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Before the ninth century had run to its close, the Arabs were in possession of all the science of the Greeks; they had produced from their own ranks students of the first order, and had raised among their initiators men who, without them, would have been groping in the dark; and they showed from this time an aptitude for the exact sciences, which was lacking in their instructors, whom they henceforward surpassed."
It has been said that great French prose is solely the work of the seventeenth century. There were nevertheless, before that, two men, certainly very different and even hostile, who were its initiators and its masters, Calvin on the one hand, on the other Rabelais.
It is impossible to touch print and not be denied. Suddenly Sampson ceased to whistle and smote his head with his chubby fist. "Ass that I am!" he exclaimed. "What new reasons have you discovered to think so?" said Raphael. "Why, we dare not create boys. We shall be found out; boys must be circumcised and some of the periphrastically styled 'Initiators into the Abrahamic Covenant' may spot us.
Everybody recognizes inventors in geometry, in music, in the plastic and mechanic arts; but there have also been men who, in their moral dispositions, were very superior to their contemporaries, and were promoters, initiators.
It did not, indeed, lead immediately to practical reform, but it advanced the cause of reform by inspiring and bringing other initiators into the field. And pre-eminent among these was Swift. Swift was evidently well acquainted with Eachard's work. In the apology prefixed to the fourth edition of the Tale of a Tub in 1710, he speaks of Eachard with great respect.
These performers and these things were in all probability but of a middling skill and splendour it was the pre-trapèze age, and we were caught by mild marvels, even if a friendly good faith in them, something sweet and sympathetic, was after all a value, whether of their own humanity, their own special quality, or only of our innocence, never to be renewed; but I light this taper to the initiators, so to call them, whom I remembered, when we had left them behind, as if they had given us a silver key to carry off and so to refit, after long years, to sweet names never thought of from then till now.
For they refer both numbers and figures to the gods, according to the testimony of their historians. But the enthusiastic character, or he who is divinely inspired, unfolding the truth itself concerning the gods essentially, perspicuously ranks among the highest initiators.
When the hour and the man are indeed met, when the time is ripe, and one truly sent, ordained of that Power which chooses, not one only what uncloaked atheism is that, to promulgate in an age like this! not the Teachers and Rabbis of one race only, but all the successful agents of human advancement, the initiators of new eras of man's progress, the inaugurators of new ages of the relief of the human estate and the Creator's glory when such an one indeed appears, there will be no lack of instrumentalities.
See also Winwood Reade's Savage Africa, ch. xviii, in which he speaks of the "gorilla dance," before hunting gorillas, as a "religious festival." Or there were dances belonging to the ceremonies of Initiation dances both by the initiators and the initiated. At initiation you learn certain dances which confer on you definite social status.
What, I think, is the notable thing about both Géricault and Delacroix, however, as exponents, as the initiators, of romanticism, is the way in which they restrained the impetuous temperament they share within the confines of a truly classic reserve. Closely considered, they are not the revolutionists they seemed to the official classicism of their day.
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