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.
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