This the world did, but not once for all; for every time since that mankind, or at least European mankind, has begun to lose faith in its dream of civilization or has again to shake itself free from the menace of outward or inward barbarism, it has always reverted to the thought and life of Greece and drawn inexhaustibly from it new light and new 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 bright.’  On the whole the gods which are its denizens are humanized and humane, the friends and allies of men, who therefore feel themselves not abased or helpless in their relations with them.  ’Of one kind are gods and men,’ and their common world is one in which men feel themselves at home.  Dark shadows there are, but they hide no mysteries to appal and unman.  The imagination is free to follow its own laws, and so to create what is lovely and lovable.  Language is no longer a tyrant but a willing and dexterous servant, and the Greek language reflecting, as all language does, the spirit of its users, is the most perfect instrument that the human mind has ever devised for the expression of its dreams.  The works which were then created have ever since haunted the mind of Europe like a passion, and we are right in speaking of them as immortal, ‘a joy for ever’.