The Little Review, March 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 1)Various
General
The Little Review, March 1915 (Vol. 2, No. 1)
Various
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- Periodicals
And it is nothing less than a man’s life, and a woman’s too, which is
being given for this. For such temples are not built without the
shedding of blood. Those who have ears to hear let them hear! As the
wise Lady says, who comes from the Isle of the Saints, “The Bridge to
the World’s Future hides within its arches the bodies of the World’s
First-Born!” It is not for any “strayed reveller,” however sensitive to
what he has seen, to give the word of Initiation to these devoted ones’
long-labored Mystery. Maurice Browne’s methods may be seen, and the
passionate irritability of his over-tasked nerves may be teased and rung
upon; but the high invisible walls of the Citadel he is raising—the
“topless towers” of his Ilium—are not for the searching of the profane.
And yet a modest guess may be hazarded as to where, in our horizon,
those towers will grow. They will grow, as all true classical ramparts
have grown, protecting us from the hordes of vulgarity, out of the
ground and soil of inveterate tradition. They will not grow to the tune
of the idealization that spurns “reality,” they will grow to the tune of
the idealization that sifts, selects, winnows, purifies, and heightens
“reality.” They will not be built, they are not being built, according
to the fierce fanaticism of any particular School or Cult or Pass-word.
The sub-soil of their tradition has been watered by no tears but those
of Humanity, and will be sown with no harvest but the harvest of
Humanity. If they are more Greek, or more Hebraic, than anything else,
that is only because to the Greeks and the Jews rather than to the rest
it has been allowed to sweep the unessential absolutely aside and return
with clear-eyed innocence to the main facts. Maurice Browne is not the
slave of Euripides—though, by God! some might think so—nor is he the
slave of the Bible. It is only that he knows too well—too well for his
peace and the peace of his friends!—that only from the depths of that
one tragic fountain—the naked human heart, my friends—spring the little
opal-tinted bubbles that reflect the World!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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