IB ^^ 5S5 CORNELL UNrVERSITY LIBRARY UNDERGRADUATE LIBRARY fcrtr^-rt mt MMIQ t» ■R J^ PRINT COIN U.S. A. Cornell University Library B 393.P29 1910 Plato and Platonism; a series of lectures 3 1924 014 617 512 Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014617512 PLATO AND PLATONISM MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY -•CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON . CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTa TORONTO PLATO AND PLATONISM A SERIES OF LECTURES BY WALTER PATER I2s 75 99 124 ISO 174 197 23s 267 PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION With the world of intellectual production, as with that of organic generation, nature makes no sudden starts. Natura nihil facit per saltum ; and in the history of philosophy there are no absolute beginnings. Fix where we may the origin of this or that doctrine or idea, the doctrine of "reminiscence," for instance, or of " the perpetual flux," the theory of " induction," or the philosophic view of things generally, the specialist will still be able . to find us some earlier anticipation of that doctrine, that mental tendency. The most elementary act of mental analysis takes time to do ; the most rudimentary sort of speculative knowledge, abstractions so simple that we can hardly conceive the human mind without them, must grow, and with difficulty. Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation, its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it. A powerful general- isation thrown into some salient phrase, such as 5 PLATO AND PLATONISM that of Heraclitus— n^irra 'pel. all things fleet away — may startle a particular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because all along its root was somewhere among the natural though but half-developed instincts of the human mind itself. Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the creator of philosophy ; and it is an immense advance he makes, from the crude or turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the lonians or the Eleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophical litera- ture. His encyclopaedic view of the whole domain of knowledge is more than a mere step in a progress. Nothing that went before it, for compass and power and charm, had been really comparable to it. Plato's achievement may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morn- ing of the mind's history. Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into was already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools. Language and the processes of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he breathed sickly with off- cast speculative atoms. In the Timeeus, dealing with the origin of the universe he figures less as the author of a new theory, than as already an eclectic critic of older ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory and counter-theory. And as we find there a 6 THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION sort of storehouse of all physical theories, so in reading the Farmenides we might think that all metaphysical questions whatever had already passed through the mind of Plato. rSpme of the results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead and gone, are of the structure of his philosophy. They are everywhere in it, not as the stray carved corner of some older edifice, to be found here or there amid the new, but rather like minute relics of earlier organic life in the very stone he builds withH The central and most intimate principles ofnis teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, not merely to his own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master — to Socrates, who survives chiefly in his pages — but to various precedent schools of speculative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy ; beyond these into that age of poetry, in which the first eflForts of philosophic apprehension had hardly understood themselves ; beyond that uncon- scious philosophy, again, to certain constitutional tendencies, persuasions, forecasts of the intellect itself, such as had given birth, it would seem, to thoughts akin to Plato's in the older civilisa- tions of India and of Egypt, as they still exercise their authority over ourselves. The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use (we find it so again, in turn, with those predecessors of his, when we pass from him to them) are covered with the traces of previous labour and have had their earlier 7 PLATO AND PLATONISM proprietors. If at times we become aware m reading him of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new : or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over. Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new ; the new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as in all other products of art, forniy in the full significa- tion of that word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing. There are three different ways in which the criticism of philosophic, of all speculative opinion whatever, may be conducted. The doctrines of Plato's Republic, for instance, may be regarded as so much truth or falsehood, to be accepted or rejected as such by the student of to-day. That is the dogmatic method of criticism ; judging every product of human thought, however alien 8 THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION or distant from one's self, by its congruity with the assumptions of Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or Hegel, according to the mental preference of the particular critic. There is, secondly, the more generous, eclectic or syncretic method, which aims at a selection from contending schools of the various grains of truth dispersed among them. It is the method which has prevailed in periods of large reading but with little inceptive force of their own, like that of the Alexandrian Neo- Platonism in the third century, or the Neo- Platonism of Florence in the fifteenth. Its natural defect is in the tendency to misrepresent the true character of the doctrine it professes to explain, that it may harmonise thus the better with the other elements of a pre -conceived system. Dogmatic and eclectic criticism alike have in our own century, under the influence of Hegel and his predominant theory of the ever-chang- ing "Time-spirit" or Zeit-geist, given way to a third method of criticism, the historic method, which bids us replace the doctrine, or the system, we are busy with, or such an ancient monument of philosophic thought as The Re- public, as far as possible in the group of con- ditions, intellectual, social, material, amid which it was . actually produced, if we would really understand it. That ages have their genius as well as the individual ; that in every age there is a peculiar ensemble of conditions which deter- 9 PLATO AND PLATONISM mines a common character in every product of that age, in business and art, in fashion and speculation, in religion and manners, in men's very faces ; that nothing man has projected from himself is really intelligible except at its own date, and from its proper point of view in the never-resting " secular process " ; the solidarity of philosophy, of the intellectual life, with common or general history ; that what it behoves the student of philosophic systems to cultivate is the " historic sense " : by force of these convictions many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase of speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us. As the strangely twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on an English lawn, is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid the contending forces of the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth, to have been the creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts ; so, beliefs the most fantastic, the " communism " of Plato, for instance, have their natural propriety when duly correlated with those facts, those conditions round about them, of which they are in truth a part. In the intellectual as in the organic world the given product, its normal or abnormal charac- teristics, are determined, as people say, by the "environment." The business of the young scholar therefore, in reading Plato, is not to take his side in a controversy, to adopt or refute Plato's opinions, to modify, or make apology for, 10 THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION what may seem erratic or impossible in him ; still less, to furnish himself with arguments on behalf of some theory or conviction of his own. His duty is rather to follow intelligently, but with strict indifference, the mental process there, as he might witness a game of skill ; better still, as in reading Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, so in reading The RepubliCy to watch, for its dramatic interest, the spectacle of a powerful, of a sovereign intellect, translating itself, amid a complex group of conditions which can never in the nature of things occur again, at once pliant and resistant to them, into a great literary monument. To put Plato into his natural place, as a result from antecedent and contemporary movements of Greek speculation, of Greek life generally : such is the proper aim of the historic, that is to say, of the really critical study of him. At the threshold, then, of The Republic of Plato, the historic spirit impresses upon us the fact that some of its leading thoughts are partly derivative from earlier thinkers, of whom we happen to possess independent information. From that brilliant and busy, yet so unconcerned press of early Greek life, one here another there stands aside to make the initial act of conscious philosophic reflexion. It is done with some- thing of the simplicity, the immediate and visible effectiveness, of the visible world in action all around. Among Plato's many intellectual zi PLATO AND PLATONISM predecessors, on whom in recent years much attention has been bestowed by a host of commentators after the mind of Hegel, three, whose ideas, whose words even, we really find in the very texture of Plato's work, emerg^ distinctly in close connexion with The Republic i Pythagoras, the dim, half-legendary founder of the philosophy of number and music ; Parmenides,, "My father Parmenides," the centre of the school of Elea ; Heraclitus, thirdly, author of the doctrine of " the Perpetual Flux " : three teachers, it must be admitted after all, of whom what knowledge we have is to the utmost degree fragmentary and vague. But then, one way of giving that knowledge greater definiteness is by noting their direct and actual influence in Plato's writings. Heraclitus, a writer of philosophy in prose, yet of a philosophy which was half poetic figure, half generalised fact, in style crabbed and obscure, but stimulant, invasive, not to be forgotten — he too might be thought, as a writer of prose, one of the " fathers " of Plato. His influence, how- ever, on Plato, though himself a Heraclitean in early life, was by way of antagonism or reaction ; Plato's stand against any philosophy of motion becoming, as we say, something of a "fixed idea " with him. Heraclitus of Ephesus (what Ephesus must have been just then is denoted by the fact that it was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League) died about forty years before 12 THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION Plato was born. Here then at Ephesus, the much frequented centre of the religious life of Ionia, itself so lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as of physical existence ; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had already been in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had lived and died around ; and in Ephesus as else- where, the privileged class had gone to the wall. In this era of unrestrained youthfulness, of Greek youthfulness, one of the haughtiest of that class, as being also of nature's aristocracy, and a man of powerful intellectual gifts, Heraclitus, asserts the native liberty of thought at all events ; becomes, we might truly say, sickly with " the pale cast" of his philosophical questioning. Amid the irreflective actors in that rapidly moving show, so entirely immersed iii it superficial as it is that they have no feeling of themselves, he becomes self-conscious. He re- flects ; and his reflexion has the characteristic melancholy of youth when it is forced suddenly to bethink itself, and for a moment feels already old, feels the temperature of the world about it sensibly colder. Its very ingenuousnes, its sincerity, will make the utterance of what comes 13 PLATO AND PLATONISM to mind just then somewhat shrill or over- emphatic. Yet Heraclitus, thus superbly turning aside from the vulgar to think, so early in the impetuous spring -tide of Greek history, does but reflect after all the aspect of what actually surrounds him, when he cries out — his philo- sophy was no matter of formal treatise or system, but of harsh, protesting cries — Udvra x®/'" «oi ovSh ftevei. All things give way : nothing; remaineth. There had been enquirers before him of another sort, purely physical enquirers, whose bold, contradictory, seemingly impious guesses how and of what primary elements the world of visible things, the sun, the stars, the brutes, their own souls and bodies, had been composed, were themselves a part of the bold enterprise of that romantic age ; a series of intellectual adventures, of a piece with its adventures in unknown lands or upon the sea. The resultant intellectual chaos expressed the very spirit of gifted and sanguine but insub- ordinate youth (remember, that the word i/eonjs, youtAy came to mean rashness, insolence !) questioning, deciding, rejecting, on mere rags and tatters of evidence, unbent to discipline, unmethodical, irresponsible. Those opinions too, coming and going, those conjectures as to what under-lay the sensible world, were them- selves but fluid elements on the changing surface of existence. 14 THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION Surface, we say ; but was there really any- thing beneath it ? That was what to the majority of his hearers, his readers, Heraclitus, with an eye perhaps on practice, seemed to deny. Perpetual motion, alike in things and in men's thoughts about them, — the sad, self- conscious, philosophy . of Heraclitus, like one, knowing beyond his years, in this barely adolescent world which he is so eager to instruct, makes no pretence to be able to restrain that. Was not the very essence of thought itself also such perpetual motion ? a baffling transition from the dead past, alive one moment since, to a present, itself deceased in turn ere we can say, It is here ? A keen analyst of the facts of nature and mind, a master presumably of all the knowledge that then there was, a vigorous definer of thoughts, he does but refer the superficial movement of all persons and things around him to deeper and still more masterful currents of universal change, stealthily with- drawing the apparently solid earth itself from beneath one's feet. The principle of disinte- gration, the incoherency of fire or flood (for Heraclitus these are but very lively instances of movements, subtler yet more wasteful still) are inherent in the primary elements alike of matter and of the soul. Aiyei irov "H.paKKeiro" «a^ oiSep fievei. But the principle of lapse, of waste, was, in fact, in one's self " No one has ever passed 15 ) PLATO AND PLATONISM twice over the same stream." Nay, the passenger himself is without identity. Upon the same ' stream at the same moment we do, and do not, embark : for we are, and are not : el/iiv re «al oiiK etfiev. And this rapid change, if it did not make all knowledge impossible, made it wholly relative, of a kind, that is. to say, valueless in the judgment of Plato. Man, the individual, at this particular vanishing-point of time and place, becomes " the measure of all things." To know after what manner (says Socrates, after discuss- ing the question in what proportion names, fleeting names, contribute to our knowledge of things) to know after what manner we must be taught, or discover for ourselves, the things that really are (toI ovra) is perhaps beyond the measure of your powers and mine. We must even content ourselves with the admission of this, that not from their names, but much rather themselves from themselves, they must be learned and looked for. . . . For consider, Cratylus, a point I oft-times dream on — whether or no we may affirm that what is beautiful and good in itself, and whatever is, respectively, in itself, it something ? Cratylus. To me at least, Socrates, it seems to be some- thing. Socrates, Let us consider, then, that 'in -itself; not whether a face, or anything of that kind, is beautiful, and whether all these things seem to flow like water. But, what is beautiful in itself — may we say ? — has not this the qualities that define it, always ? Cratylus. It must be so. Socrates. Can we then, if it is ever passing out below, predicate about it ; first, that it is that ; next, that it has thii or that quality ; or must it not be that, even as we speak, il should straightway become some other thing, and go out undei on its way, and be no longer as it is ? . . . Now, how coulc that which is never in the same state be a thing at all ? , , l6 THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION Nor, in truth, could it be an object of knowledge to any one j for, even as he who shall know comes upon it, it would become another thing with other qualities ; so that it would be no longer matter of knowledge what sort of a thing it is, or in what condition. Now, no form of knowing, methinks, has knowledge of that which it knows to be no-how, Cratylus. It is as you say. Socrates. But if, Cratylus, all things change sides, and nothing stays, it is not fitting to say that there is any knowing at all. . . . And the consequence of this argument would be, that there is neither any one to know, nor anything to be known. If, on the other hand, there be always that which knows, and that which is known ; and if the Beautiful ;x, and the Good «, and each one of those things that really are, «, then, to my thinking, those things in no way resemble that moving stream of which we are now speaking. Whether, then, these matters be thus, or in that other way as the followers of Heraclitus affirm and many besides, I fear may be no easy thing to search out. But certainly it is not like a sensible man, committing one's self, and one's own soul, to the rule of names, to serve them, and, with faith in names and those who imposed them, as if one knew something thereby, to maintain (damaging thus the character of that which is, and our own) that there is no sound ring in any one of them, but that all, like earthen pots, let water. Cratylus, 439. Yet from certain fragments in which the Lagos is already named we may understand that there had been another side to the doctrine of Heraclitus ; an attempt on his part, after all, to reduce that world of chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a reasonable order, by the search for and the notation, if there be such, of arx antiphonal rhythm, or logic, which, proceed- ing uniformly from movement to movement, as in some intricate musical theme, might link to- gether in one those contending, infinitely diverse p. VI 17 c PLATO AND PLATONISM impulses. It was an act of recognition, even on the part of a philosophy of the inconsecutive, the incoherent, the insane, of that Wisdom v\rhich, " reacheth from end to' end, sweetly and strongly ordering all things." But if the "weeping philosopher," the first of the pessi-; mists, finds the ground of his melancholy in the sense of universal change, still more must he weep at the dulness of men's ears to that continuous strain of melody throughout it. In truth, what was sympathetic with the hour and the scene in the Heraclitean doctrine, was the boldly aggressive, the paradoxical and negative tendency there, in natural collusion, as it was, with the destructiveness of undisciplined youth ; that sense of rapid dissolution, which, according to one's temperament and one's luck in things, might extinguish, or kindle all the more eagerly, an interest in the mere phenomena of existence,; of one's so hasty passage through the world. The theory of the perpetual flux was indeed an apprehension of which the full scope was only to be realised by a later age, in alliance with a larger knowledge of the natural world, a closer observation of the phenomena of mind, than was possible, even for Heraclitus, at that early day. So, the seeds of almost all scientific ideas might seem to have been dimly enfolded in the mind of antiquity ; but fecundated, admitted to their full working prerogative, one by one, in after ages, by good favour of the special i8 THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION intellectual conditions belonging to a particular generation, which, on a sudden, finds itself pre- occupied by a formula, not so much new, as renovated by new applicatjion. It is in this way that the most modern metaphysical, and the most modern empirical philosophies alike have illustrated emphatically, justified, expanded, the divination (so we may make bold to call it under the new light now thrown upon it) of the ancient theorist of Ephesus. The entire modern theory of "de- velopment," in all its various phases, proved or unprovable, — what is it but old Heracliteanism awake once more in a new world, and grown to fiill proportions ? Udvra xiiaTOs eoTiv re Kal los ovK tart /I'q eZvai* " that what is, is ; and that what is not, is not " ; or, in the Latin of scholasticism, here inaugurated by Parmenides, esse ens : non esse non ens — viiBaai eoTt KiksvOoi \ dXijdtCri yap oinjSe^ "this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes along with it. The other — that what is, is not ; and by consequence that what is not, is : — I tell you that is the way which goes counter to persuasion : T^v &^ rot pd.