The Cruise of the Branwen

THE PARTHENON Pheidias are far away; Athena's self stays hidden in her cloud. No coup de f oudre that ignorant anticipation promised bursts from the sapphire heavens. You leave it in perplexity. An angry self-examination follows; an almost indignant comparison between the eyes that looked, the heart that would not understand, and those long-vanished eyes and hearts which saw and understood when first the Parthenon was built. Slowly you struggle to envisage those fortunate contemporaries of Pheidias, happy in their reconquered country, in their resources, in their firm-won fame; happy in their opportunity of thus building something exactly to their minds, of thus realising an ideal long cherished, of thus perfecting, not for themselves alone but for all time, the steadfast image of their dream. It is but natural to envy this imagination of them. Right or wrong, it is a picture that imposes itself upon you ; and on the other side is the modern fashionable dissatisfaction with existing life: a pose-which seems now the mode-of preferring either past or future to the present and any other country to our own; a public which is neither homogeneous nor enthusiastic, and can neither be fairly revealed in any single mirror nor soundly roused by any single battle-cry. Out of this strange society, out of this mingled, hurry– ing modern life, with all its telegraphs and railway trains and daily newspapers, you have walked suddenly into the Temenos of ancient Hellas, into the ordered shrine designed by men whose dream was harmony and balance and pro- D 49