this, Perseus set out upon
his long journey, equipped with the magic gifts of swiftness and
invisibility, and bearing on his arm the shield that was also a mirror.
The whole picture is infinitely dreary. As he travels across the dark sea
to the land where the pillars of Atlas are visible far off, towering into
the sky, the light decreases. In the murky and dangerous twilight he
forces the Graiai, those grey-haired sisters with their miserable
fragmentary life, to bestir their aged limbs and guide him to the
Gorgons' den. By the dark stream, where the yellow light brooded
everlastingly, he reached at last that cave of horrors. Well was it then
for Perseus that he was invisible, for the snakes that were Medusa's hair
could see all round. But at that time Medusa was asleep and the snakes
asleep, and in the silence and twilight of the land where there is
"neither night nor day, nor cloud nor breeze nor storm," he held the
magic mirror over against the monster, beheld her in it without change
or injury to himself, severed the head, and bore it away to place it on
Athene's shield.
It is very interesting to notice how Art has treated the legend. It was
natural that so vivid an image should become a favourite alike with
poets and with sculptors, but there was a gradual development from the
old hideous and terrible representations, back to the calm repose of a
beautiful dead face. This might indeed more worthily record the
maiden's tragedy, but it missed entirely the thing that the old myth had
said. The oldest idea was horrible beyond horror, for the darker side of
things is always the most impressive to primitive man, and sheer
ugliness is a category with which it is easy to work on simple minds.
The rudest art can achieve such grotesque hideousness long before it
can depict beauty. Later, as we have seen, Art tempered the face to
beauty, but in so doing forgot the meaning of the story. It was the old
story that has been often told, of the fair and frail one who had fallen

among the pitiless. For her there was no compassion either in mortals
or in immortals. It was the tragedy of sweet beauty desecrated and lost,
the petrifying horror of which has found its most unflinching modern
expression in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. _Corruptio
optimi pessima_.
To interpret such stories as these by any reference to the rising sun, or
the rivalry between night and dawn, is simply to stultify the science of
interpretation. It may, indeed, have been true that most of those who
told and heard the tale in ancient times accepted it in its own right, and
without either the desire or the thought of further meanings. Yet, even
told in that fashion, as it clung to memory and imagination, it must
continually have reminded men of certain features of essential human
nature, which it but too evidently recorded. Here was one of the sad
troop of soulless women who appear in the legends of all the races of
mankind. Medusa had herself been petrified before she turned others to
stone. The horror that had come upon her life had been too much to
bear, and it had killed her heart within her.
So far of passion and the price the woman's heart has paid for it. But
this story has to do also with Athene, on whose shield Medusa's head
must rest at last. For it is not passion only, but knowledge, that may
petrify the soul. Indeed, the story of passion can only do this when the
dazzling glamour of temptation has passed, and in place of it has come
the cold knowledge of remorse. Then the sight of one's own shame, and,
on a wider scale, the sight of the pain and the tragedy of the world,
present to the eyes of every generation the spectacle of victims standing
petrified like those who had seen too much at the cave's mouth in the
old legend.
It is peculiarly interesting to contrast the story of Medusa with its
Hebrew parallel in Lot's wife. Both are women presumably beautiful,
and both are turned to stone. But while the Greek petrifaction is the
result of too direct a gaze upon the horrible, the Hebrew is the result of
too loving and desirous a gaze upon the coveted beauty of the world.
Nothing could more exactly represent and epitomise the diverse genius
of the nations, and we understand the Greek story the better for the

strong contrast with its Hebrew parallel. To the Greek, ugliness was
dangerous; and the horror of the world, having no explanation nor
redress, could but petrify