Literary and General Lectures and Essays

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Literary and General Lectures
and Essays, by

Charles Kingsley
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Title: Literary and General Lectures and Essays
Author: Charles Kingsley
Release Date: February 10, 2004 [eBook #11026]
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY
AND GENERAL LECTURES AND ESSAYS***

Transcribed by David Price, email [email protected]

LITERARY AND GENERAL ESSAYS

Contents: {0} The Stage as it was Once Thoughts on Shelley and
Byron Alexander Smith and Alexander Pope Tennyson Burns and his
School The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art On English
Composition On English Literature Grots and Groves Hours with the
Mystics Frederick Denison Maurice: In Memoriam

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.

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 Athene 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 thousand of them,
possibly, when the theatre was complete and full. If it be fine, they all
wear garlands on their heads. If the sun be too hot, they wear
wide-brimmed straw hats. And if a storm comes on, they will take
refuge in the porticoes beneath; not without wine and cakes, for what
they have come to see will last for many an hour, 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-- the priests, the
magistrates, and the other [Greek]--the fair and good men--as the
citizens of the highest rank were called, and with them foreign
ambassadors and distinguished strangers. What an audience! the
rapidest, subtlest, wittiest, down to the very cobblers and tinkers, the
world has ever seen. And what noble figures on those front seats;
Pericles, with Aspasia beside him, and all his friends--Anaxagoras the
sage, Phidias the sculptor, and many another immortal artist; and
somewhere among the free citizens, perhaps beside his father
Sophroniscus the sculptor, a short, square, pug- nosed boy of ten years
old, looking at it all with strange eyes--"who will be one day," so said
the Pythoness at Delphi, "the wisest man in Greece"--sage,
metaphysician, humorist, warrior, patriot, martyr--for his name is
Socrates.
All are in their dresses of office; for this is not merely a day of
amusement, but of religions ceremony; sacred to Dionysos--Bacchus,
the inspiring god, who raises men above themselves, for good--or for
evil.
The evil, or at least the mere animal aspect of that inspiration, was to be
seen in forms grotesque and sensuous enough in those very festivals,
when the gayer and coarser part of the population, in town and country,

broke out into frantic masquerade--of which the silly carnival of Rome
is perhaps the last