lowest; and there must be battle-royal and victory at
last, or surrender to hell. Through lack of training, and
ignorance of the laws of the inner life, the Higher will be
handicapped; the lower will have advantage through its own
natural impulse downward, increased by every success it is
allowed to gain. And so all these ages of creative achievement
exhaust themselves; every victory of the passions drawing down
the creative force from the higher planes, to waste it on the
lower; till at last what had been an attempt of the Spirit to
lift humanity up on to nobler lines of evolution, and to open a
new order of ages, expires in debauchery, weakness, degeneracy,
physical and moral death. The worst fate you could wish a man is
genius without moral strength. It wrecks individuals, and it
wrecks nations. I said we stand now on an isthmus of time;
fifth-century Greece stood on such another. For reasons that we
have seen, there was to be a radical difference between the ages
that preceded, and the ages that followed it; its influence was
not to wear out, in the west, for twenty-five hundred years. It
was to give a keynote, in cultural effort, to a very long future.
So all western ages since have suffered because of its descent
from lofty ideals to vulgar greed and ambition; from Aristides
to Themistocles and Pericles. We shall see this Athenian descent
in literature, in art, in philosophy. If Athens had gone up, not
down, European history would have been a long record of the
triumphs of the spirit:--not, as it has been in the main, one of
sorrow and disaster.

At the beginning of the Greek age in literature, we find the
stupendous figure of Aeschylus. For any such a force as he was,
there is--how shall I say?--a twofold lineage or ancestry to be
traced: there are no sudden creations. Take Shakespeare, for
example. There was what he found read to his hand in English
literature; and what he brought into England out of the Unknown.
In his outwardness, the fabric of his art--we can trace this
broad river back to a thinnish stream by the name of Chaucer; or
he was growth, recognizably, of the national tree of which
Chaucer was the root, or lay at the root. The unity called
English poetry had grown naturally from that root to this
glorious flower: the sparkle, with, brightness, and above all
large hold upon the other life that one finds in Shakespeare--one
finds at least the rudiments of them in Chaucer also. But there