(ta TravairciOia eii/tev araprirav' avre yap ay yvonjs to yt /i^ «&v ov yckp itftiKTov' — That which is not, never could you know : there is no way of getting at that ; nor could you explain it to another; for Thought and Being are identical." — Famous utterance, yet of so dubious omen ! — To eripm apa erepov ri BvvaftevT} eiearepa air&v wi^vxe' ovk ey^w/jet yvaxTTOv Koi So^aarbv ravrov ehai-) and thirdly, to illustrate that opposi- tion, the figurative use, so impressed on thought and speech by Plato that it has come to seem hardly a figure of speech at all but appropriate philosophic language, of the opposition of light to darkness. — Well, then (Socrates is made to say in the fifth book of The Republic) if what is, is the object of knowledge, would not something other than what is, be the object of opinion i Yes ! something else. Does opinion then opine what is not ; or is it impossible to have even opinion concerning what is not ? Consider I does not he who has opinion direct his opinion upon something ? or is it impossible, again, to have an opinion, yet an opinion about nothing ? Impossible ! But he who has an opinion has opinion at least about some- thing J hasn't he ? Yet after all what is not, is not a thing j but would most properly be denominated nothing. Certainly. Now to what is not, we assigned of necessity ignorance : to what is, knowledge. Rightly : he said. 43 PLATO AND PLATONISM Neither what is, then, nor what is not, is the object of opinion. No! Opinion therefore would be neither ignorance nor knowledge. It seems not. . x Is it, then, beyond these ; going beyond knowledge in clear- % ness, beyond ignorance in obscurity ? Neither the one, nor the other. But, I asked, opinion Seems to you (doesn't it ?) to be a darker thing than knowledge, yet lighter than ignorance. Very much so j he answered. Does it lie within those two ? Yes. Opinion, then, would be midway, between these two con- ditions ? Undoubtedly so. Now didn't we say in what went before that if anything became apparent such that it is, and is not, at the same time, a thing of that kind would lie between that which is in unmixed clearness, and that which wholly is not; and that there would be, in regard to that, neither knowledge nor ignorance j but, again, a condition revealing itself between ignorance and knowledge i Rightly. And now, between these two, what we call * opinion ' has in fact revealed itself. Clearly so. It would remain for us therefore, as it seems, to find that which partakes of both — both of Being and Not-being, and which could rightly be called by neither term distinctly ; in order that, if it appear, we may in justice determine it to be the object of opinion ; assigning the extremes to the extremes, the intermediate to what comes between them. Or is it not thus? Thus it is. These points then being assumed, let him tell me ! let him speak and give his answer — that excellent person, who on the one hand thinks there is no Beauty itself, nor any idea of Beauty itself, ever in the same condition in regard to the same things (acl Kwrb. ravrh, (ucravrms Ixowrov) yet, on the other hand, holds 44 THE DOCTRINE OF REST that there are the many beautiful objects ; — that lover of sight (o ^iXoflca/ioiv) who can by no means bear it if any one says that the beautiful is one ; the just also ; and the rest, after the same way. For good Sir ! we shall say, pray tell us, is there any one of these many beautiful things which will not appear ugly (under certain conditions) of the many just or pious actions which will not seem unjust or impious ? No ! he answered. Rather it must be that they shall seem, in a manner, both beautiful and ugly ; and all the rest you ask of. Well ! The many double things : — Do they seem to be at all less half than double ? Not at all. And great, in truth, and little, and light, and heavy — will they at all more truly be called by these names which we may give them, than by the opposite names ? No ! he said ; but each of them will always hold of both. Every several instance of 'The Many,' then — is it, more truly than it is not, that which one may affirm it to be ? It is like people at supper-parties he said (very Attic supper- parties !) playing on words, and the children's riddle about the eunuch and his fling round the bat — with what, and on what, the riddle says he hit it j for these things also seem to set both ways, and it is not possible, fixedly, to conceive any one of them either to be, or not to be ; neither both, nor the one, nor the other. Have you anything then you can do with them ; or any- where you can place them with fairer effect than in that posi- tion between being and the being not ? For presumably they will not appear more obscure than what is not, so as not to be, still more ; nor more luminous than what is, so as to be, even more than that. We have found then that the many customary notions of the many, about Beauty and the rest are revolved somewhere between not-being and being unmixedly. So we have. And agreed, at least, at the outset, that if anything of this sort presented itself, it must be declared matter not of knowledge, but of opinion ; to be apprehended by the inter- mediate faculty J as it wanders unfixed, there, between. Republic, 478. 45 PLATO AND PLATONISM Many a train of thought, many a turn of expression, only too familiar, some may think, to the reader of Plato, are summarised in that troublesome yet perhaps attractive passage. The I influence then of Parmenides on Plato had made I him, incurably (shall we say ?) a dualist. Only, *i practically, Plato's richly coloured genius will find a compromise between the One which alone really is, is yet so empty a thought for finite minds ; and the Many, which most properly is not, yet presses so closely on eye and ear and heart and fancy and will, at every moment. That which really is (to Sv) the One, if he is really to think about it at all, must admit within it a certain variety of members ; and, in effect, for Plato the true Being, the Absolute, the One, does become delightfully multiple, as the world of ideas — appreciable, through years of loving study, more and more clearly, one by one, as the perfectly concrete, mutually adjusted, permanent forms of our veritable experience : the Bravery, for instance, that cannot be confused, not merely with Cowardice, but with Wisdom, or Humility. One after another they emerge again from the dead level, the Parmenidean tabula rasa, with nothing less than the reality of persons face to face with us, of a personal identity. It was as if the firm plastic outlines of the delightful old Greek polytheism had found their way back after all into a repellent monotheism. Prefer as he may in theory that 46 THE DOCTRINE OF REST blank white light of the One — its sterile, "form- less, colourless, impalpable," eternal identity with itself — the world, and this chiefly is why the world has not forgotten him, will be for him, as he is by no means colour-blind, by no means a colourless place. He will suffer it to come to him, as his pages convey it in turn to us, with the liveliest variety of hue, as in that conspicu- ously visual emblem of it, the outline of which (essentially characteristic of himself as it seems) he had really borrowed from the old Eleatic teacher who had tried so hard to close the bodily eye that he might the better apprehend the world unseen. — And now (he writes in the seventh book of The Republic) take for a figure of human nature, as regards education and the lack thereof, some such condition as this. Think you see people as it were in some abode below- ground, like a cave, having its entrance spread out upwards towards the light, broad, across the whole cavern. Suppose them here from childhood ; their legs and necks chained ; so that there they stay, and can see only what is in front of them, being unable by reason of the chain to move their heads round about : and the light of a fire upon them, blazing from far above, behind their backs : between the fire and the prisoners away up aloft : and see beside it a low wall built along, as with the showmen, in front of the people lie the screens above which they exhibit their wonders. I see : he said. See, then, along this low wall, men, bearing vessels of all sorts wrought in stone and wood ; and, naturally, some of the bearers talking, other silent. It is a strange figure you describe : said he : and strange prisoners. — They are like ourselves : I answered ! Republic, 514, 47 PLATO AND PLATONISM Metaphysical formulae have always their I practical equivalents. The ethical alliance of |Heraclitus is with the Sophists, and the Cyrenaics or the Epicureans ; that of Par- Smenides, with Socrates, and the Cynics or the *< Stoics. The Cynic or Stoic ideal of a static calm is as truly the moral or practical equivalent of the Parmenidean doctrine of the One, as the Cyrenaic iiovaxpovoi ^Sovtj — the pleasure of the ideal now — is the practical equivalent of the doctrine of motion ; and, as sometimes happens, what seems hopelessly perverse as a metaphysic for the understanding is found to be realisable enough as one of many phases of our so flexible human feeling. The abstract philosophy of the One might seem indeed to have been translated into the terms of a human will in the rigid, disinterested, renunciant career of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, its mortal coldness. Let me however conclude with a document of the Eleatic temper, nearer in its origin to the age of Plato : an ancient fragment of Cleanthes the Stoic, which has justly stirred the admiration of Stoical minds ; though truly, so hard is it not to lapse from those austere heights, the One, the Abso- lute, has become in it after all, with much varied colour and detail in his relations to concrete things and persons, our father Zeus. An illustrious athlete ; then a mendicant dealer in water-melons ; chief pontiff lastly of the sect of the Stoics ; Cleanthes, as we see him in anec- 48 THE DOCTRINE OF REST dote at least, is always a loyal, sometimes a very quaintly loyal, follower of the Parmenidean or Stoic doctrine of detachment from all material things. It was at the most critical points perhaps of such detachment, that somewhere about the year three hundred before Christ, he put to- gether the verses of his famous " Hymn." By its practical indifference, its resignation, its passive submission to the One, the undivided Intelli- gence, which Sict irdvTwv X'?) i^ ^^ dominion of number everywhere, the proportion, the harmony, the music, into which number as such expands. Truths of number : the essential laws of measure in time and space : — Yes, these are indeed everywhere in our experience : must, as Kant can explain to us, be an element in anything we are able so much as to conceive at all. And music, covering all it does, for Pythagoras, for Plato and Platonism — music, which though it is of course much besides, is certainly a formal development of purely numerical laws : that too surely is some- 52 THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER thing, independently of ourselves, in the real world without us, like a personal intelligible soul durably resident there for those who bring intelligence of it, of music, with them ; to be known on the favourite Platonic principle of like by like (S/ioiov ofioiqt) though the incapable or uninstructed ear, in various degrees of dulness, may fail to apprehend it. The Golden Verses of Pythagoras parted early into dust (that seems strange, if they were ever really written in a book) and antiquity itself knows little directly about his doctrine. Yet Pythagoras is much more than a mere name, a term, for locating as well as may be a philosophical abstraction. Pythagoras, his person, his memory, attracted from the first a kind of fairy-tale of mystic science. The philosophy of number, of music and proportion, came, and has remained, in a cloud of legendary glory ; the gradual accumulation of which Porphyry and lamb- lichus, the fantastic masters of Neo-Platonism, or Neo-Pythagoreanism, have embodied in their so-called Lives of him, like some antique fable richly embossed with starry wonders. In this spirit there had been much writing about him : that he was a son of Apollo, nay, Apollo himself — ^the twilight, attempered. Hyperborean Apollo, like the sun in Lapland : that his person gleamed at times with a supernatural brightness : that he had exposed to those who loved him a golden thigh : how Abaris, the minister of that god, 53 PLATO AND PLATONISM had come flying to him on a golden arrow : of his almost impossible journeys : how he was seen, had lectured indeed, in different places at the same time. As he walked on the banks of the Nessus the river had whispered his name : he had been, in the secondary sense, various persons in the course of ages ; a courtesan once, for some ancient sin in him ; and then a hero, Euphorbus, son of Panthus ; could remember very distinctly so recent a matter as the Trojan war, and had recognised in a moment his own old armour, hanging on the wall, above one of his old dead bodies, in the temple of Athene at Argos ; showing out all along only by hints and flashes the abysses of divine knowledge within him, sometimes by miracle. For if the philo- sopher really is all that Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans suppose ; if the material world is so perfect a musical instrument, and he knows its theory so well, he might surely give practical and sensible proof of that on occasion, by himself improvising music upon it in direct miracle. And so there, in Porphyry and lamblichus, the appropriate miracles are. If the mistaken affection of the disciples of dreamy Neo-Platonic Gnosis at Alexandria, in the third or fourth century of our era, has thus made it impossible to separate later legend from original evidence as to what he was, and said, and how he said it, yet that there was a brilliant, perhaps a showy, personality there, infusing the 54 THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER most abstract truths with what would tell on the fancy, seems more than probable, and, though he would appear really to have had from the first much of mystery or mysticism about him, the thaumaturge of Samos, *' whom even the vulgar might follow as a conjuror," must have been very unlike the lonely "weep- ing" philosopher of Ephesus, or the almost disembodied philosopher of Elea. In the very person and doings of this earliest master of the doctrine of harmony, people saw that philo- sophy is Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute. And in turn he abounded in influence on the deeds, the persons, of others, as if he had really carried a magic lute in his hands to charm them. As his fellow -citizens had all but identified Pythagoras with him, so Apollo remained the peculiar patron of the Pythagoreans ; and we may note, in connexion with their influence on Plato, that as Apollo was the chosen ancestral deity, so Pythagoreanism became especially the philosophy, of the severely musical Dorian Greeks. If, as Plato was aware, or fancied, true Spartans knew more of philosophy than they let strangers suppose — turned them all out from time to time and feasted on it in secret, for the strengthening of their souls — it was 55 PLATO AND PLATONISM precisely the Pythagorean philosophy of music, of austere music, mastering, remoulding, men's very bodies, they would then have discussed with one another. A native of Ionia, it is in one of the Dorian cities of Magna Grascia, at Crotona, that Pytha- goras finds the fitting scene of his mysterious influence. He founds there something like an ideal republic, or rather a religious brotherhood, under a rule outwardly expressive of that inward idea of order or harmony, so dear to the Dorian soul, and, for it, as for him, ever the peculiar pledge of the presence of philosophic truth. 'AXif^etaw 8k d/ierpia fffei axr/'yevri elvai, ^ i/ifieTpia ; asks one in the The Republic ; and 'E/i/ierpLti' of course, is the answer. Recalling the student of Plato to penetrate as far as he can into that mysterious community, there, long before, in the imagination of Pytha- goras is the first dream of the Perfect City, with all those peculiar ethical sympathies which the Platonic Republic enforces already well defined — the perfect mystic body of the Dorian soul, built, as Plato requires, to the strains of music. As a whole, and in its members severally, it would reproduce and visibly reflect to others that inward order and harmony of which each one was a part. As such, the Pythagorean order (it was itself an " order ") expanded and was long maintained in those cities of Magna Gracia which had been the scene of the prac- 56 THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER tical no less than of the speculative activity of its founder ; and in one of which, Metapontum, so late as the days of Cicero what was believed to be the tomb of Pythagoras was still shown. Order, harmony, the temperance, which, as Plato will explain to us, will convince us by the visible presentment of it in the faultless person of the youthful Charmides, is like a musical harmony, — that was the chief thing Pythagoras exacted from his followers, at least at first, though they were mainly of the noble and wealthy class who could have done what they liked — temperance in a religious intention, with many singular scruples concerning bodily puri- fication, diet, and the like. For if, according to his philosophy, the soul had come from heaven, to use the phrase of Wordsworth re- producing the central Pythagorean doctrine, "from heaven," as he says, "trailing clouds of glory," so the arguments of Pythagoras were always more or less explicitly involving one in consideration of the means by which one might get back thither, of which means, surely, absti- nence, the repression of one's carnal elements, must be one ; in consideration also, in curious questions, as to the relationship of those carnal elements in us to the pilgrim soul, before and after, for which he was so anxious to secure full use of all the opportunities of further perfecting which might yet await it, in the many revolutions of its existence. In the midst of that assthetic- 57 PLATO AND PLATONISM ally so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascesis^ about him. Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards, that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon his way. The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of which the philosopher ot music was, perhaps not inconsistently, a lover, which enveloped the entire action of the Pythagoreans, and had indeed kept Pythagoras himself, as some have thought, from committing his thoughts to writ- ing at all, was congruous with such monkish discipline. Mysticism — the condition of the initiated — is a word derived, as we know, from a Greek verb which may perhaps mean to close the eye that one may better perceive the invisible, but more probably means to close the lips while the soul is brooding over what cannot be uttered. Later Christian admirers said of him, that he had hidden the words of God in his heart. The dust of his golden verses perhaps, but certainly the gold-dust of his thoughts, lies scattered all along Greek literature from Plato to the latest of the Greek Fathers of the Church. You may find it serviceably worked out in the notes of Zeller's excellent work on Greek philo- sophy, and, with more sparing comment, in Mullach's Fragmenta Phtlosophorum Grcecorum. No one of those Pre-Socratic philosophers has 58 THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER been the subject of a more enthusiastic erudition. For his mind's health however, if in doing so he is not making a disproportionate use of his time, inconsistent certainly with the essential temper of the doctrine he seeks for, and such as a true Pythagorean would instantly condemn, the young scholar might be recommended to go straight to the pages of Aristotle — those discreet, un- romantic pages, salutary therefore to listen to, concerning doctrines in themselves so fantastic* In the Ethics, as you may know, in the Meta- physics, and elsewhere, Aristotle gives many not unsympathetic notices at least of the dis- ciples, which, by way of sober contrast on a matter from the first profusely, perhaps cheaply, embroidered, is like quiet information from Pythagoras himself. Only, remember always in reading Plato — Plato, as a sincere learner in the school of Pythagoras — that the essence, the active principle of the Pythagorean doctrine, resides, not as with the ancient Eleatics, nor as with our modern selves too often, in the "infinite," those eternities, infinitudes, abysses, Carlyle invokes for us so often — in no cultus of the infinite (to direipov) but in the finite (to iripa^). It is so indeed, with that exception of the Parmenidean sect, through all Greek philosophy, congruously with the proper vocation of the * Or to Mr. Burnet's Ear/y Greek Philosophy ; which I have read since these pages went to press, with much admiration for its learning and lucidity, and its unconventionality of view. 59 PLATO AND PLATONISM people of art, of art as being itself the finite, ever controlling the infinite, the formless. Those famous ava-Totxiai r&v ivavn&p, OT parallel columns of contraries : the One and the Many : Odd and Even, and the like : Good and Evil : are indeed all reducible ultimately to terms of art, as the expressive and the inexpressive. Now observe that Plato's " theory of ideas " is but an effort to enforce the Pythagorean Tr^pa?, with all the unity- in-variety of concerted music, — eternal definition of the finite, upon to avetpov, the infinite, the indefinite, formless, brute matter, of our experi- ence of the world. For it is of Plato again we should be thinking, and of Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans, only so far as they explain the actual conformation of Plato's thoughts as we find them, especially in TAe Republic. Let us see, as much as possible in his own words, what Plato received from that older philosophy, of which the two leading persuasions were ; first, the universality, the ulti- mate truth, of numerical, of musical law ; and secondly, the pre-existence, the double eternity, of the soul. In spirit, then, we are certainly of the Pythagorean company in that most characteristic dialogue, the Meno, in which Plato discusses the nature, the true idea, of Virtue, or rather how one may attain thereto ; compelled to this sub- ordinate and accessory question by the intel- 60 THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER lectual cowardice of his disciple, though after his manner he flashes irrepressible light on that other primary and really indispensable question by the way. Pythagoras, who had founded his famous brotherhood by way of turning theory into practice, must have had, of course, definite views on that most practical question, how virtue is to be attained by us ; and Plato is certainly faithful to him in assigning the causation of virtue partly to discipline, forming habit (aa-KtjaK) as en- forced on the monk, the soldier, the schoolboy, as he is true to his own experience in assigning it partly also to a good natural disposition (^wet) and he suggests afterwards, as I suppose some of us would be ready to do, that virtue is due also in part {0ela /loipa) to the good pleasure of heaven, to un -merited grace. Whatever else, however, may be held about it, it is certain (he admits) that virtue comes in great measure through learning. But is there in very deed such a thing as learning ? asks the eristic Meno, who is so youthfully fond of argument for its own sake, and must exercise by display his already well- trained intellectual muscle. Is not that favourite, that characteristic, Greek paradox, that it is impossible to be taught, and therefore useless to seek, what one does not know already, after all the expression of an empirical truth ? — Meno. After what manner Socrates will you seek for that which you do not know at all — what it is ? For what sort of thin^, among the things you know not, will you propose as your 6l PLATO AND PLATONISM object of search ? Or even if you should have lighted full upon it, howr will you know that it is this thing which you knew not i Socrates. Ah ! I understand the kind of thing you mean to say, Meno. Do you see what a contentious argument this is you are bringing down on our heads ? — that forsooth it is not possible for a man to seek either for what he knows, or for what he knows not ; inasmuch as he would not seek what he knows, at least ; because he knows it, and to one in such case there is no need of seeking. Nor would he seek after what he knows not j for he knows not what he shall seek for. Menoj 80. Well ! that is true in a sense, as Socrates admits ; not however in any sense which en- courages idle acquiescence in what according to common language is our ignorance. There is a sense (it is exemplified in regard to sound and colour, perhaps in some far more important things) in which it is matter of experience that it is impossible to seek for, or be taught, what one does not know already. He who is in total ignorance of musical notes, who has no ear, will certainly be unaware of them when they light on him, or he lights upon them. Where could one begin ? we ask, in certain cases where not to know at all means incapacity for receiving knowledge. Yes, certainly ; the Pythagoreans are right in saying that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence — avd/ivrja-tii : famous word ! and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise way it is impossible or possible to find out what you don't know : how that happens. In full use of the dialogue, as itself the instrument most 62 THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER fit for him of whatever what we call teaching and learning may really be, Plato, dramatic always, brings in one of Meno's slaves, a boy who speaks Greek nicely, but knows nothing of geometry : introduces him, we may fancy, into a mathematical lecture-room where diagrams are to be seen on the walls, cubes and the like lying on the table — ^particular objects, the mere sight of which will rouse him when subjected to the dialectical treatment, to universal truths con- cerning them. The problem required of him is to describe a square of a particular size : to find the line which must be the side of such a square ; and he is to find it for himself. Meno, carefully on his guard, is to watch whether the boy is taught by Socrates in any of his answers ; whether he answers anything at any point other- wise than by way of reminiscence and really out of his own mind, as the reasonable questions of Socrates fall like water on the seed-ground, or like sunlight on the photographer's negative. " See him now ! " he cries triumphantly, " How he remembers ; in the logical order ; as he ought to remember ! " The reader, in truth, following closely, scrupulously, this pretty process, cannot help seeing that after all the boy does not discover the essential point of the problem for himself, that he is more than just guided on his way by the questioning of Socrates, that Plato has chosen an instance in itself illusively clear as being concerned with elementary space. It is 63 PLATO AND PLATONISM once for all, however, that he recognises, under such questioning, the immovable, indefectible certainty of this or that truth of space. So much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly to the advantage of the Pythagorean theory : that even his false guesses have a plausibility, a kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about them : that as he remembers, in logical order (a)9 Sel) so he makes the mistakes also which he ought to make — the right sort of mistakes, such as are natural and ought to occur in order to the awakening mind, a kind of properly innate errors. NOi/ air^ aairep ovap dpri, avatceKivqvrai, ai So^ai avrai, — " Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been stirred up within him " ; and he will perform, Socrates assures us, similar acts of re- miniscence on demand, with other geometrical problems, with any and every problem whatever. " If then," observes Socrates in the PAado, wistfully pondering, for such consolation as there may be in it, in his last hours, the larger outlook suggested by this hopeful doctrine : — If, having apprehended it (having apprehended a certain mathematical principle, that is) before birth, we were born already possessed of this principle, had we not knowledge, both before and immediately upon our begetting here, not merely about the equal and the greater and the less, but about all other things of the kind ? For our theory (of an innate knowledge, that is to say, independent of our experience here) our theory holds not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the absolute Beauty (was he going now to see its very fecc again, after the dim intermediate life here?) and about what is absolutely just and good, and about all things whatever, upon 64 THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER which, in all our past questioning and answering, we set this seal — ols hrur^payti^pfuOa tovto — Thaty which really is. Pheedo^ 75- But to return to the cheerful pages of the Mem — from the prison-cell to the old mathe- matical lecture-room and that psychological ex- periment upon the young boy with the square : — OHkovv ovBepo'i SiSd^avTOi, dXV ipotT'^a'avTO^, iirtanjirerai, avaXa^mv, aiiro^ i^ avroO, iiria-nj/j/riv ? " Through no one's teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning, will he attain a true science, knowledge in the fullest sense (ivKmjfir)) by the recovery of such science out of himself ? " — Yes I and that recovery is an act of reminiscence." These opinions therefore, the boy's discover- able right notions about side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (hnjcrav Si ye avr^ atrai ai So|at) and surely, as Socrates was observing later, right opinions also concerning other things more important, which too, when stirred up by a process of questioning, will be established in him as consciously reasoned knowledge (epmr^a-ei eireyepdeia-at, iiriaTrjftai f/tyvovTM). That at least IS what Plato is quite certain about : not quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us — the doctrine namely of metempsycMsis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, p. VI 6s F PLATO AND PLATONISM under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal con- sciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of Socrates, who in the Phado discourses at great length on that so comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a personal hope in the immediate prospect of death. The soul, then, would be immortal {aJdavaTo% h> f\ ■^vxv etri) prospectively as well as in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth " over the way, there," as, in the Meno, Socrates drew from it an encouragement to the search for truth, here. Retrospectively, at all events, it seemed plain that *' the soul is eternal. It is right therefore to make an effort to find out things one may not know, that is to say, one does not remember, just now." Those notions were in the boy, they and the like of them, in all boys and men ; and he did not come by them in this life, a young slave in Athens. Ancient, half-obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls, the mental tablet, seeds of knowledge to come, shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an earlier period of time they had been laid up in him, to blossom again now, so kindly, so firmly ! Upon a soul thus provided, puzzled as that seed swells within it under the spring-tide influences of this untried atmosphere, it would be the proper vocation of the philosophic teacher 66 THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER to supervene with his encouraging questions. And there was another doctrine — a persuasion still more poetical or visionary, it might seem, yet with a strong presumption of literal truth about it, when seen in connexion with that great fact of our consciousness which it so conveniently explains — "reminiscence." Socrates had heard it, he tells us in the Meno^ in the locus classicus on this matter, from the venerable lips of certain religious persons, priests and priestesses, — ^who had made it their business to be able to give an account concerning their sacred functions. Pindar too asserts this, and many other of the poets, so many as were divinely inspired. And what they say is as follows. — But do you observe, whether they seem to you to speak the truth. For they say that the soul of man is immortal ; and that at one time it comes to a pause, which indeed they call dying, and then is born again ; but that it is never destroyed. That on this account indeed it is our duty to pass through life as religiously as possible (because there's 'another world,' namely). *For those,' says Pindar, 'from whom Persephone shall have received a recompense of ancient wrong — she gives back their soul again to the sun above in the ninth year, of whom are begotten kings, illustrious and swift in strength, and men greatest in wisdom ; and for remaining time they are called holy heroes among us.' Inas- much then as the soul is immortal, and has been born many times, and has seen both things here and things in Hades, and all things, there is nothing that it has not learned ; so that it is by no means surprising that it should be able to remember both about virtue and about other matters what it knew at least even aforetime. For inasmuch as the whole of nature is akin to itself (homogeneous) and the soul has learned all things, nothing hinders one, by remembering one thing only, which indeed people call ' learning ' (though it is something else in fact, you see !) from finding out all other things for himself, if he be brave and &il not through weariness in his search. For in truth to 67 PLATO AND PLATONISM seek and to learn is wholly Recollection. Therefore one must not be persuaded by that eristic doctrine (namely that if ignorant in ignorance you must remain) for that on the one hand would make us idle and is a pleasant doctrine for the weak among man- kind to hear ; while this other doctrine makes us industrious and apt to seek. Trusting in which that it is true, I am willing along with you to seek out virtue : — what it is. MenOy 8i. These strange theories then are much with Socrates on his last sad day — sad to his friends — as justifying more or less, on ancient religious authority, the instinctive confidence, checking sadness in himself, that he will survive — survive the effects of the poison, of the funeral fire ; that somewhere, with some others, with Minos perhaps and other "righteous souls" of the national religion, he will be holding discourses, dialogues, quite similar to these, only a little better as must naturally happen with so diligent a scholar, this time to-morrow. And that wild thought of metempsycMsis was connected with a theory, yet more fantastic, of the visible heaven above us. For Pythagoras, the Pythagoreans, had had their views also, as became the possessors of " a first principle " — of a philosophy therefore which need leave no problem untouched — on purely material things, above all on the structure of the planets, the mechanical contrivances by which their motion was effected (it came to just that ! ) on the relation of the earth to its atmosphere and the like. The doctrine of the transmigration, 68 THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER the pilgrimage or mental journeys, of the soul linked itself readily with a fanciful, guess-work astronomy, which provided starry places, wide areas, hostelries, for that wanderer to move or rest in. A matter of very lively and presentable form and colour, as if making the invisible show through, this too pleased the extremely visual fancy of Plato ; as we may see, in many places of the Phadoj the PhadruSy the Timaus^ and most conspicuously in the tenth book of The Republic^ where he relates the vision of Er — what he saw of the other world during a kind of temporary death. Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are briefly depicted in it ; Paradise especially with a quite Dantesque sensibility to coloured light — physical light or spiritual, you can hardly tell which, so perfectly is the inward sense blent with its visible counter-part, reminding one forcibly of the Divine Comedy, of which those closing pages of T/ie Republic suggest an early outline. That then is the third element in Plato derivative from his Pythagorean masters : an astronomy of infant minds, we might call it, in which the celestial world is the scene, not as yet of those abstract reasonable laws of number and motion and space, upon which, as Plato himself protests in the seventh book of The Republic, it is the business of a veritable science of the stars to exercise our minds, but rather of a machinery, which the mere star-gazer may peep into as best he can, with its levers, its spindles and revolving 69 PLATO AND PLATONISM wheels, its spheres, he says, *' like those boxes which fit into one another," and the literal doors " opened in heaven," through which, at the due point of ascension, the revolving pilgrim soul will glide forth and have a chance of gazing into the wide spaces beyond, "as he stands outside on the back of the sky" — that hollow partly transparent sphere which surrounds and closes in our terrestrial atmosphere. Most difficult to follow in detailed description, perhaps not to be taken quite seriously, one thing at least is clear about the planetary movements as Plato and his Pythagorean teachers conceive them. They produce, naturally enough, sounds, that famous " music of the spheres," which the undisciplined ear fails to recognise, to delight in, only because it is never silent. That it really is impossible after all to learn, to be taught what you are entirely ignorant of, was and still is a fact of experience, manifest especially in regard to music. Now that " music of the spheres " in its largest sense, its completest orchestration, the harmonious order of the whole universe (KoTroi<;, fiJi) o6pot fikv woWol, ^dicxot Bi re iravpoi. He will have, as readers of The Kepublic know, a hundred precepts of self- repression for others — the self-repression of every really tuneable member of a chorus ; and he begins by almost eifacing himself. All that is best and largest in his own matured genius he identifies with his master ; and when we speak of Plato generally what we are really thinking of is the Platonic Socrates. 9« PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS " Sophist," professional enemy of Socrates : — it became, chiefly through the influence of Plato, inheriting, expanding, the preferences and anti- pathies of his master, a bad name. Yet it had but indicated, by a quite natural verbal formation, the class of persons through whom, in the most effectual manner, supply met demand, the demand for education, asserted by that marvellously ready Greek people, when the youthful mind in them became suddenly aware of the coming of virile capacity, and they desired to be made by rules of art better speakers, better writers and account- ants, than any merely natural, unassisted gifts, however fortunate, could make them. While the peculiar religiousness of Socrates had induced in him the conviction that he was something less than a wise man, a philosopher only, a mere seeker after such wisdom as he might after all never attain, here were the ao<^i,^, yiKoiov Tiva koI arexvov irape^eTai. — It is but a kind of bastard art of mere words (rixyrj are^yo^) that he will have who does not know the truth of things, but has tried to hunt out what other people think about it. "Conception," observed an intensely personal, deeply stirred, poet and artist of our own genera- ii8 PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS tion : " Conception, fundamental brainwork, — that is what makes the difference, in all art." Against all pretended, mechanically com- municable rules of art then, against any rule of literary composition, for instance, unsanctioned by the facts, by a clear apprehension of the facts, of that experience, which to each one of us severally is the beginning, if it be not also the end, of all knowledge, against every merely formal dictate (their name is legion with practis- ing Sophists of all ages) Ilepl fipaxvXoyia^, Kal eKeeivoXoyia^, xal Seivwaea^, Concerning freedom or precision, figure, emphasis, proportion of parts and the like, exordium and conclusion : — against all such the Platonic Socrates still protests, " You know what must be known before harmony can be attained, but not yet the laws of harmony itself," — rd, irph Tpar/^Siai, Sophocles would object in like case, rh wph rpayq»Slayia) it is in general with knowledge of the soul of man — with a veritable psychology, with as much as possible as we can get of that — that the writer, the speaker, must be chiefly concerned, if he is to handle minds not by mere empiric routine, rpt^y uovov, KoX ifiireipla aXKa rexvy, but by the pOWCr of veritable fine art. Now such art, such theory, is not ** to be caught with the left hand," as the Greek phrase went ; and again, x<^\eiret, rk KoXd. We have no time to hear in English Plato's clever specimens of the way in which people would wtite about love without success. Let us rather hear himself on that subject, in his own characteristic mood of conviction. — Try ! she said (a certain Sibylline woman namely, from whose lips Socrates in the Symposium is supposed to quote what follows) Try to apply your mind as closely as possible to what I am going to say. For he who has been led thus far in the discipline of love, beholding beautiful objects in the right order, coming now towards the end of the doctrine of love, will on a sudden behold a beauty wonderful in its nature : — that, Socrates I towards which indeed the former exercises were all designed ; being first of all ever existent j having neither beginning nor end; neither growing or fading away'j and then, not beautiful in one way, unbeautiful in another; beautiful now, but not then ; beautiful in this relation, unlovely in that ; to some, but not to others. Nor again will that beauty appear to him to be beautiful as a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body ; nor as any kind of reasoning or science ; nor as being resident in anything else, as in a living creature or the earth or the sky or any other 121 PLATO AND PLATONISM thing ; but as being itself by itself, ever in a single form with itself; all other beautiful things so participating in it, that while they begin and cease to be, that neither becomes more nor less nor suffers any other change. Whenever, then, anyone, beginning from things here below, through a right practice of love, ascending, begins to discern that other beauty, he will almost have reached the end. For this in truth is the right method of proceeding towards the doctrine of love, or of being conducted therein by another, — beginning from these beautiful objects here below ever to be going up higher, with that other beauty in view ; using them as steps of a ladder ; mounting from the love of one fair person to the love of two ; and from the love of two to the love of all ; and from the love of beautiful persons to the love of beautiful employments — koAA eiriTrjStvftaTa (that means being a soldier, or a priest, or a scholar) and from the love of beautiful employments to the love of beautiful kinds of knowledge ; till he passes from degrees of knowledge to that knowledge which is the knowledge of nothing else save the absolute Beauty itself, and knows it at length as in itself it really is. At this moment of life, dear Socrates ! said the Mantinean Sibyl, if at any moment, man truly lives, beholding the absolute beauty — the which, so you have once seen it, will appear beyond the comparison of gold, or raiment, or those beautiful young persons, seeing whom now, like many another, you are so overcome that you are ready, beholding those beautiful persons and associating ever with them, if it were possible, neither to eat nor drink but only to look into their eyes and sit beside them. What then, she asked, suppose we ? if it were given to any one to behold the absolute beauty, in its clearness, its pureness, its unmixed essence j not replete with flesh and blood and colours and other manifold vanity of this mortal life ; but if he were able to behold that divine beauty (/lovoetSes) simply as it is. Do you think, she said, that life would be a poor thing to one whose eyes were fixed on that ; seeing that, (^S &t) with the organ through which it must be seen, and communing with that ? Do you not think rather, she asked, that here alone it will be his, seeing the beautiful with that through which it may be seen (namely with the imaginative reason, 6 voCs) to beget no mere phantasms of virtue, as it is no phantom he 122 PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS apprehends, but the true virtue, as he embraces what is true ? And having begotten virtue (virtue is the child that will be born of this mystic intellectual commerce, or connubium^ of the imaginative reason with ideal beauty) and reared it, he will become dear to God, and if any man may be immortal he will be. Symposium, 2iO. The essential vice of sophistry, as Plato con- ceived it, was that for it no real things existed. Real things did exist for Plato, things that were " an end in themselves " ; and the Platonic Socrates was right : — Plato has written so well there, because he was no scholar of the Sophists as he understood them, but is writing of what he really knows. 123 VI THE GENIUS OF PLATO All true criticism of philosophic doctrine, as of every other product of human mind, must begin with an historic estimate of the conditions, ante- cedent and contemporary, which helped to make it precisely what it was. But a complete criti- cism does not end there. In the evolution of abstract doctrine as we find it written in the history of philosophy, if there is always, on one side, the fatal, irresistible, mechanic play of circumstance — the circumstances of a particular age, which may be analysed and explained ; there is always also, as if acting from the opposite side, the comparatively inexplicable force of a person- ality, resistant to, while it is moulded by, them. It might even be said that the trial-task of criti- cism, in regard to literature and art no less than to philosophy, begins exactly where the estimate of general conditions, of the conditions common to all the products of this or that particular age — of the "environment" — leaves off, and we touch what is unique in the individual genius 124 THE GENIUS OF PLATO which contrived after all, by force of will, to have its own masterful way with that environ- ment. If in reading Plato, for instance, the philosophic student has to re -construct for himself, as far as possible, the general character of an age, he must also, so far as he may, re- produce the portrait of a person. The Sophists, the Sophistical world, around him ; his master, Socrates ; the Pre-Socratic philosophies ; the mechanic influence, that is to say, of past and present : — of course we can know nothing at all of the Platonic doctrine except so far as we see it in well-ascertained contact with all that ; but there is also Plato himself in it. — A personality, we may notice at the outset, of a certain complication. The great masters of philosophy have been for the most part its noticeably single-minded servants. As if in emulation of Aristotle's simplicity of character, his absorbing intellectualism — impressive cer- tainly, heroic enough, in its way — they have served science, science in vacuo, as if nothing beside, faith, imagination, love, the bodily sense, could detach them from it for an hour. It is not merely that we know little of their lives (there was so little to tell !) but that we know nothing at all of their temperaments ; of which, that one leading abstract or scientific force in them was in fact strictly exclusive. Little more than intellectual abstractions themselves, in them 125 PLATO AND PLATONISM philosophy was wholly faithful to its colours, or its colourlessness ; rendering not grey only, as Hegel said of it, but all colours alike, in grey. With Plato it was otherwise. In him, the passion for truth did but bend, or take the bent of, certain ineradicable predispositions of his nature, in themselves perhaps somewhat opposed to that. It is however in the blending of diverse elements in the mental constitution of Plato that the peculiar Platonic quality resides. Platonism is in one sense an emphatic witness to the un- seen, the transcendental, the non-experienced, the beauty, for instance, which is not for the bodily eye. Yet the author of this philosophy of the unseen was, — Who can doubt it who has read but a page of him ? this, in fact, is what has led and kept to his pages many who have little or no turn for the sort of questions Plato actually discusses : — ^The author of this philosophy of the unseen was one, for whom, as was said of a very different French writer, " the visible world really existed." Austere as he seems, and on well- considered principle really is, his temperance or austerity, aesthetically so winning, is attained only by the chastisement, the control, of a variously interested, a richly sensuous nature. Yes, the visible world, so pre-eminently worth eye-sight at Athens just then, really existed for him : exists still — there's the point ! — is active still everywhere, when he seems to have turned away from it to invisible things. 126 THE GENIUS OF PLATO To the somewhat sad -coloured school of Socrates, and its discipline towards apathy or contempt in such matters, he had brought capacities of bodily sense with the making in them of an Odyssey ; or (shall we say ?) of a poet after the order of Sappho or Catullus ; as indeed also a practical intelligence, a popular management of his own powers, a skill in philo- sophic yet mundane Greek prose, which might have constituted him the most successful of Sophists. You cannot help seeing that his mind is a storehouse of all the liveliest imageries of men and things. Nothing, if it really arrests eye or ear at all, is too trivial to note. Passing through the crowd of human beings, he notes the sounds alike of their solemn hymns and of their pettiest handicraft. A conventional philo- sopher might speak of "dumb matter," for instance ; but Plato has lingered too long in braziers* workshops to lapse into so stupid an epithet. And if the persistent hold of sensible things upon him thus reveals itself in trifles, it is manifest no less in the way in which he can tell a long story, — ^no one more effectively ! and again, in his graphic presentment of whole scenes from actual life, like that with which The Re- public opens. His Socrates, like other people, is curious to witness a new religious function : how they will do it. As in modern times, it would be a pleasant occasion also for meeting the acquaintance one likes best — Bwetrofteffa itoWok 127 PLATO AND PLATONISM T&v vecav avToOi. " We shall meet a number of our youth there : we shall have a dialogue : there will be a torchlight procession in honour of the goddess, an equestrian procession : a novel feature ! — What ? Torches in their hands, passed on as they race ? Aye, and an illumination, through the entire night. It will be worth seeing!" — that old midnight hour, as Carlyle says of another vivid scene, " shining yet on us, ruddy-bright through the centuries." Put along- side of that, and, for life-like charm, side by side with Murillo's Beggar- boys (you catch them, if you look at his canvas on the sudden, actually moving their mouths, to laugh and speak and munch their crusts, all at once) the scene in the Lysis of the dice -players. There the boys are ! in full dress, to take part in a religious ceremony. It is scarcely over ; but they are already busy with the knuckle-bones, some just outside the door, others in a corner. Though Plato never tells one without due motive, yet he loves a story for its own sake, can make one of fact or fancy at a moment's notice, or re-tell other people's better : how those dear skinny grasshoppers of Attica, for instance, had once been human creatures, who, when the Muses first came on earth, were so ab- sorbed by their music that they forgot even to eat and drink, till they died of it. And then the story of Gyges in TAe Republic, and the ring that can make its wearer invisible : i?8 THE GENIUS OF PLATO — it goes as easily, as the ring itself round the finger. Like all masters of literature, Plato has of course varied excellences ; but perhaps none of them has won for him a larger number of friendly readers than this impress of visible reality. For him, truly (as he supposed the highest sort of knowledge must of necessity be) all knowledge was like knowing a person. The Dialogue itself, being, as it is, the special creation of his literary art, becomes in his hands, and by his masterly conduct of it, like a single living person ; so comprehensive a sense does he bring to bear upon it of the slowly -developing physiognomy of the thing — its organic structure, its symmetry and expression — combining all the various, dis- parate subjects of The Republic, for example, into a manageable whole, so entirely that, look- ing back, one fancies this long dialogue of at least three hundred pages might have occupied, perhaps an afternoon. And those who take part in it ! If Plato did not create the " Socrates " of his Dialogues, he has created other characters hardly less life- like. The young Charmides, the incarnation of natural, as the aged Cephalus of acquired, temperance ; his Sophoclean amenity as he sits there pontifically at the altar, in the court of his peaceful house ; the large company, of varied character and of every age, which moves in those Dialogues, though still oftenest the young p. VI 129 K PLATO AND PLATONISM in all their youthful liveliness : — who that knows them at all can doubt Plato's hold on persons, that of persons on him ? Sometimes, even when they are not formally introduced into his work, characters that had interested, impressed, or touched him, inform and colour it, as if with their personal influence, showing through what purports to be the wholly abstract analysis of some wholly abstract moral situation. Thus, the form of the dying Socrates himself is visible pathetically in the description of the suffering righteous man, actually put into his own mouth in the second book of The Republic; as the winning brilliancy of the lost spirit of Alcibiades infuses those pages of the sixth, which discuss the nature of one by birth and endowments an aristocrat, amid the dangers to which it is ex- posed in the Athens of that day — the qualities which must make him, if not the saviour, the destroyer, of a society which cannot remain unaffected by his showy presence. Corruptio optimi pessima ! Yet even here, when Plato is dealing with the inmost elements of personality, his eye is still on its object, on character as seen in characteristics^ through those details, which make character a sensible fact, the changes of colour in the face as of tone in the voice, the gestures, the really physiognomic value, or the mere tricks, of gesture and glance and speech. What is visibly expressive in, or upon, persons ; those flashes of temper which check yet give 130 THE GENIUS OF PLATO renewed interest to the course of a conversation ; the delicate touches of intercourse, which convey to the very senses all the subtleties of the heart or of the intelligence : — it is always more than worth his while to make note of these. We see, for instance, the sharp little pygmy bit of a soul that catches sight of any little thing so keenly, and makes a very proper lawyer. We see, as well as hear, the " rhapsodist," whose sensitive performance of his part is nothing less than an *' interpretation " of it, artist and critic at once : the personal vanities of the various speakers in his Dialogues, as though Plato had observed, or overheard them, alone ; and the inevitable prominence of youth wherever it is present at all, nothwithstanding the real sweet- ness of manner and modesty of soul he records of it so affectionately. It is this he loves best to linger by ; to feel himself in contact with a condition of life, which translates all it is, so immediately, into delightful colour, and move- ment, and sound. The eighth and ninth books of The Republic are a grave contribution, as you know, to abstract moral and political theory, a generalisation of weighty changes of character in men and states. But his observations on the concrete traits of individuals, young or old, which enliven us on the way ; the difference in same- ness of sons and fathers, for instance ; the in- fluence of servants on their masters ; how the minute ambiguities of rank, as a family becomes 131 PLATO AND PLATONISM impoverished, tell on manners, on temper ; all the play of moral colour in the reflex of mere circumstance on what men really are : — the characterisation of all this has with Plato a touch of the peculiar fineness of Thackeray, one might say. Plato enjoys it for its own sake, and would have been an excellent writer of fiction. There is plenty of humour in him also of course, and something of irony — salt, to keep the exceeding richness and sweetness of his dis- course from cloying the palate. The affectations of sophists, or professors, their staginess or their inelegance, the harsh laugh, the swaggering ways, of Thrasymachus, whose determination to make the general company share in a private conversation, is significant of his whole char- acter, he notes with a finely-pointed pencil, with something of the fineness of malice, — maliny as the French say. Once Thrasymachus had been actually seen to blush. It is with a very differ- ent sort of fineness Plato notes the blushes of the young ; of Hippocrates, for instance, in the Prota- goras. The great Sophist was said to be in Athens, at the house of Callicles, and the diligent young scholar is up betimes, eager to hear him. He rouses Socrates before daylight. As they linger in the court, the lad speaks of his own intellectual aspirations ; blushes at his confidence. It was just then that the morning sun blushed with his first beam, as if to reveal the lad's 132 THE GENIUS OF PLATO blushing face. — Kai &? el-n-ev ipvOpidaai, ^817 yhp viriipaivi ti ^/lipa^ uots Kara^ainj aiirbv yeviaSat. He who noted that so precisely had, surely, the delicacy of the artist, a fastidious eye for the subtleties of colour as soul made visibly ex- pressive. " Poor creature as I am," says the Platonic Socrates, in the Lysis, concerning an- other youthful blush, " Poor creature as I am, I have one talent : I can recognise, at first sight, the lover and the beloved." So it is with the audible world also. The exquisite monotony of the voice of the great sophist, for example, " once set in motion, goes ringing on like a brazen pot, which if you strike it continues to sound till some one lays his hand upon it." And if the delicacy of eye and ear, so also the keenness and constancy of his observa- tion, are manifest in those elaborately wrought images for which the careful reader lies in wait : the mutiny of the sailors in the ship — ship of the state, or of one's own soul : the echoes and beams and shadows of that half - illuminated cavern, the human mind : the caged birds in the Theeetetus, which are like the flighty, half- contained notions of an imperfectly educated understanding. Real notions are to be ingrained by persistent thoroughness of the "dialectic" method, as if by conscientious dyers. He makes us stay to watch such dyers busy with their purple stuff, as he had done ; adding as it were ethic colour to what he sees with the eye, and 133 PLATO AND PLATONISM painting while he goes, as if on the margin of his high philosophical discourse, himself scarcely aware ; as the monkish scribe set bird or flower, with so much truth of earth, in the blank spaces of his heavenly meditation. Now Plato is one for whom the visible world thus " really exists " because he is by nature and before all things, from first to last, unalterably a lover. In that, precisely, lies the secret of the susceptible and diligent eye, the so sensitive ear. The central interest of his own youth — of his profoundly impressible youth — as happens always with natures of real capacity, gives law and pattern to all that succeeds it. T^ ipmriKd, as he says, the experience, the discipline, of love, had been that for Plato ; and, as love must of necessity deal above all with visible persons, this discipline involved an exquisite culture of the senses. It is " as lovers use," that he is ever on the watch for those dainty messages, those finer intimations, to eye and ear. If in the later development of his philosophy the highest sort of knowledge comes to seem like the knowledge of a person, the relation of the reason to truth like the commerce of one person with another, the peculiarities of personal relationship thus moulding his