V. SOME PERICLEAN FIGURES

Yoshio Markino (that ever-delightful Japanese) makes an illuminating comparison between the modern western and the ancient eastern civilizations.  What he says amounts to this:  the one is of Science, the other of the Human Spirit; the one of intellect, the other of intuition; the one has learnt rules for carrying all things through in some shape that will serve—­the other worked its wonders by what may be called a Transcendental Rule of Thumb.  But in fact it was a reliance on the Human Spirit, which invited the presence thereof;—­and hence results were attained quite unachievable by modern scientific methods.  What Yoshio says of the Chinese and Japanese is also true of all the great western ages of the past.  We can do a number of things,—­ that is, have invented machinery to do a number of things for us,—­but with all our resources we could not build a Parthenon:  could not even reproduce it, with the model there before our eyes to imitate.*

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* I quote Prof.  Mahaffy in his Problems of Greek History.  He
also points out that it is beyond the powers of modern science in
naval architecture to construct a workable model of a Greek trireme.
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It stands as a monument of the Human Spirit:  as an age-long witness to the presence and keen activity of that during the Age of Pericles in Athens.  It was built at almost break-neck speed, yet remains a thing of permanent inimitable beauty, defying time and the deliberate efforts of men and gunpowder to destroy it.  The work in it which no eye could see was as delicate, as exquisite, as that which was most in evidence publicly; every detail bore the deliberate impress of the Spirit, a direct spiritual creation.  There is no straight line in it; no two measurements are the same; but by a divine and direct intuition, every difference is inevitable, and an essential factor in the perfection of the whole.  As if the same creative force had made it, as makes of the sea and mountains an inescapable perfection of beauty.

It is one of the many mighty works wherewith Pericles and his right-hand man Pheidias, and his architects Ictinus and Callicrates, adorned Athens.  It would serve no purpose to make a list of the great names of the age; which you know well enough already.  The simple fact to note is this:  that at a certain period in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. the Crest-Wave of Evolution was, so far as we can see, flowing through a very narrow channel.  The Far Eastern seats of civilization were under pralaya; the life-forces in West Asia were running towards exhaustion, or already exhausted; India, it is true, is hidden from us; we cannot judge well what was going on there; and so was most of Europe.  Any scheme of cycles that we can put forward as yet must necessarily be tentative and hypothetical; what we do not know is, to what we do know, as a million to one; I may