Another myth of great beauty and far-reaching significance is that of Medusa.  It is peculiarly interesting on account of its double edge, for it shows us both the high possibilities of ideal beauty and the deepest depths of pagan horror.  Robert Louis Stevenson tells us how, as he hung between life and death in a flooded river of France, looking around him in the sunshine and seeing all the lovely landscape, he suddenly felt the attack of the other side of things.  “The devouring element in the universe had leaped out against me, in this green valley quickened by a running stream.  The bells were all very pretty in their way, but I had heard some of the hollow notes of Pan’s music.  Would the wicked river drag me down by the heels, indeed? and look so beautiful all the time?” It was in this connection that he gave us that striking and most suggestive phrase, “The beauty and the terror of the world.”  It is this combination of beauty and terror for which the myth of Medusa stands.  It finds its meaning in a thousand instances.  On the one hand, it is seen in such ghastly incidents as those in which the sheer horror of nature’s action, or of man’s crime, becomes invested with an illicit beauty, and fascinates while it kills.  On the other hand, it is seen in all of the many cases in which exquisite beauty proves also to be dangerous, or at least sinister.  “The haunting strangeness in beauty” is at once one of the most characteristic and one of the most tragic things in the world.

There were three sisters, the Gorgons, who dwelt in the Far West, beyond the stream of ocean, in that cold region of Atlas where the sun never shines and the light is always dim.  Medusa was one of them, the only mortal of the trio.  She was a monster with a past, for in her girlhood she had been the beautiful priestess of Athene, golden-haired and very lovely, whose life had been devoted to virgin service of the goddess.  Her golden locks, which set her above all other women in the desire of Neptune, had been her undoing:  and when Athene knew of the frailty of her priestess, her vengeance was indeed appalling.  Each lock of the golden hair was transformed into a venomous snake.  The eyes that had been so love-inspiring were now bloodshot and ferocious.  The skin, with its rose and milk-white tenderness, had changed to a loathsome greenish white.  All that remained of Medusa was a horrid thing, a mere grinning mask with protruding beast-like tusks and tongue hanging out.  So dreadful was the aspect of the changed priestess, that her face turned all those who chanced to catch sight of it to stone.  There is a degree of hideousness which no eyes can endure; and so it came to pass that the cave wherein she dwelt, and all the woods around it, were full of men and wild beasts who had been petrified by a glance of her,—­grim fossils immortalised in stone,—­while the snakes writhed and the red eyes rolled, waiting for another victim.