The Crest-Wave of Evolution: A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19Morris, Kenneth
Philosophy
The Crest-Wave of Evolution: A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19
Morris, Kenneth
Theosophy
which compensates for the more than Greek--unintelligibility of
Browning's version of the _Agamemnon:_ it gives you some color,
some adumbration of the being and import of the man. How shall we
compare him with those others, his great compeers on the Mountain
of Song? Shakespeare--as I think--throned upon a peak where are
storms often, but where the sun shines mostly; surveying all
this life, and with an eye to the eternal behind: Dante--a
prophet, stern, proud, glad and sorrowful; ever in a great pride
of pain or agony of bliss; surveying the life without,--only to
correlate it with and interpret it by the vaster life within
that he knew better;--this Universe for him but the crust and
excoriata of the Universe of the Soul. Milton--a Titan Soul
hurled down from heaven, struggling with all chaos and the deep
to enunciate--just to proclaim and put on everlasting record--
those two profound significant words, _Titan_ and _Soul,_ for a
memorial to Man of the real nature of Man. Aeschylus--the
barking of an eagle--of Zeus the Thunderer's own eagle out of
ominous skies above the mountains: a thing unseen as Karma,
mysterious and mighty as Fate, as Disaster, as the final Triumph
of the Soul; sublime as death; a throat of bronze, superhumanly
impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoarse or harsh,
perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand;
immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;--
ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark
tremendous destinies;--and yet he too with serenity and the
Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us: he will not
leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas' wand and will they
are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.
Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves
on the minds of those who know him. They bear testimony to the
fact that, however grand his style--like a Milton Carlylized in
poetry--thought still seems to overtop it and to be struggling
for expression through a vehicle less than itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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