fruit, for it is its own thought and its own life, while still there ran
in its veins the freshness and the vigour, the blitheness and
hopefulness of its immortal youth. In meditating upon the unforgotten
debt which we owe to Greece, we revive in memory what the spirit which
now lives and moves in us not only once accomplished but still in each
new generation accomplishes, accomplishing ever the better if it repeats
its former achievements with increased consciousness and more deliberate
care. We too here and now have to define what we mean by civilization,
by knowledge, by freedom. Otherwise our future will be determined for
us, and not by us. 'What is to come out of this struggle? Just anything
that may come out of it, or something we mean _shall_ come out of it?'
Assuredly, if we are not to stand bankrupt before our present problem,
we must go to school with Greece, with Rome, with Classical Antiquity,
and in the end with all History, that is to say, with our own experience
as a whole; or out of the spreading chaos no civilized cosmos will be
re-born. Our civilization has been shaken to its foundations, the task
before us and our descendants is to rebuild once more in Europe a
habitable city for the mind of man; and in designing and reconstructing
it we must take counsel with our predecessors who first found the way of
escape from outward and inward barbarism, doing for and in us what we
would do for and in our successors.

The first and most obvious achievement of the Greek mind was the
deliverance of itself in the sphere of the imagination. Behind the fair
creations of Greek art lies a dark and ugly background, but it does lie
behind them. That was its first conquest. Under the magic spell of Art
the hateful and terrifying shapes of barbarous religion retreated and
the world of imagination was peopled with gracious and attractive
figures. The Greek Pantheon is, for all its defects, a world of
dignified and beautiful humanity. 'No thorn or threat stains its beauty