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Contents: {0}
TheStage as it was Once
Thoughts on Shelley andByron
Alexander Smith and Alexander Pope
Tennyson
Burnsand his School
The Poetry of Sacred and LegendaryArt
On English Composition
OnEnglish Literature
Grots and Groves
Hourswith the Mystics
Frederick Denison Maurice: InMemoriam
Let us think for a while upon what the Stage was once, in a republicof the past—what it may be again, I sometimes dream, in some republicof the future. In order to do this, let me take you back in fancysome 2314 years—440 years before the Christian era, and try tosketch 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 raremoment for humanity, when all that is loftiest in it—when reverencefor the Unseen powers, reverence for the heroic dead, reverence forthe fatherland, and that reverence, too, for self, which is expressedin stateliness and self-restraint, in grace and courtesy; when all these,I say, can lend themselves, even for a day, to the richest enjoymentof 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 whichsuch 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 thestatues and bas-reliefs of Phidias and his scholars, gleaming whiteagainst 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.
And there are gathered the people of Athens—fifty thousandof them, possibly, when the theatre was complete and full. Ifit be fine, they all wear garlands on their heads. If the sunbe too hot, they wear wide-brimmed straw hats. And if a stormcomes on, they will take refuge in the porticoes beneath; not withoutwine and cakes, for what they have come to see will last for many anhour, and they intend to feast their eyes and ears from sunrise to sunset. On the highest seats are slaves and freedmen, below them the free citizens;and on the lowest seats of all are the dignitaries of the republic—thepriests, the magistrates, and the other καλοικαyαθι—the fair and good men—asthe citizens of the highest rank were called, and with them foreignambassadors and distinguished strangers. What an audience! therapidest, subtlest, wittiest, down to the very cobblers and tinkers,the world has ever seen. And what noble figures on those frontseats; Pericles, with Aspasia beside him, and all his friends—Anaxagorasthe sage, Phidias the sculptor, and many another immortal artist; andsomewhere among the free citizens, perhaps beside his father Sophroniscusthe sculptor, a short, square, pug-nosed boy of ten years old,