Book Description

A passage from the book... Let us think for a while upon what the Stage was once, in a republic of the past-what it may be again, I sometimes dream, in some republic of the future. In order to do this, let me take you back in fancy some 2314 years-440 years before the Christian era, and try to sketch for you-alas! how clumsily-a great, though tiny people, in one of their greatest moments-in one of the greatest moments, it may be, of the human race. For surely it is a great and a rare moment for humanity, when all that is loftiest in it-when reverence for the Unseen powers, reverence for the heroic dead, reverence for the fatherland, and that reverence, too, for self, which is expressed in stateliness and self-restraint, in grace and courtesy; when all these, I say, can lend themselves, even for a day, to the richest enjoyment of life-to the enjoyment of beauty in form and sound, and of relaxation, not brutalising, but ennobling.Rare, alas! have such seasons been in the history of poor humanity. But when they have come, they have lifted it up one stage higher thenceforth. Men, having been such once, may become such again; and the work which such times have left behind them becomes immortal.A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.Let me take you to the then still unfurnished theatre of Athens, hewn out of the limestone rock on the south-east slope of the Acropolis.Above are the new marble buildings of the Parthenon, rich with the statues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming white against the blue sky, with the huge bronze statue of Athené Promachos, fifty feet in height, towering up among the temples and colonnades. In front, and far below, gleams the blue sea, and Salamis beyond.