Our
Europe Then Was Still Sleeping, Wrapped In The Mantle Of Its Damp
Forests; Sleeping That Sleep Which Still Had Thousands Of Years To
Run.
Here, a precocious humanity, only recently emerged from the Age
of Stone, that earliest form of all, an infant
Humanity, which saw
massively on its issue from the massiveness of the original matter,
conceived and built terrible sanctuaries for gods, at first dreadful
and vague, such as its nascent reason allowed it to conceive them.
Then the first megalithic blocks were erected; then began that mad
heaping up and up, which was to last nearly fifty centuries; and
temples were built above temples, palaces over palaces, each
generation striving to outdo its predecessor by a more titanic
grandeur.
Afterwards, four thousand years ago, Thebes was in the height of her
glory, encumbered with gods and with magnificence, the focus of the
light of the world in the most ancient historic periods; while our
Occident was still asleep and Greece and Assyria were scarcely
awakened. Only in the extreme East, a humanity of a different race,
the yellow people, called to follow in totally different ways, was
fixing, so that they remain even to our day, the oblique lines of its
angular roofs and the rictus of its monsters.
The men of Thebes, if they still saw too massively and too vastly, at
least saw straight; they saw calmly, at the same time as they saw
forever. Their conceptions, which had begun to inspire those of
Greece, were afterwards in some measure to inspire our own.
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