conception of the properly in- visible world of ideas, this is partly because, for a lover, the entire visible world, its hues and outline, its attractiveness, its power and bloom, must have associated themselves pre-eminently 134 THE GENIUS OF PLATO with the power and bloom of visible living persons. With these, as they made themselves known by word and glance and touch, through the medium of the senses, lay the forces, which, in that inexplicable tyranny of one person over another, shaped the soul. Just there, then, is the secret of Plato's inti- mate concern with, his power over, the sensible world, the apprehensions of the sensuous faculty : he is a lover, a great lover, somewhat after the manner of Dante. For him, as for Dante, in the impassioned glow of his conceptions, the material and the spiritual are blent and fused together. While, in that fire and heat, what is spiritual attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is material, on the other hand, will lose its earthi- ness and impurity. It is of the amorous temper, therefore, you must think in connexion with Plato's youth — of this, amid all the strength of the genius in which it is so large a constituent, — indulging, developing, refining, the sensuous capacities, the powers of eye and ear, of the fancy also which can re-fashion, of the speech which can best respond to and reproduce, their liveliest presentments. That is why when Plato speaks of visible things it is as if you saw them. He who in the Symposium describes so vividly the pathway, the ladder, of love, its joyful ascent towards a more perfect beauty than we have ever yet actually seen, by way of a parallel to the gradual elevation of mind towards perfect 135 PLATO AND PLATONISM knowledge, knew all that, we may be sure — T^ ipmnKo, — all the ways of lovers, in the literal sense. He speaks of them retrospectively indeed, but knows well what he is talking about. Plato himself had not been always a mere Platonic lover ; was rather, naturally, as he makes Socrates say of himself, ^TTo>» t&v koX&v — subject to the influence of fair persons. A certain penitential colour amid that glow of fancy and expression, hints that the final harmony of his nature had been but gradually beaten out, and invests the temperance, actually so conspicuous in his own nature, with the charms of a patiently elaborated effect of art. For we must remind ourselves just here, that, quite naturally also, instinctively, and apart from the austere influences which claimed and kept his allegiance later, Plato, with a kind of unim- passioned passion, was a lover in particular of temperance ; of temperance too, as it may be seeriy as a visible thing — seen in Charmides, say! in that subdued and grey-eyed loveliness, " clad in sober grey " ; or in those youthful athletes which, in ancient marble, reproduce him and the like of him with sound, firm outlines, such as temperance secures. Still, that some more luxurious sense of physical beauty had at one time greatly disturbed him, divided him against himself, we may judge from his own words in a famous passage of the Phcedrus concerning the management, the so difficult management, of 136 THE GENIUS OF PLATO those winged steeds of the body, which is the chariot of the soul. Puzzled, in some degree, Plato seems to remain, not merely in regard to the higher love and the lower. Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemus, as he distinguishes them in the Symposium; nor merely with the difficulty of arbitrating between some inward beauty, and that which is outward ; with the odd mixture everywhere, save in its still unapprehended but eternal essence, of the beautiful with what is otherwise ; but he is yet more harassed by the experience (it is in this shape that the world-old puzzle of the existence of evil comes to him) that even to the truest eyesight, to the best trained faculty of soul, the beautiful would never come to seem strictly concentric with the good. That seems to have taxed his understanding as gravely as it had tried his will, and he was glad when in the mere natural course of years he was become at all events less ardent a lover. 'Tis he is the authority for what Sophocles had said on the happy decay of the passions as age advanced : it was "like being set free from service to a band of madmen." His own distinguishing note is tranquil afterthought upon this conflict, with a kind of envy of the almost disembodied old age of Cephalus, who quotes that saying of Sophocles amid his placid sacrificial doings. Connect with this quiet scene, and contrast with the luxuriant power of the Phadrus and the Symposium, what, 137 PLATO AND PLATONISM for a certain touch of later mysticism in it, we might call Plato's evening prayer, in the ninth book of The Republic. — When any one, being healthfully and temperately disposed towards himself, turns to sleep, having stirred the reasonable part of him with a feast of fair thoughts and high problems, being come to full consciousness, himself with himself; and has, on the other hand, committed the element of desire neither to appetite, nor to surfeiting, to the end that this may slumber well, and, by its pain or pleasure, cause no trouble to that part which is best in him, but may suffer it, alone by itself, in its pure essence, to behold and aspire towards some object, and apprehend what it knows not — some event, of the past, it may be, or something that now is, or will be hereafter j and in like manner has soothed hostile impulse, so that, felling to no angry thoughts against any, he goes not to rest with a troubled spirit, but with those two parts at peace within, and with that third part, wherein reason is engendered, on the move : — you know, I think, that in sleep of this sort he lays special hold on truth, and then least of all is there lawlessness in the visions of his dreams. Republic^ ^yi. For Plato, being then about twenty -eight years old, had listened to the "Apology" of Socrates ; had heard from them all that others had heard or seen of his last hours; himself perhaps actually witnessed those last hours. "Justice itself " — the "absolute" Justice — had then become almost a visible object, and had greatly solemnised him. The rich young man, rich also in intellectual gifts, who might have become (we see this in the adroit management of his written work) the most brilliant and effective of Sophists ; who might have developed dialogues into plays, tragedy, perhaps comedy, as he cared ; 138 THE GENIUS OF PLATO whose sensuous or graphic capacity might have made him the poet of an Odyssey, a Sappho, or a Catullus, or, say ! just such a poet as, just because he was so attractive, would have been disfran- chised in the Perfect City; was become the creature of an immense seriousness, of a fully adult sense, unusual in Greek perhaps even more than in Roman writers, " of the weightiness of the matters concerning which he has to discourse, and of the frailty of man." He inherits, alien as they might be to certain powerful influences in his own temper, alike the sympathies and the antipathies of that strange, delightful teacher, who had given him (most precious of gifts !) an inexhaustible interest in himself. It is in this way he inherits a preference for those trying severities of thought which are characteristic of the Eleatic school ; an antagonism to the suc- cessful Sophists of the day, in whom the old sceptical " philosophy of motion " seemed to be renewed as a theory of morals ; and henceforth, in short, this master of visible things, this so ardent lover, will be a lover of the invisible, with — Yes ! there it is constantly, in the Platonic dia- logues, not to be explained away — with a certain asceticism, amid all the varied opulence, of sense, of speech and fancy, natural to Plato's genius. The lover, who is become a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, and therefore, literally, a seer, of it, carrying an elaborate cultivation of the bodily senses, of eye and ear, their natural 139 PLATO AND PLATONISM force and acquired fineness — gifts akin properly to rh epariKd, as he says, to the discipline of sensuous love — into the world of intellectual abstractions ; seeing and hearing there too, associating for ever all the imagery of things seen with the conditions of what primarily exists only for the mind, filling that " hollow land " with delightful colour and form, as if now at last the mind were veritably dealing with living people there, living people who play upon us through the affinities, the repulsion and attraction, of persons towards one another, all the magnetism, as we call it, of actual human friendship or love : — ^There, is the formula of Plato's genius, the essential condition of the specially Platonic temper, of Platonism. And his style, because it really is Plato's style, conforms to, and in its turn promotes in others, that mental situation. He breaks as it were visible colour into the very texture of his work : his vocabulary, the very stuff he manipulates, has its delightful esthetic qualities ; almost every word, one might say, its figurative value. And yet no one perhaps has with equal power literally sounded the unseen depths of thought, and, with what may be truly called "substantial" word and phrase, given locality there to the mere adumbrations, the dim hints and surmise, of the speculative mind. For him, all gifts of sense and intelligence converge in one supreme faculty of theoretic vision, Qempia, the imaginative reason. 140 THE GENIUS OF PLATO To trace that thread of physical colour, en- twined throughout, and multiplied sometimes into large tapestried figures, is the business, the enjoyment, of the student of the Dialogues, as he reads them. For this or that special literary quality indeed we may go safely by preference to this or that particular Dialogue ; to the Gorgias, for instance, for the readiest Attic wit, and a manly practical sense in the handling of philo- sophy ; to the Charmides, for something like the effect of sculpture in modelling a person ; to the Timaus, for certain brilliant chromatic effects. Yet who that reads the Theatetus, or the Pheedrus, or the seventh book of The Republic, can doubt Plato's gift in precisely the opposite direction ; that gift of sounding by words the depths of thought, a plastic power literally, moulding to term and phrase what might have seemed in its very nature too impalpable and abstruse to lend itself, in any case, to language ? He gives names to the invisible acts, processes, creations, of abstract mind, as masterly, as efficiently, as Adam himself to the visible living creations of old. As Plato speaks of them, we might say, those abstractions too become visible living creatures. We read the speculative poetry of Wordsworth, or Tennyson ; and we may observe that a great metaphysical force has come into language which is by no means purely technical or scholastic ; what a help such language is to the understanding, to a real hold over the things, the thoughts, the 141 PLATO AND PLATONISM mental processes, those words denote ; a vocabu- lary to which thought freely commits itself, trained, stimulated, raised, thereby, towards a high level of abstract conception, surely to the increase of our general intellectual powers. That, of course, is largely due to Plato's successor, to Aristotle's life-long labour of analysis and defini- tion, and to his successors the Schoolmen, with their systematic culture of a precise instrument for the registration, by the analytic intellect, of its own subtlest movements. But then, Aristotle, himself the first of the Schoolmen, had succeeded Plato, and did but formulate, as a terminology " of art," as technical language, what for Plato is still vernacular, original, personal, the product in him of an instinctive imaginative power — a sort of 'visual power, but causing others also to see what is matter of original intuition for him. From first to last our faculty of thinking is limited by our command of speech. Now it is straight from Plato's lips, as if in natural con- versation, that the language came, in which the mind has ever since been discoursing with itself concerning itself, in that inward dialogue, which is the " active principle " of the dialectic method as an instrument for the attainment of truth. For, the essential, or dynamic, dialogue, is ever that dialogue of the mind with itself, which any converse with Socrates or Plato does but promote. The very words of Plato, then, 142 THE GENIUS OF PLATO challenge us straightway to larger and finer appre- hension of the processess of our own minds ; are themselves a discovery in the sphere of mind. It was he made us freemen of those solitary places, so trying yet so attractive : so remote and high, they seem, yet are naturally so close to us : he peopled them with intelligible forms. Nay more ! By his peculiar gift of verbal articulation he divined the mere hollow spaces which a knowledge, then merely potential, and an ex- perience still to come, would one day occupy. And so, those who cannot admit his actual speculative results, precisely his report on the invisible theoretic world, have been to the point sometimes, in their objection, that by sheer effectiveness of abstract language, he gave an illusive air of reality or substance to the mere nonentities of metaphysic hypothesis — of a mind trying to feed itself on its own emptiness. Just there — in the situation of one, shaped, by combining nature and circumstance, into a seer who has a sort of sensuous love of the un- seen — is the paradox of Plato's genius, and therefore, always, of Platonism, of the Platonic temper. His aptitude for things visible, with the gift of words, empowers him to express, as if for the eyes, what except to the eye of the mind is strictly invisible, what an acquired asceticism induces him to rank above, and some- times, in terms of harshest dualism, oppose to, the sensible world. Plato is to be interpreted 143 PLATO AND PLATONISM not merely by his antecedents, by the influence upon him of those who preceded him, but by his successors, by the temper, the intellectual alliances, of those who directly or indirectly have been sympathetic with him. Now it is noticeable that, at first sight somewhat incon- gruously, a certain number of Manicheans have always been of his company; people who held that matter was evil. Pointing significantly to an unmistakable vein of Manichean, or Puritan sentiment actually there in the Platonic Dia- logues, these rude companions or successors of his, carry us back to his great predecessor, to Socrates, whose personal influence had so strongly enforced on Plato the severities, moral and in- tellectual, alike of Parmenides and of the Pytha- goreans. The cold breath of a harshly abstract, a too incorporeal philosophy, had blown, like an east wind, on that last depressing day in the prison-cell of Socrates ; and the venerable commonplaces then put forth, in which an over- strained pagan sensuality seems to be reacting, to be taking vengeance, on itself, turned now sick and suicidal, will lose none of their weight with Plato: — That "all who rightly touch philosophy, study nothing else than to die, and to be dead" — that " the soul reasons best, when, as much as possible, it comes to be alone with itself, bidding good-bye to the body, and, to the utmost of its power, rejecting communion with it, with the very touch of it, aiming at what is" 144 THE GENIUS OF PLATO It was, in short, as if for the soul to have come into a human body at all, had been the seed of disease in it, the beginning of its own proper death. As for any adornments or provision for this body, the master had declared that a true philo- sopher as such would make as little of them as possible. To those young hearers, the words of Socrates may well have seemed to anticipate, not the visible world he had then delineated in glowing colour as if for the bodily eye, but only the chilling influence of the hemlock ; and it was because Plato was only half convinced of the Manichean or Puritan element in his master's doctrine, or rather was in contact with it on one side only of his complex and genial nature, that Platonism became possible, as a temper for which, in strictness, the opposition of matter to spirit has no ultimate or real existence. Not to be " pure " from the body, but to identify it, in its utmost fairness, with the fair soul, by a gymnastic " fused in music," became, from first to last, the aim of education as he conceived it. That the body is but " a hindrance to the attain- ment of philosophy, if one takes it along with one as a companion in one's search " (a notion which Christianity, at least in its later though wholly legitimate developments, will correct) can hardly have been the last thought of Plato himself on quitting it. He opens his door indeed to those austere monitors. They correct the sensuous richness of his genius, but could p. VI 145 L PLATO AND PLATONISM not suppress it. The sensuous lover becomes a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, after his earlier pattern, carrying into the world of intel- lectual vision, of deapia, all the associations of the actual world of sight. Some of its invisible realities he can all but see with the bodily eye : the absolute Temperance, in the person of the youth- ful Charmides ; the absolute Righteousness, in the person of the dying Socrates. Yes, truly ! all true knowledge will be like the know- ledge of a person, of living persons, and truth, for Plato, in spite of his Socratic asceti- cism, to the last, something to look at. The eyes which had noted physical things, so finely, vividly, continuously, would be still at work ; and, Plato thus qualifying the Manichean or Puritan element in Socrates by his own capacity for the world of sense, Platonism has contributed largely, has been an immense en- couragement towards, the redemption of matter, of the world of sense, by art, by all right education, by the creeds and worship of the Christian Church — towards the vindication of the dignity of the body. It was doubtless because Plato was an excellent scholar that he did not begin to teach others till he was more than forty years old — one of the great scholars of the world, with Virgil and Milton : by which is implied that, possessed of the inborn genius, of those natural powers, 146 THE GENIUS OF PLATO which sometimes bring with them a certain defiance of rule, of the intellectual habits -of others, he acquires, by way of habit and rule, all that can be taught and learned ; and what is thus derived from others by docility and discipline, what is range^ comes to have in him, and in his work, an equivalent weight with what is unique, impulsive, underivable. Raphael — Raphael, as you see him in the Blenheim Madonna^ is a supreme example of such scholar- ship in the sphere of art. Born of a romantically ancient family, understood to be the descendant of Solon himself, Plato had been in early youth a writer of verse. That he turned to a more vigorous, though pedestrian mode of writing, was perhaps an effect of his corrective intercourse with Socrates, through some of the most important years of his life, — from twenty to twenty-eight. He belonged to what was just then the discontented class, and might well have taken refuge from active political life in political ideals, or in a kind of self-imposed exile. A traveller, adventurous for that age, he certainly became. After the Lehr-jahre^ the Wander-jahre ! — all round the Mediterranean coasts as far west as Sicily. Think of what all that must have meant just then, for eyes which could see. If those journeys had begun in angry flight from home, it was for purposes of self-improvement they were continued : the delightful fruit of them is evident in what he writes ; and finding him 147 PLATO AND PLATONISM in friendly intercourse with Dionysius the elder, with Dio, and Dionysius the younger, at the polished court of Syracuse, we may understand that they were a search also for " the philosophic king," perhaps for the opportune moment of realising "the ideal state." In that case, his quarrels with those capricious tyrants show that he was disappointed. For the future he sought no more to pass beyond the charmed theoretic circle, " speaking wisdom," as was said of Pythagoras, only " among the perfect." He returns finally to Athens ; and there, in the quiet precincts of the Academus, which has left a somewhat dubious name to places where people come to be taught or to teach, founds, not a state, nor even a brotherhood, but only the first college, with something of a common life, of communism on that small scale, with Aristotle for one of its scholars, with its chapel, its gardens, its library with the authentic text of his Dialogues upon the shelves : we may just discern the sort of place through the