The Cruise of the Branwen

THE CRUISE OF THE BRANWEN channels through which it must be made; and almost half of that appeal depends on seeing it upon Hellenic soil. There is a Genius of Place, as there is individual influence in every personality ; and on the Acropolis that Genius is more insistent than in any other spot I know. "You may almost hear the beating of his wings." It is not dependent on the landscape, though here, as in similar instances, the surroundings seemed made fit their central gem; it is not dependent upon accidents of time or idiosyncrasies of character, for the Parthenon, like all great works of art, makes its essential call on those primeval fibres of our common humanity through which the greatest artists of all ages have made their own appeal to all the populations of the world. But inasmuch as no other architectural composition has had quite this effect upon all beholders-has, in fact, so nobly succeeded in impressing the meaning of its builders upon every successive generation-it is worth while asking why what at first appears to be only an arrangement of straight lines of marble should have been able, in the certain mind of its creator, to express so much. If there is any answer to this, it will also be the answer to the even more insistent question: why so much architecture afterwards has been not only meaningless but positively offensive, both to its contemporaries and to their posterity. · One general consideration must be at once stated, and then left. If architecture is not a fair reflection of the age and the life that called 52