The danger I see before this generation is that which came upon the Roman world insensibly and which resulted in a decadence not arrested till it sank into the night of the dark ages. The later empire was content to take Greek art and Greek letters at second hand, and to substitute Latin culture for the models which had educated their greatest masters. But as I have already told you the copy had not the life of the original. So we too, with all our science, with our increase of material knowledge and our restless running to and fro, may sink into an ugly, tame, joyless conglomeration of societies, for whom new discoveries supply hosts of new conveniences, but no return to the happiness and the contentment of a simpler age. Our purblind toothless children may have their congenital defects vamped up by science, and without it we should indeed be stranded upon the reefs of despair. But happiness does not lie here, no, nor in motors, nor in turbines, nor in wireless messages across the globe, nor in daily newspapers full of inextricable fact and falsehood.
I cannot believe that the civilised world will remain satisfied with this dark outlook,--the monopoly of these factories of material discovery, where furnace and electric light replace the glorious rays of the Sun-God worshipped by the Greeks. There has generally been a great power of recovery in our race at large; and periods of decay have been followed by periods not only of renascence but of rejuvenescence. At all epochs when the world grew dull and desponding and the times were out of joint, we have the mystical tendency, the inclination to brush aside human joys and cares and to fix the mind on the Eternal, on the ineffable delights of communion with the Spirit of the Universe. That this tendency is alive even in modern America, cannot but be obvious to those who have studied the pathology of so-called Christian Science. The other tendency is the humanist, that which seeks to recover for us the joys and beauties of life, enhanced by art and protected by the refinement of a sound education. This was the aspect of human happiness which is most perfectly represented, so far as the world has yet run, by the Greeks, and hence the careful and minute study of their life must always appeal to those who desire the æsthetic reformation of modern society. Once and again the Greeks have exercised this vast and beneficent influence; is it vain to hope that even still it is not exhausted, but potent to cure the ills of man? Peradventure, the prophecy of our great and most Hellenic of poets may yet come true, with a fulfilment wider and deeper than even his large vision could compass:--