Mr. March-Phillips has very well described the spirit which built a certain temple into the scenery of a Sicilian valley. Here (he says), in a place now deserted, the white pillars ornament a jutting tongue of land, and are so placed that all the lines of the gorge lead up to them, and that the shrine becomes the centre of a picture, and, as it were, of a composition. Of this antique consciousness of terrestrial beauty all southern Europe is full, and here in Guelma, upon an edge of the high town, the site of the theatre gives evidence of the same zeal.
The side of a hill was chosen, just where the platform of the city breaks down sharply upon the plain below. There, so that the people and the slaves upon the steps could have a worthy background for their plays, the half-circle of the auditorium was cut out like a quarry from the ground. Beyond the actors, and giving a solemnity to the half-religious concourse of the spectators, the mountains of the Tell stood always up behind the scene, and the height, not only of those summits but of the steps above the plain, enhanced the words that were presented. We have to-day in Europe no such aids to the senses. We have no such alliance of the air and the clouds with our drama, nor even with our patriotism—such as the modern world has made it. The last centuries of the Empire had all these things in common: great verse inherited from an older time, good statuary, plentiful fountains, one religion, and the open sky. Therefore its memory has outlasted all intervening time, and it itself the Empire, (though this truth is as yet but half-received,) has re-arisen.
|The Greatness of The First Four Centuries|
There is one great note in the story of our race which the least learned man can at once appreciate, if he travels with keen eyes looking everywhere for antiquity, but which the most learned in their books perpetually ignore, and ignore more and more densely as research develops. That note is the magnitude of the first four centuries.
Everybody knows that the ancient world ran down into the completed Roman Empire as into a reservoir, and everybody knows that the modern world has flowed outwards from that reservoir by various channels. Everybody knows that this formation of a United Europe was hardly completed in the first century, that it was at last conscious of disintegration in the fifth. The first four centuries are therefore present as dates in everybody’s mind, yet the significance of the dates is forgotten.
Historians have fallen into a barren contemplation of the Roman decline, and their readers with difficulty escape that attitude. Save in some few novels, no writer has attempted to stand in the shoes of the time and to see it as must have seen it the barber of Marcus Aurelius or the stud-groom of Sidonius’ Palace. We know what was coming, the men of the time knew it no more than we can know the future. We take at its own self-estimate that violent self-criticism which accompanies vitality, and we are content to see in these 400 years a process of mere decay.
The picture thus impressed upon us is certainly false. There is hardly a town whose physical history we can trace, that did not expand, especially towards the close of that time. There was hardly an industry or a class (notably the officials) that had not by an accumulation of experience grown to create upon a larger and a larger scale its peculiar contribution to the State; and far the larger part of the stuff of our own lives was created, or was preserved, by that period of unity.
That our European rivers are embanked and canalised, that we alone have roads, that we alone build well and permanently, that we alone in our art can almost attain reality, that we alone can judge all that we do by ideas, and that therefore we alone are not afraid of change and can develop from within—in a word, that we alone are Christians we derive from that time.