It is only in the best Greek gems, on the silver coins of Syracuse,
or among the marble figures of the Parthenon frieze, that one can
find the ideal representation of the marvellous beauty of that face
which laughed through the leaves last night as Hester Grazebrook.

Pure Greek it is, with the grave low forehead, the exquisitely
arched brow; the noble chiselling of the mouth, shaped as if it
were the mouthpiece of an instrument of music; the supreme and
splendid curve of the cheek; the augustly pillared throat which
bears it all: it is Greek, because the lines which compose it are
so definite and so strong, and yet so exquisitely harmonized that
the effect is one of simple loveliness purely: Greek, because its
essence and its quality, as is the quality of music and of
architecture, is that of beauty based on absolutely mathematical
laws.

But while art remains dumb and immobile in its passionless
serenity, with the beauty of this face it is different: the grey
eyes lighten into blue or deepen into violet as fancy succeeds
fancy; the lips become flower-like in laughter or, tremulous as a
bird's wing, mould themselves at last into the strong and bitter
moulds of pain or scorn. And then motion comes, and the statue
wakes into life. But the life is not the ordinary life of common
days; it is life with a new value given to it, the value of art:
and the charm to me of Hester Grazebrook's acting in the first
scene of the play last night was that mingling of classic grace
with absolute reality which is the secret of all beautiful art, of