scantiest notices. His reign was after all to be in his writings. Plato himself does nothing in them to retard the efFacement which mere time brings to persons and their abodes ; and there had been that, moreover, in his own temper, which promotes self-effacement. Yet as he left it, the place remained for centuries, according to his will, to its original use. What he taught through the remaining forty years of his life, the method of that teaching, whether it 148 THE GENIUS OF PLATO was less or more esoteric than the teaching of the extant Dialogues^ is but matter of surmise. Writers, who in their day might still have said much we should have liked to hear, give us little but old, quasi-supernatural stories, told as if they had been new ones, about him. The year of his birth fell, according to some, in the very year of the death of Pericles (a significant date !) but is not precisely ascertainable : nor is the year of his death, nor its manner. Scribens est mortuus, says Cicero : — after the manner of a true scholar, " he died pen in hand." 149 VII THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO I. The Theory of Ideas Platonism is not a formal theory or body of theories, but a tendency, a group of tendencies — a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato's dialogues as reflecting the peculiarities, the marked peculiarities, of himself and his own mental complexion. Those tendencies combine and find their complete expression in what Plato's commentators, rather than Plato, have called the " theory of ideas," itself indeed not so much a doctrine or theory, as a way of regarding and speaking of general terms, such as Useful or fust ; of abstract notions, like Equality ; of ideals, such as Beauty, or The Perfect City ; of all those terms or notions, in short, which represent under general forms the particular pre- sentations of our individual experience ; or, to use Plato's own frequent expression, borrowed ISO THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO from his old Eleatic teachers, which reduce " the Many to the One." What the nature of such representative terms and notions, genus and species, class-word, and abstract idea or ideal, may be ; what their rela- tionship to the individual, the unit, the par- ticulars which they include ; is, as we know, one of the constant problems of logic. Realism, which supposes the abstraction, Animal for instance, or The Just, to be not a mere name, nomen, as with the nominalists, nor a mere subjective thought as with the conceptualists, but to be res, a thing in itself, independent of the particular instances which come into and pass out of it, as also of the particular mind which enter- tains it : — that is one of the fixed and formal answers to this question ; and Plato is the father of all realists. Realism, as such, in the sense just indicated, is not in itself a very difficult or tran- scendental theory ; but rises, again and again, at least in a particular class of minds, quite naturally, as the answer to a natural question. Taking our own stand as to this matter somewhere between the realist and the conceptualist : — See ! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with which we are, each one of us, in communication. It is in that, those common or general ideas really reside. And we might add just here (giving his due to the nominalist also) that those abstract or common PLATO AND PLATONISM notions come to the individual mind through language, through common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality^ into which one's in- dividual experience, little by little, drop by drop, conveys their full meaning or content ; and, by the instrumentality of such terms and notions, thus locating the particular in the general, mediating between general and particular, between our in- dividual experience and the common experience of our kind, we come to understand each other, and to assist each other's thoughts, as in a common mental atmosphere, an "intellectual world," as Plato calls it, a true vorfTot roirot. So much for the modern view ; for what common sense might now suggest as to the nature of logical " universals." Plato's realism however — what is called " The Theory of Ideas " — his way of regarding abstract term and general notion, what Plato has to say about " the Many and the One," is often very difficult ; though of various degrees of difficulty, it must be observed, to various minds. From the simple and easily intelligible sort of realism attributed by Aristotle to Socrates, seeking in " universal definitions," or ideas, only a serviceable instrument for the distinguishing of what is essential from what is unessential in the actual things about him, Plato passes by successive stages, which we should try to keep distinct as we read him, to what may be rightly called a "transcendental," what to many minds has 152 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO seemed a fantastic and unintelligible habit of thought, regarding those abstractions, which indeed seem to become for him not merely substantial things-in-themselves, but little short of living persons, to be known as persons are made known to each other, by a system of affinities, on the old Eleatic rule, Sfioiov ofwiip, like to like — these persons constituting together that common, eternal, intellectual world, a sort of divine family or hierarchy, with which the mind of the individual, so far as it is reasonable, or really knows, is in communion or corre- spondence. And here certainly is a theory, a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about which the difficulties are many. Yet as happens always with the metaphysical questions, or answers, which from age to age pre- occupy acuter minds, those difficulties about the Many and the One actually had their attractive- ness for some in the days of Plato. — Our doctrine (says the Platonic Socrates in the PhiUbus) is, that one and the same thing (the one common notion, namely, embodied in one general term) which — wr& A.oyoiv — under the influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language, become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to every- thing of which existence is asserted from time to time. This law neither will cease to be, nor has it just now begun ; but something of the kind is, I think, an eternal and ineradicable affection of our reason itself in us. And whenever a young man gets his first taste of this he is delighted as having found the priceless pearl of philosophy ; he becomes an enthusiast in his delight ; and eagerly sets in motion — Kivet — every definition 153 PLATO AND PLATONISM — Xoyos — every conception or mental definition (it looked so fixed and firm till then ! ) at one time winding things round each other and welding them into one (that is, he drops all particularities out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular, till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first, and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him, older or younger, or of whatever age he may be ; sparing neither father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen ; scarcely even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men ; for he would hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find an interpreter. Philebus, 15. The Platonic doctrine of " the Many and the One " — the problem with which we are brought face to face in this choice specimen of the humour as well as of the metaphysical power of Plato — is not precisely the question with which the speculative .young man of our own day is likely to puzzle himself^ or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese ; though the questions we are apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment, or protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeif- geist and its doings, may, in their turn, come to seem quite as lifeless and unendurable. As the theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes the mere commonplace of the next, so, in matters of philosophic enquiry, it might appear that the all-absorbing novelty of one generation becomes nothing less than the standard of what is un- interesting, as such, to its successor. Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is not so much 154 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after all really tells. Plato and Platonism we shall never understand unless we are patient with him in what he has to tell us about " the Many and the One." Plato's peculiar view of the matter, then, passes with him into a phase of poetic thought ; as indeed all that Plato's genius touched came in contact with poetry. Of course we are not naturally formed to love, or be interested in, or attracted towards, the abstract as such ; to notions, we might think, carefully deprived of all the incident, the colour and variety, which fits things — this or that — to the constitution and natural habit of our minds, fits them for attachment to what we really are. We cannot love or live upon genus and species^ accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies, need an orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses. Take a seed from the garden. What interest it has for us all lies in our sense of potential differentiation to come : the leaves, leaf upon leaf, the flowers, a thousand new seeds in turn. It is so with animal seed ; and with humanity, individually, or as a whole, its expansion into a detailed, ever- changing, parti -coloured history of particular facts and persons. Abstraction, the introduction of general ideas, seems to close it up again ; to reduce flower and fruit, odour and savour, back again into the dry and worthless seed. We might as well be colour-blind at once, and there I5S PLATO AND PLATONISM is not* a proper name left ! We may contrast generally the mental world we actually live in, where classification, the reduction of all things to common types, has come so far, and where the particular, to a great extent, is known only as the member of a class, with that other world, on the other side of the generalising movement to which Plato and his master so largely contributed — a world we might describe as being under Homeric conditions, such as we picture to ourselves with regret, for which experience was intuition, and life a continuous surprise,, and every object unique, where all knowledge was still of the concrete and the particular, face to face delightfully. To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed ; to genus and species and differentia^ into formal classes, under general notions, and with — yes ! with written labels fluttering on the stalks, instead of blossoms — a botanic or " physic " garden, as they used to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard. And yet (it must be confessed on the other hand) what we actually see, see and hear, is more interesting than ever ; the nineteenth century as compared with the first, with Plato's days or Homer's ; the faces, the persons behind those masks which yet express so much, the flowers, or whatever it may happen to be they carry or iS6 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO touch. The concrete, and that even as a visible thing, has gained immeasurably in richness and compass, in fineness, and interest towards us, by the process, of which those acts of generalisation, of reduction to class and generic type, have certainly been a part. And holding still to the concrete, the particular, to the visible or sensuous, if you will, last as first, thinking of that as essentially the one vital and lively thing, really worth our while in a short life, we may recognise sincerely what generalisation and abstraction have done or may do, are defensible as doing, just for that — for the particular gem or flower — ^what its proper service is to a mind in search, precisely, of a concrete and intuitive knowledge such as that. Think, for a moment, of the difference, as regards mental attitude, between the naturalist who deals with things through ideas, and the layman (so to call him) in picking up a shell on the sea-shore ; what it is that the subsumption of the individual into the species, its subsequent alliance to and co-ordination with other species, really does for the furnishing of the mind of the former. The layman, though we need not suppose him inattentive, or unapt to retain im- pressions, is in fact still but a child ; and the shell, its colours and convolution, no more than a dainty, very easily destructible toy to him. Let him become a schoolboy about it, so to speak. The toy he puts aside ; his mind is 157 PLATO AND PLATONISM drilled perforce, to learn about it ; and thereby is exercised, he may think, with everything except just the thing itself, as he cares for it ; with other shells, with some general laws of life, and for a while it might seem that, turning away his eyes from the " vanity " of the particular, he has been made to sacrifice the concrete, the real and living product of nature, to a mere dry and abstract product of the mind. But when he comes out of school, and on the sea-shore again finds a fellow to his toy, perhaps a finer specimen of it, he may see what the service of that converse with the general has really been towards the concrete, towards what he sees — in regard to the particular thing he actually sees. By its juxta- position and co-ordination with what is ever more and more not //, by the contrast of its very imperfection, at this point or that, with its own proper and perfect type, this concrete and particular thing has, in fact, been enriched by the whole colour and expression of the whole circumjacent world, concentrated upon, or as it were at focus in, it. By a kind of short-hand now, and as if in a single moment of vision, all that, which only a long experience, moving patiently from part to part, could exhaust, its manifold alliance with the entire world of nature, is legible upon it, as it lies there in one's hand. So it is with the shell, the gem, with a glance of the eye ; so it may be with the moral act, IS8 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO with a condition of the mind, or a feeling. You may draw, by use of this coinage (it is Hobbes's figure) this coinage of representative words and thoughts, at your pleasure, upon the accumula- tive capital of the whole experience of humanity. Generalisation, whatever Platonists, or Plato him- self at mistaken moments, may have to say about it, is a method, not of obliterating the concrete phenomenon, but of enriching it, with the joint perspective, the significance, the ex- pressiveness, of all other things beside. What broad-cast light he enjoys ! — that scholar, con- fronted with the sea-shell, for instance, or with some enigma of heredity in himself or another, with some condition of a particular soul, in circumstances which may never precisely so occur again ; in the contemplation of that single phenomenon, or object, or situation. He not only sees, but understands (thereby only seeing the more) and will, therefore, also remember. The significance of the particular object he will retain, by use of his intellectual apparatus of notion and general law, as, to use Plato's own figure, fluid matter may be retained in vessels, not indeed of unbaked clay, but of alabaster or bronze. So much by way of apology for general ideas — abstruse, or intangible, or dry and seedy and wooden, as we may sometimes think them. " Two things," says Aristotle, " might rightly be attributed to Socrates : inductive reasoning, 159 PLATO AND PLATONISM and universal definitions." Now when Aristotle says this of Socrates, he is recording the institu- tion of a method, which might be applied in the way just indicated, to natural objects, to such a substance as carbon, or to such natural processes as heat or motion ; but which, by Socrates him- self, as by Plato after him, was applied almost exclusively to moral phenomena, to the general- isation of aesthetic, political, ethical ideas, of the laws of operation (for the essence of every true conception, or definition, or idea, is a law of operation) of the feelings and the will. To get a notion, a definition, or idea, of motion, for example, which shall not exclude the subtler forms of it, heat for instance — to get a notion of carbon, which shall include not common charcoal only, but the diamond, a thing superficially so unlike it, and which shall also exclude, perhaps, some other substance, superficially almost indis- tinguishable from it : such is the business of physical science, in obedience to rules, outlined by Bacon in the first book of the Novum Organum^ for securing those acts of " inclusion " and " exclusion," inclusiones, exclusiones^ naturce^ debitce, as he says, " which the nature of things requires," if our thoughts are not to misrepresent them. It was a parallel process, a process of in- clusion, that one's resultant idea should be adequate, of rejection or exclusion, that this idea should be not redundant, which Socrates applied 1 60 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO to practice ; exercising, as we see in the Platonic Dialogues, the two opposed functions of a-waya'iri and Siaipeaii, for the formation of just ideas of Temperance, Wisdom, Bravery, Justice itself — a classification of the phenomena of the entire world of feeling and action. Ideas, if they fulfil their proper purpose, represent to the mind such phenomena, for its convenience, but may easily also misrepresent them. In the transition from the particulars to the general, and again in the transition from the general idea, the mental word, to the spoken or written word, to what we call the definition, a door lies open, both for the adulteration and the diminution of the proper content, of our conception, our definition. The first growth of the Platonic " ideas," as we see it in Socrates, according to the report of Aristotle, provided against this twofold mis- representation. Its aim is to secure, in the terms of our discourse with others and with ourselves, precise equivalence to what they denote. It was a " mission " to go about Athens and challenge people to guard the inlets of error, in the passage from facts to their thoughts about them, in the passage from thoughts to words. It was an intellectual gymnastic, to test, more exactly than they were in the habit of doing, the equivalence of words they used so constantly as Just, Brave, Beautiful, to the thoughts they had ; of those thoughts to the facts of ex- perience, which it was the business of those p. vi l6l M PLATO AND PLATONISM thoughts precisely to represent ; to clear the mental air ; to arrange the littered work- chamber of the mind. In many of Plato's Dialogues we see no more than the ordered reflex of this process, informal as it was in the actual practice of Socrates. Out of the accidents of a conversation, as from the confused currents of life and action, the typical forms of the vices and virtues emerge in definite outline. The first contention of The Republic^ for instance, is to establish in regard to the nature of Justice, terms as exactly conterminous with thoughts, thoughts as exactly conterminous with moral facts, as the notion of carbon is for the naturalist, when it has come to include both charcoal and the diamond, on the basis of the essential law of their operation as experience reveals it. Show us, not merely accidental truths about it ; but, by the doing of what (T/ iroiova-a) in the very soul of its possessor, itself by itself. Justice is a good, and Injustice a bad thing. That illustrates exactly what is meant by "an idea," the force of " knowledge through ideas," in the particular instance of Justice. It will include perhaps, on the one hand, forms of Justice so remote from the Justice of our every- day experience as to seem inversions of it ; it will clearly exclude, on the other hand, acts and thoughts, not it, yet, phenomenally, so like it, as to deceive the very gods ; and its area will be expanded sufficiently to include, not the indi- 162 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO vidual only, but the state. And you, the philo- sophic student, were to do that, not for one virtue only, but for Piety, and Beauty, and the State itself, and Knowledge, and Opinion, and the Good. Nay, you might go on and do the same thing for the physical, when you came to the end of the moral, world, were life long enough, and if you had the humour for it : — for Motion, Number, Colour, Sound. That, then, was the first growth of the Platonic ideas, as derived immediately from Socrates, whose formal contribution to philosophy had been " universal definitions," developed " inductively," by the twofold method of " inclusion " and " exclusion." Aristotle adds, however, that Socrates had stopped at the point here indicated : he had not