Thank you, sir. Fitness and Beauty. Anything more?
NORTH.
Much more. We think of the Greeks and Romans, sir, as those in whom the Human Mind reached Superhuman Power.
TALBOYS.
Superhuman?
NORTH.
We think so—comparing ourselves with them, we cannot help it. In the Hellenic Wit, we suppose Genius and Taste met at their height—the Inspiration Omnipotent—the Instinct unerring! The creations of Greek Poetry!—Ποιησις—a Making! There the soul seems to be free from its chains—happily self-lawed. "The Earth we pace" is there peopled with divine Forms. Sculpture was the human Form glorified—deified. And as in Marble, so in Song. Something common—terrestrial—adheres to our being, and weighs us down. They—the Hellenes—appear to us to have really walked—as we walk in our visions of exaltation—as if the Graces and the Muses held sway over daily and hourly existence, and not alone over work of Art and solemn occasion. No moral stain or imperfection can hinder them from appearing to us as the Light of human kind. Singular, that in Greece we reconcile ourselves to Heathenism.
TALBOYS.
It may be that we are all Heathens at heart.
NORTH.