(Study not always men of your own age and those engaged in the same occupation as yourself, but likewise the great men of antiquity whose works have kept the same worth for centuries.... Study Molière, study Shakespeare, above all things study the ancient Greeks, and always the ancient Greeks.)
The choruses of Euripedes are among the loveliest things in existence, an undying beauty, which not time nor change mar. Do you happen to recall this?
The long white reach of Achilles’ Beach
Where his ghost feet shine on the sand.
After centuries, after wasted ink and paper, the thundering, the fault-finding of teachers, we know no more about words than the Attic Greeks, centuries before the birth of Christ. No more did I say? We do not know as much.
The age of Attic splendor antidated, I believe, the Birth of the Saviour by some five hundred years. In nobility of form, in beauty of tone, they are masters. We do not learn easily.
I wonder if beauty is a pagan thing which Christianity helped to kill? Has anything so supremely lovely been done since? And I am quoting at random, and always from memory. Memory, of course, is not a storehouse for so great a treasure as the past.
They say the cedars of Lebanon can not grow in the modern world. There is something that kills them as soon as the city, modern civilization, begin to approach. Their last stronghold is the slopes of the Atlas Mountains in Africa. Now they tell us, the French, who are trying to change ways of living there, that few young trees are springing up and the old are showing rapid signs of decay, the same decay that ruined their beauty in the Holy Land.
The Cedars of Lebanon and Beauty! Can they exist only in a pre-Christian world? It will never be possible to harmonize the Hellenic and the Hebraic spirit.