THE STAGE AS IT WAS ONCE {1}



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.