Thurium, sensual.  The Siren Ligeia, and fountain of Arethusa, on the coins of Terina and Syracuse, are prettier, but totally without expression, and chiefly set off by their well-curled hair.  You might have expected something subtle in Mercuries; but the Mercury of AEnus is a very stupid-looking fellow, in a cap like a bowl, with a knob on the top of it.  The Bacchus of Thasos is a drayman with his hair pomatum’d.  The Jupiter of Syracurse is, however, calm and refined; and the Apollo of Clazomenae would have been impressive, if he had not come down to us, much flattened by friction.  But on the whole, the merit of Greek coins does not primarily depend on beauty of features, nor even, in the period of highest art, that of the statues.  You make take the Venus of Melos as a standard of beauty of the central Greek type.  She has tranquil, regular, and lofty features; but could not hold her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple English girl, of pure race and kind heart.

168.  And the reason that Greek art, on the whole, bores you (and you know it does), is that you are always forced to look in it for something that is not there; but which may be seen every day, in real life, all round you; and which you are naturally disposed to delight in, and ought to delight in.  For the Greek race was not at all one of exalted beauty, but only of general and healthy completeness of form.  They were only, and could be only, beautiful in body to the degree that they were beautiful in soul (for you will find, when you read deeply into the matter, that the body is only the soul made visible).  And the Greeks were indeed 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.

169.  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 Right.* 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 fiddle-strings, which constitute the ideal life of a modern artist.

* Compare above, sec. 101.

Also observe, there is an entire masterhood of its business up to the required point.  A Greek does not reach after other people’s strength, nor outreach 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 follows on that strength.