gone on, like some others, to make those universal notions or definitions " separable " — separable, that is to say, from the particular and concrete instances, from which he had gathered them. Separable : -xwpurrot (famous word ! ) that is pre- cisely what general notions become in what is specially called " the Platonic Theory of Ideas." The " Ideas " of Plato are, in truth, neither more nor less than those universal definitions, those universal conceptions, as they look, as they could not but look, amid the peculiar lights and shadows, in the singularly constituted atmosphere, under the strange laws of refraction, and in the proper perspective, of Plato's house of thought. By its peculiarities, subsequent thought — philo- 163 PLATO AND PLATONISM sophic, poetic, theological — has been greatly influenced ; by the intense subjectivities, the accidents, so to speak, of Plato's genius, of Plato himself; the ways constitutional with him, the magic or trick of his personality, in regarding the intellectual material he was occupied with — by Plato's psychology. And it is characteristic of him, again, that those peculiarities of his mental attitude are evidenced informally ; by a tendency, as we said, by the mere general tone in which he speaks of Beauty, for instance, " as it really is," of all that " really is," under its various forms ; a manner of speaking, not explicit, but veiled, in various degrees, under figures, as at the end of the sixth book of The Republic, or under mythological fantasies, like those of the Phcedrus. He seems to have no inclination for the responsibilities of definite theory ; for a system such as that of the Neo-Platonists for instance, his own later followers, who, in a kind of prosaic and cold-blooded transcendentalism, developed as definite philosophic dogma, hard enough in more senses than one, what in Plato is to the last rather poetry than metaphysical reasoning — the irrepressible because almost un- conscious poetry, which never deserts him, even when treating of what is neither more nor less than a chapter in the rudiments of logic. The peculiar development of the Socratic realism by Plato can then only be understood 164 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO by a consideration of the peculiarities of Plato's genius ; how it reacted upon those abstractions ; what they came to seem in its peculiar atmo- sphere. The Platonic doctrine of "Ideas," as was said, is not so much a doctrine, as a way of speaking or feeling about certain elements of the mind ; and this temper, this peculiar way of feeling, of speaking, which for most of us will have many difficulties, is not uniformly notice- able in Plato's Dialogues, but is to be found more especially in the Phadoy the Symposium^ and in certain books of The Republic, above all in the Phcedrus, Here is a famous passage from it: — There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of Pythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and space) there, at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the soul. For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were upon the highest point, passed out and stood (as you might stand upon the outside of a great hollow sphere) upon the back of the sky. And as they stand there, the revolution of the spheres carries them round ; and they behold the things that are beyond the sky. That supercelestial place none of our poets on earth has ever yet sung of, nor will ever sing, worthily. And thus it is : for I must make bold to state the truth, at any rate, especially as it is about truth, that I am speaking. For the colourless, and formless, and impalpable Being, being in very truth of (that is, relative to) the soul, is visible by reason alone as one's guide. Centered about that, the generation, or seed, yeVos — the people, of true knowledge inhabits this place. As, then, the intelligence of God, which is nourished by pure or unmixed reason and knowlege {ixsf- p&rif, unmixed with sense) so, the intelligence of every other soul also, which is about to receive that which properly be- longs to it, beholding, after long interval, that which is, hves i6s PLATO AND PLATONISM it (that's the point !) and by the vision of truth is fed ; and fares well ; until, in cycle, the revolving movement brings it round again to the same place. And in that journey round it looks upon Justice itself; it looks upon Temperance, upon Knowledge; not that knowledge to which the process of becoming (the law of change, namely, of birth and death and decay) attaches ; nor that which is, as it were, one in one thing, another in another, of those things which now we speak of as being ; but the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is (t^v «v ry o Iotii/ ov ovrms «jr«rr^/trji' oScrav) and having beheld, after the same manner, all other things that really are, and feasted upon them, being passed back again to the interior of the sky, the soul returned home. Phadrusy 247. Only, as Plato thinks, that return was, in fact, an exile. There, in that attractive, but perhaps not wholly acceptable, sort of discourse, in some other passages like it, Plato has gone beyond his master Socrates, on two planes or levels, so to speak, of speculative ascent, which we may distinguish from each other, by way of making a little clearer what is in itself certainly so difficult. For Plato, then, not by way of formal theory, we must remember, but by a turn of thought and speech (while he speaks of them, in fact) the Socratic " universals," the notions of Justice and the like, are become, first, things in them- selves — the real things ; and secondly, persons, to be known as persons must be ; and to be loved, for the perfections, the visible perfec- tions, we might say — intellectually visible — of 166 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO their being. " It looks upon Justice itself ; it looks upon Temperance ; upon Knowledge." Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the ideas had been creations, serviceable creations, of men's thought, of our reason. With Plato, they are the creators of our reason — those treasures of experience, stacked and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by inherit- ance, or with no proportionate effort on our part, to direct, to enlarge and rationalise, from the first use of language by us, our manner of tak- ing things. For Plato, they are no longer, as with Socrates, the instruments by which we tabulate and classify and record our experience — mere " marks " of the real things of experi- ence, of what is essential in this or that, and common to every particular that goes by a certain common name ; but are themselves rather the proper objects of all true know- ledge, and a passage from all merely relative experience to the " absolute." In proportion as they lend themselves to the individual, in his effort to think, they create reason in him ; they reproduce the eternal reason for him. For Socrates, as Aristotle understands him, they were still in service to, and valid only in and by, the experience they recorded, with no locus standi beyond. For Plato, for Platonists, they are become — ^Justice and Beauty, and the perfect State, or again Equality (that which we must bring with us, if we are to apprehend sensible 167 PLATO AWD PLATONISM instances thereof, but which no two equal things here, two coins, ever really attain) nay, Couch, or Tree, every general thought, or name of a thing, whatever — separate {xapiiTToii) separable from, as being essentially independent of, the individual mind which conceives them ; as also of the particular temporary instances which come under them, come and go, while they remain for ever — those eternal "forms," of Tree, Equality, Justice, and so forth. That, then, is the first stage, or plane, of Platonic transcendentalism. Our common ideas, without which, in fact, we none of us could think at all, are not the consequence, not the products, but the cause of our reason in us : we did not make them ; but they make us what we are, as reasonable beings. The eternal Being, of Parmenides, one and indivisible, has been dif- fused, divided, resolved, refracted, differentiated, into the eternal Ideas, a multiple, numerous, stellar world, so to call it — abstract light into stars : Justice, Temperance as it is. Bravery as it is. Permanence, independency, indefectible identity with itself — all those qualities which Parmenides supposed in the one and indivisible reality — belong to every one of those ideas severally. It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in that abstract world ; a return of the many gods of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions. Love, i68 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO Fear, Confidence, and the like; and as such, the nwdern anthropologist, our student of the natural history of man, would rank the Platonic theory as but a form of what he calls " animism." Animism, that tendency to locate the movements of a soul like our own in every object, almost in every circumstance, which impresses one with a sense of power, is a condition of mind, of which the simplest illustration is primitive man ador- ing, as a divine being endowed with will, the meteoric stone that came rushing from the sky. That condition "survives" however, in the negro, who thinks the discharging gun a liv- ing creature ; as it survives also, more subtly, in the culture of Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom clouds and peaks are kindred spirits ; in the pantheism of Goethe ; and in Schelling, who formulates that pantheism as a philosophic, a Platonic, theory. Such " animistic " instinct was, certainly, a natural element in Plato's mental constitution, — the instinctive effort to find anima^ the conditions of personality, in whatever pre-occupied his mind, a mind, be it remembered, of which the various functions, as we reckon them, imagination, reason, intuition, were still by no means clearly analysed and differentiated from each other, but participated, all alike and all together, in every single act of mind. And here is the second stage of the Platonic idealism, the second grade of Plato's departure 169 PLATO AND PLATONISM from the simpler realism of his master, as noted by Aristotle, towards that " intelligible world," opposed by him so constantly to the visible world, into which many find it so hard to follow him at all, and in which the " ideas " become veritable persons. To speak, to think, to feel, about abstract ideas as if they were living persons ; that, is the second stage of Plato's speculative ascent. With the lover, who had graduated, was become a master, in the school of love, but had turned now to the love of intellectual and strictly invisible things, it was as if the faculty of physical vision, of the bodily eye, were still at work at the very centre of intellectual abstraction. Abstract ideas them- selves became animated, living persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes. And it is, as a consequence, but partly also as a secondary reinforcing cause, of this mental condition, that the idea of Beauty becomes for Plato the central idea ; the permanently typical instance of what an idea means ; of its relation to particular things, and to the action of our thoughts upon them. It was to the lover dealing with physi- cal beauty, a thing seen, yet unseen — seen by all, in some sense, and yet, truly, by one and not by another, as if through some capricious, personal self-discovery, by some law of affinity between the seer and what is seen, the knowing and the known — that the nature and function of an idea, as such, would come home most clearly. 170 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO And then, while visible beauty is the clearest, the most certain thing, in the world (lovers will always tell you so) real with the reality of some- thing hot or cold in one's hand, it also comes nearest of all things, so Plato assures us, to its eternal pattern or prototype. For some reason, the eternal idea of beauty had left visible copies of itself, shadows, antitypes, out of all propor- tion, in their truthfulness and adequacy, to any copy, left here with us, of Justice, for instance, or Equality, or the Perfect State. The typical instance of an abstract idea, yet pre-occupying the mind with all the colour and circumstance of the relationship of person to person, the idea of Beauty, conveyed into the entire theory of ideas, the associations which belong properly to such relationships only. A certain measure of caprice, of capricious preference or repulsion, would thus be naturally incidental to the commerce of men's minds with what really is, with the world in which things really are, only so far as they are truly known. " Philo- sophers are lovers of truth and of that which is — impassioned lovers " : ToO ovTOip]j, ToiiTQ Iriov. This dialectic method, this continuous dis- y course with one's self, being, for those who ' prosecute it with thoroughness, co- extensive with life itself — a part of the continuous com- pany we keep with ourselves through life — will have its inequalities ; its infelicities ; above all, / its final insecurity. " We argue rashly and ad- venturously," writes Plato, most truly, in the Timceus — aye, we, the Platonists, as such, some- times — "by reason that, like ourselves, our dis- courses (our Platonic discourses, as such) have much participation in the temerity of chance." Of course, as in any other occasional conversation, with its dependence on the hour and the scene, the persons we are with, the humours of the moment, there will always be much of accident in this essentially informal, this un-methodical, ~^ 18S PLATO AND PLATONISM method ; and, therefore, opportunities for misuse, sometimes consciously. The candid reader notes instances of such, even in The Republic^ not always on the part of Thrasymachus : — in this " new game of chess," played, as Plato puts it, not with counters, but with words, and not necessarily for the prize of truth, but, it may be, for the mere enjoyment of move and counter- move, of check-mating. Since Zeno's paradoxes, in fact, the very air of Athens was become sophisticated, infected with questionings, often vain enough ; and the Platonic method had been, in its measure, determined by (the unfriendly might say, was in truth only a deposit from) that infected air. " Socrates," as he admits, " is easily refuted. Say rather, dear Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth." That is reassuring, certainly ! For you might think sometimes, uneasily, of the Platonic Socrates, that, as he says of the Sophist, or of himself perhaps en caricature^ in the Euthydemusy " Such is his skill in the war of words, that he can refute any proposition whatever, whether true or false " ; that, in short, there is a danger- ous facility abroad for proving all things what- ever, equally well, of which Socrates, and his presumable allotment of truth, has but the general allotment. The friendly, on the other hand, might rejoin even then, that, as Lessing suggests, the search for truth is a better thing for us than its possession. 1 86 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO Plato, who supposes any knowledge worth the name to be " absolute and eternal " ; whose constant contention it is, to separate longo inter- valloy by the longest possible interval, science (hrurrvf-v) ^s the possession of irresistible truth, from any and every sort of knowledge which falls short of that ; would hardly have accepted the suggestion of Lessing. Yet, in spite of all that, in spite of the demand he makes for certainty and exactness and what is absolute, in all real knowledge, he does think, or inclines his reader to think, that truth, precisely because it resembles some high kind of relationship of persons to persons, depends a good deal on the receiver; and must be, in that degree, elusive, provisional, contingent, a matter of various approximation, and of an " economy," as is said ; that it is partly a subjective attitude of mind : — that philo- sophic truth consists in the philosophic temper. " Socrates in Plato," remarks Montaigne acutely, " disputes, rather to the profit of the disputants, than of the dispute. He takes hold of the first subject, like one who has a more profitable end in view than to explain it ; namely, to clear the understandings that he takes upon him to instruct Sind exercise." Just there, in fact, is the justification of Plato's peculiar dialectical method, of its inexactness, its hesitancy, its scruples and reserve, as if he feared to obtrude knowledge on an unworthy receiver. The treatise, as the proper instrument of dogma 187 PLATO AND PLATONISM — the Ethics of Aristotle, the Ethics of Spinoza — begins with a truth, or with a clear conviction of truth, in the axiom or definition, which it does but propose further to explain and apply. — The treatise, as the instrument of a dogmatic philo- sophy begins with an axiom or definition : the essay or dialogue, on the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does not necessarily so much as conclude in one ; like that long dialogue with oneself, that dialectic process, which may be CO -extensive with life. It does in truth little more than clear the ground, as we say, or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one may have a fair chance of knowing, or seeing, perhaps : it does but put one into a duly receptive attitude towards such possible truth, discovery, or revelation, as may one day occupy the ground, the tablet, — shed itself on the purified air; it does not provide a proposition, nor a system of propositions, but forms a temper. What Plato presents to his readers is then, again, a paradox, or a reconciliation of opposed tendencies : on one side, the largest possible demand for infallible certainty in knowledge (it was he fixed that ideal of absolute truth, to which, vainly perhaps, the human mind, as such, aspires) yet, on the other side, the utmost possible inex- actness, or contingency, in the method by which actually he proposes to attain it. It has been said that the humour of Socrates, of which the i88 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO famous Socratic irony — the pretence to have a ^ bad memory, to dislike or distrust long and formal discourse, to have taught nothing, to be but a : mid-wife in relation to other people's thoughts — ^ was an element, is more than a mere personal trait ; that it was welcome as affording a means of escape from the full responsibilities of his teaching. It belonged, in truth, to the tentative i character of dialectic, of question and answer as \ the method of discovery, of teaching and learning, i to the position, in a word, of the philosophic I essayist. That it was thus, might be illustrated ' abundantly from the Platonic dialogues. The irony, the Socratic humour, so serviceable to a diffident teacher, are, in fact, Plato's own. Kw;- Svvevei, " it may chance to be," is, we may notice, a favourite catchword of his. The philosopher of Being, or, of the verb "To be," is after all afraid of saying, " It is." For, again, person dealing with person — with possible caprice, therefore, at least on one side — ' or intelligence with intelligence, is what Plato supposes in the reception of truth : — that, and ! not an exact mechanism, a precise machine, 'j operating on, or with, an exactly ponderable ; matter. He has fears for truth, however care- fully considered. To the very last falsehood will lurk, if not about truth itself, about this or that assent to it. The receiver may add the falsities of his own nature to the truth he re- ceives. The proposition which embodies it very 189 PLATO AND PLATONISM imperfectly, may not look to him, in those dark chambers of his individuality, of himself, into which none but he can ever get, to test the matter, what it looks to me, or to you. We may not even be thinking of, not looking at, the same thing, when we talk of Beauty, and the like ; objects which, after all, to the Platonist are matters of Oeapia, of immediate intuition, of immediate vision, or, as Plato sometimes fancied, of an earlier personal experience ; and which, as matter of such intuition, are incapable of analysis, and therefore, properly, incommunicable by words. Place, then, must be left to the last in any legiti- mate dialectic process for possible after-thoughts ; for the introduction, so to speak, of yet another interlocutor in the dialogue, which has, in fact, no necessary conclusion, and leaves off only because time is up, or when, as he says, one leaves off seeking through weariness (am-oKafivcov). "What thought can think, another thought can mend." Another turn in the endless road may change the whole character of the perspective. You cannot, as the Sophist proposed to do (that