historical Greece, the seclusion of women. Not that this ever existed
in the Oriental sense; but, with much freedom and simplicity of
relations inside the family, the share which women had in the public
and external life of the city, at a time when the city meant so much,
was comparatively slight. The greater freedom of women in Homer makes
the world of the Iliad and Odyssey really more modern, more akin to
our own, than that of the later poets. The girl in Theocritus, "with
spring in her eyes,"[1] comes upon us as we read the Idyls almost like
a modernism. It is in the fair shepherd boy, Daphnis or Thyrsis, that
Greek pastoral finds its most obvious, one might almost say its most
natural inspiration.

Much of what is most perplexing in the difference in this respect
between Greek and western art has light thrown on it, if we think of
the importance which angels have in medieval painting. Their
invention, if one may call it so, was one of the very highest moment
in art. Those lovely creations, so precisely drawn up to a certain
point, so elusive beyond it, raised the feeling for pure beauty into a
wholly ideal plane. The deepest longings of men were satisfied by the
contemplation of a paradise in which we should be even as they. In
that mystical portraiture of the invisible world an answer--perhaps
the only answer--was found to the demand for an ideal of beauty. That
remarkable saying preserved by S. Clement, of a kingdom in which "the
two shall be one, and the male with the female neither male nor
female,"[2] might form the text for a chapter of no small importance
in human history. The Greek lucidity, which made all mysticism
impossible in their art as it was alien from their life, did not do
away with this imperious demand; and their cult of beauty was the
issue of their attempt, imperfect indeed at best and at worst
disastrous, to reunite the fragments of the human ideal.[3]