2o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



it Avc had all uf that coiiicdv wliirh is rcprcsciitctl Ijv Aristophanes 

 alone; if we had all (d' the more ancictit comedy, all of the ndddlc 

 period and all of the new, with ]\Ienaiider who since the Renais- 

 sance is the regret of all critics of fine apprehension — all this po- 

 etry could not exhaust the multiple fecimdity and the j)rodii>ious 

 richness of the imagination whi(di created it. if malevolent For- 

 tune had decreed the destruction of every hit of (ii-eek ]dastic art 

 we should have been condemned to per])etual ignorance of many 

 aspects and methods of the Greek soul. Is there anything in litera- 

 ture worth the little clay figures of Tanagra in making clear how 

 the Greeks apprehended and enjoyed female beauty: how they 

 loved it not only in the noble and serious types of a Pallas or an 

 Aphrodite, but even as presented by the humble inhabitants of 

 little villages in the graceful abandon of their everyday life and 

 in the liberty of their most ordinary attitudes? If we base an 

 opinion of the religion of the Greeks only upon the epithets used 

 by poets in defining the gods and upon actions they attributed to 

 them, we run the risk of judging wrongly. In contemplating their 

 images we obtain clearer notions of the ideas associated with each 

 divine type. Alas! we do not possess the great works of Phidias 

 which according to men of authority made men more religious — 

 the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia. But even 

 in the reduced copies of these two masterpieces which have reached 

 down to our time we can divine how the master expressed in the 

 one the idea of calm and luminous intelligence and of supreme wis- 

 dom, and in the other the idea of that sovereign force in repose 

 and of that omnipotence, tempered by goodness, which were con- 

 ceived to exist in the sovereign of the universe, th(» father of gods 

 and men. 



In subsequent paragraphs Perrot imagines the Greek statues 

 of the Louvre thus addressing a classical student: 



"Young man, you who are studying Greece in Ilomei- and 

 Plato, in Sophocles and Herodotus, do not pass us by so quickly. 

 We also belong to that Cireece which you discern and which \n\\ 

 seek in their writings, of which not without diflficulty you decii)her 

 the prose and the verse. To understand and to love us, to read in 

 our features the thoughts of which we are the expression, to seize 

 in the modeling of our flesh and in the pure outline of onr limhs 

 the secret of the genius which created us, no gi-ammar nor dic- 

 tionary is needed; only apply yourself to the education of yoni- eye. 

 In this exercise, in this apprenticeship, yon will find a pleasure 

 which will become more and more keen as yon become more ca- 

 pable of perceiving rapidly the finest gradations. If you aspire to 

 become ati authorized iiit( ■ri)rcter of Greek genins, do not fear that 



