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 the heart of man.  To the Hebrew, the beauty of the world was dangerous, and man must learn to turn away his eyes from beholding vanity.

The legend of Medusa is a story of despair, and there is little room in it for idealism of any kind; and yet there may be some hint, in the reflecting shield of Perseus, of a brighter and more heartening truth.  The horror of the world we have always with us, and for all exquisite spirits like those of the Greeks there is the danger of their being marred by the brutality of the universe, and made hard and cold in rigid petrifaction by the too direct vision of evil.  Yet for such spirits there is ever some shield of faith, in whose reflection they may see the darkest horrors and yet remain flesh and blood.  Those who believe in life and love, whose religion—­or at least whose indomitable clinging to the beauty they have once descried—­has taught them sufficient courage in dwelling upon these things, may come unscathed through any such ordeal.  But for that, the story is one of sheer pagan terror.  It came out of the old, dark pre-Olympian mythology (for the Gorgons are the daughters of Hades), and it embodied the ancient truth that the sorrow of the world worketh death.  It is a tragic world, and the earth-bound, looking upon its tragedy, will see in it only the macabre, and feel that graveyard and spectral air which breathes about the haunted pagan sepulchre.