gloomy Roundheads only followed the consequences of that anti-artistic spirit which had already manifested itself in the first centuries of the Church, and made its iconoclastic power felt more or less to this day.
This old, irreconcilable antipathy against the theatre is nothing but one side of that enmity which for eighteen hundred years has raged and ruled between two utterly dissimilar views of life, one of which first grew on the arid, barren soil of Judæa, and the other in blooming Greece. For full eighteen hundred years has the grudge and rancour between Jerusalem and Athens, between the Holy Sepulchre and the cradle of Art, between life in the spirit and the spirit in life, prevailed, and the irritation or friction, and public and private feuds which it has caused, reveal themselves plainly to the esoteric reader in the history of mankind. When we read today in the newspapers that the Archbishop of Paris has refused Christian burial[1] to a poor dead actor, such action is not influenced by any priestly caprice, and only a short-sighted person can perceive in it narrow-minded malice. What here inspires is rather the spirit of an ancient strife, a battle to death against Art, which was often employed by the Hellenic spirit as a
- ↑ Gebräumluchlichen Begräumlnissehren, "the usual honours of burial."