was part of his foolishness) take and put truth into the soul. If you could, it might be established there, only as an " inward lie," as a mistake. " Must I take the argument, and literally insert it into your mind?" asks Thrasymachus. " Heaven forbid": answers Socrates. That is precisely what he fears most, for himself, and for others ; and from first to last, demands, as the first condition of comrade- 190 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO ship in that long journey in which he conceives teacher and learner to be but fellow-travellers, pilgrims side by side, sincerity, above all sincerity with one's self — that, and also freedom in reply. "Answer what you think, fieya\ovpeTrm — liber- ally." For it is impossible to make way other- wise, in a method which consists essentially in the development of knowledge by question and answer. Misuse, again, is of course possible in a method which admits of no objective sanction or standard ; the success of which depends on a loyalty to one's self, in the prosecution of it, of which no one else can be cognisant. And if we can misuse it with ourselves, how much more certainly can the expert abuse it with another. At every turn of the conversation, a door lies open to sophistry. Sophistry, logomachy, eristic : we may learn what these are, sometimes, from Plato's own practice. That justice is only useful as applied to things useless; that the just man is a kind of thief ; and the like ; is hardly so much as sophistry. And this too was possible in a method, which, with all its large outlook, has something of the irregularity, the accident, the heats and confusion, of life itself — a method of reasoning which can only in a certain measure be reasoned upon. How different the exactness which Aristotle supposes, and does his best to secure, in scientific procedure ! For him, dialectic, Platonic dialectic, is, at best, a part of " eristic " 191 PLATO AND PLATONISM — of the art, or trick, of merely popular and approximate debate, in matters where science is out of the question, and rhetoric has its office, not in providing for the intelligence, but in moulding the sentiments and the will. Con- versely to that absoluteness and necessity which Plato himself supposes in all real knowledge, as " the spectacle of all time and all existence," it might seem that the only sort of truth attain- able by his actual method, must be the truth of a particular time and place, for one and not for another. AtaXoyo? ireipaa-nKo^, " a Dialogue of search " : — every one of Plato's Dialogues is in essence such like that whole, life-long, endless dialogue which dialectic, in its largest scope, does but formulate, and in which truly the last, the infallible word, after all, never gets spoken. Our pilgrimage is meant indeed to end in nothing less than the vision of what we seek. But can we ever be quite sure that we are really come to that ? By what sign or test ? Now oppose all this, all these peculiarities of the Platonic method, as we find it, to the exact and formal method of Aristotle, of Aquinas, of Spinoza, or Hegel ; and then suppose one trained exclusively on Plato's dialogues. Is it the eternal certainty, after all, the immutable and absolute character of truth, as Plato conceived it, that he would be likely to apprehend ? We have here another of those contrasts of tendency, consti- 192 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO tutional in the genius of Plato, and which may add to our interest in him. Plato is to be ex- plained, as we say, or interpreted, partly through his predecessors, and his contemporaries ; but in part also by his followers, by the light his later mental kinsmen throw back on the conscious or unconscious drift of his teaching. Now there are in the history of philosophy two opposite Platonic traditions ; two legitimate yet divergent streams of influence from him. Two very differ- ent yet equally representative scholars we may see in thought emerging from his school. The "theory of the Ideas," the high ideal, the un- compromising demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or knowledge worthy of the name ; the immediate or intuitive character of the highest acts of knowledge ; that all true theory is indeed " vision " : — for the maintenance of that side of the Platonic position we must look onward to Aristotle, and the Schoolmen of all ages, to Spinoza, to Hegel ; to those mystic aspirants to "vision" also, the so-called Neo-Platonists of all ages, from Proclus to Schelling. From the abstract, metaphysical systems of those, the ecstasy and illuminism of these, we may mount up to the actual words of Plato in the Symposium, the fifth book of The Republic, the Phadrus. But it is in quite different company we must look for the tradition, the development, of Plato's actual method of learning and teaching. The Academy of Plato, the established seat of his p. VI 193 o PLATO AND PLATONISM philosophy, gave name to a school, of which Lucian, in Greek, and in Latin, Cicero, are the proper representatives, — Cicero, the perfect em- bodiment of what is still sometimes understood to be the " academic spirit," surveying all sides, arraying evidence, ascertaining, measuring, bal- ancing, tendencies, but ending in suspension of judgment. If Platonism from age to age has meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of " being," or the nearest attainable approach to or substi- tution for that ; for others, Platonism has been in fact only another name for scepticism, in a recognisable philosophic tradition. Thus, in the Middle Age, it qualifies in the Sic et Non the confident scholasticism of Abelard. It is like the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates himself again, in those endless conversations of Montaigne — that typical sceptic of the age of the Renaissance — coversations with himself, with the living, with the dead through their writings, which his Essays do but reflect. Typical Platonist or sceptic, he is therefore also the typical essayist. And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does but commence the modern world, which, side by side with its metaphysical reassertions, from Descartes to Hegel, side by side also with a constant accumulation of the sort of certainty which is afforded by empirical science, has had assuredly, to check wholesomely the pretensions of one and of the other alike, its doubts. — " Their name is legion," says a modern writer. Reverent 194 THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO and irreverent, reasonable and unreasonable, manly and unmanly, morbid and healthy, guilty and honest, wilful, inevitable — they have been called, indifferently, in an age which thirsts for intel- lectual security, but cannot make up its mind. Qae scais-je ? it cries, in the words of Montaigne ; but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socrates, with whom such dubitation had been nothing less than a religious duty or service. Sanguine about any form of absolute know- ledge, of eternal, or indefectible, or immutable truth, with our modern temperament as it is, we shall hardly become, even under the direction of Plato, and by the reading of the Platonic Dialogues. But if we are little likely to realise in his school, the promise of " ontological " science, of a " doctrine of Being," or any increase in our consciousness of metaphysical security, are likely, rather, to acquire there that other sort of Platonism, a habit, namely, of tentative thinking \ and suspended judgment, if we are not likely to ^ enjoy the vision of his " eternal and immutable ideas," Plato may yet promote in us what we call "ideals" — the aspiration towards a more perfect Justice, a more perfect Beauty, physical and intellectual, a more perfect condition of human affairs, than any one has ever yet seen ; that Kotr/jLixs. in which things are only as they are thought by a perfect mind, to which experience is constantly approximating us, but which it does not provide. There they stand, the two 195 PLATO AND PLATONISM great landmarks of the intellectual or spiritual life as Plato conceived it : the ideal, the world of " ideas," " the great perhaps," for which it is his merit so effectively to have opened room in the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all, through our affinities of nature with it, which, however, in our dealings with ourselves and others we may assume to be objective or real : — and then, over against our imperfect realisation of that ideal, in ourselves, in nature and history, amid the personal caprices (it might almost seem) of its discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate attitude on our part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts. Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question — the " philosophic temper," in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascer- tained knowledge. 196 VIII LACED^MON Among the Greeks, philosophy has flourished longest, and is still most abundant, at Crete and Lacedaemon ; and there there are more teachers of philosophy than anywhere else in the world. But the Lacedaemonians deny this, and pretend to be unlearned people, lest it should become manifest that it is through philo- sophy they are supreme in Greece ; that they may be thought to owe their supremacy to their fighting and manly spirit, for they think that if the means of their superiority were made known all the Greeks would practise this. But now, by keep- ing it a secret, they have succeeded in misleading the Laconisers in the various cities of Greece ; and in imitation of them these people buffet themselves, and practise gymnastics, and put on boxing-gloves, and wear short cloaks, as if it were by such things tihat the Lacedxmonians excel all other Greeks. But the Lacedaemonians, when they wish to have intercourse with their philosophers without reserve, and are weary of going to them by stealth, make legal proclamation that those Laconisers should depart, with any other aliens who may be sojourning among them, and thereupon betake themselves to their sophists unobserved by strangers. And you may know that what I say is true, and that the Lacedaemonians are better instructed than all other people in philosophy and the art of discussion in this way. If any one will converse with even the most insignificant of the Lacedaemonians, he may find him indeed in the greater part of what he says seemingly but a poor creature ; but then at some chance point in the conversation he will throw in some brief compact saying, worthy of remark, like a clever archer, so that his interlocutor shall seem no better than a child. Of 197 PLATO AND PLATONISM this fact some both of those now living and of the ancients have been aware, and that to Laconise consists in the study of philosophy far rather than in the pursuit of gymnastic, for they saw that to utter such sayings as those was only possible for a perfectly educated man. Of these was Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias the Prienean, and our own Solon, Cleobulus the Lindian, and Myson of Chen, and the seventh among them was called Chilon, a Lacedaemonian. These were all zealous lovers and disciples of the culture of the Lacedae- monians. And any one may understand that their philosophy was something of this kind, short rememberable sayings uttered by each of them. They met together and offered these in common, as the first fruits of philosophy, to Apollo in his temple at Delphi, and they wrote upon the walls these sayings known and read of all men : TvwOi aavrov and MtjScv ayav. Protagoras, 343. Of course there is something in that of the romance to which the genius of Plato readily inclined him ; something also of the Platonic humour or irony, which suggests, for example, to Meno, so anxious to be instructed in the theory of virtue, that the philosophic temper must be departed from Attica, its natural home, to Thessaly — to the rude northern capital whence that ingenuous youth was freshly arrived. Partly romantic, partly humorous, in his Laconism, Plato is however quite serious in locating a certain spirit at Lacedsmon of which his own ideal Republic would have been the completer development ; while the picture he draws of it presents many a detail taken straight from Lacedasmon as it really was, as if by an admiring visitor, who had in person paced the streets of the Dorian metropolis it was so difficult for any 198 LACEDiEMON alien to enter. What was actually known of that stern place, of the Lacedsemonians at home, at school, had charmed into fancies about it other philosophic theorists ; Xenophon for in- stance, who had little or nothing of romantic tendency about them. And there was another sort of romancing also, quite opposite to this of Plato, concerning the hard ways among themselves of those Lacedas- monians who were so invincible in the field. "The Lacedaemonians," says Pausanias, "appear to have admired least of all people poetry and the praise which it bestows." " At Lacedasmon there is more philosophy than anywhere else in the world," is what Plato, or the Platonic Socrates, had said. Yet, on the contrary, there were some who alleged that true Lacedemonians — Lacedaemonian nobles — for their protection against the "effeminacies" of culture, were denied all knowledge of reading and writing. But then we know that written books are properly a mere assistant, sometimes, as Plato himself sug- gests, a treacherous assistant, to memory ; those conservative Lacedsmonians being, so to speak, the people of memory pre-eminently, and very appropriately, for, whether or not they were taught to read and write, they were acknow- ledged adepts in the Pythagorean philosophy, a philosophy which attributes to memory so preponderating a function in the mental life. " Writing," says K. O. Miiller in his laborious, 199 PLATO AND PLATONISM yet, in spite of its air of coldness, passably romantic work on The Dorians — an author whose quiet enthusiasm for his subject resulted indeed in a patient scholarship which well befits it : " Writ- ing," he says, "was not essential in a nation where laws, hymns, and the praises of illustrious men — that is, jurisprudence and history — were taught in their schools of music." Music, which is or ought to be, as we know, according to those Pythagorean doctrines, itself the essence of all things, was everywhere in the Perfect City of Plato ; and among the Lacedasmonians also, who may be thought to have come within measurable distance of that Perfect City, though with no conscious theories about it, music (/iouo-t/ei?) in the larger sense of the word, was everywhere, not to alleviate only but actually to promote and inform, to be the very substance of their so strenuous and taxing habit of life. What was this "music," this service or culture of the Muses, this harmony, partly moral, doubtless, but also throughout a matter of elaborate move- ment of the voice, of musical instruments, of all beside that could in any way be associated to such things — this music, for the maintenance, the perpetual sense of which those vigorous souls were ready to sacrifice so many opportunities, privileges, enjoyments of a different sort, so much of their ease, of themselves, of one another ? Platonism is a highly conscious reassertion 200 LACEDiEMON of one of the two constituent elements in the Hellenic genius, of the spirit of the highlands namely in which the early Dorian forefathers of the Lacedaemonians had secreted their peculiar disposition, in contrast with the mobile, the marine and fluid temper of the littoral Ionian people. The Republic of Plato is an embodiment of that Platonic reassertion or preference, of Platonism, as the principle of a society, ideal enough indeed, yet in various degrees practicable. It is not understood by Plato to be an erection dc novOy and therefore only on paper. Its founda- tions might be laid in certain practicable changes to be enforced in the old schools, in a certain reformed music which must be taught there, and would float thence into the existing homes of Greece, under the shadow of its old temples, the sanction of its old religion, its old memories, the old names of things. Given the central idea, with its essentially renovating power, the well- worn elements of society as it is would rebuild themselves, and a new colour come gradually over all things as the proper expression of a certain new mind in them. And in fact such embodiments of the specially Hellenic element in Hellenism, compacted in the natural course of political development, there had been, though in a less ideal form, in those many Dorian constitutions to which Aristotle refers. To Lacedaemon, in The Republic itself, admiring allusions abound, covert, yet bold 201 PLATO AND PLATONISM enough, if we remember the existing rivalry between Athens and her neighbour ; and it becomes therefore a help in the study of Plato's political ideal to approach as near as we may to that earlier actual embodiment of its principles, which is also very interesting in itself. The Platonic City of the Perfect would not have been cut clean away from the old roots of national life : would have had many links with the beautiful and venerable Greek cities of past and present. The ideal, poetic or romantic as it might seem, would but have begun where they had left off, where Lacedaemon, in particular, had left off. Let us then, by way of realising the better the physiognomy of Plato's theoretic build- ing, suppose some contemporary student of The Republic, a pupil, say ! in the Athenian Academy, determined to gaze on the actual face of what has so strong a family likeness to it. Stimulated by his master's unconcealed Laconism, his approval of contemporary Lacedasmon, he is at the pains to journey thither, and make personal inspection of a place, in Plato's general commendations of which he may suspect some humour or irony, but which has unmistakably lent many a detail to his ideal Republic, on paper, or in thought. He would have found it, this youthful Anacharsis, hard to get there, partly through the nature of the country, in part because the people of Lacedaemon (it was a point of system with them, as we heard just now) were suspicious of 202 LACEDiEMON foreigners. Romantic dealers in political theory at Athens were safe in saying pretty much what they pleased about its domestic doings. Still, not so far away, made, not in idea and by the movements of an abstract argument, the mere strokes of a philosophic pen, but solidified by constancy of character, fortified anew on emergency by heroic deeds, for itself, for the whole of Greece, though with such persistent hold throughout on an idea, or system of ideas, that it might seem actually to have come ready-made from the mind of some half-divine Lycurgus, or through him from Apollo himself, creator of that music of which it was an example : — there, in the hidden valley of the Eurotas, it was to be found, as a visible centre of actual human life, the place which was alleged to have come, harsh paradox as it might sound to Athenian ears, within measurable distance of civic per- fection, of the political and social ideal. Our youthful academic adventurer then, mak- ing his way along those difficult roads, between the ridges of the Eastern Acadian Mountains, and emerging at last into " hollow " Laconia, would have found himself in a country carefully made the most of by the labour of serfs ; a land of slavery, far more relentlessly organised accord- ing to law than anywhere else in Greece, where, in truth, for the most part slavery was a kind of accident. But whatever rigours these slaves of Laconia were otherwise subjected to, they 203 PLATO AND PLATONISM enjoyed certainly that kind of well-being which does come of organisation, from the order and regularity of system, living under central military authority, and bound themselves to military service ; to furnish (as under later feudal institu- tions) so many efficient men-at-arms on demand, and maintain themselves in readiness for war as they laboured in those distantly-scattered farms, seldom visited by their true masters from Lace- dasmon, whither year by year they sent in kind their heavy tribute of oil, barley and wine. The very genius of conservatism here enthroned, secured, we may be sure, to this old-fashioned country life something of the personal dignity, of the enjoyments also, natural to it ; somewhat livelier religious feasts, for example, than their lords allowed themselves. Stray echoes of their boisterous plebeian mirth on such occasions have reached us in Greek literature. But if the traveller had penetrated a little more closely he would have been told certain startling stories, with at least a basis of truth in them, even as regards the age of Plato. These slaves were Greeks : no rude Scythians, nor crouch- ing, decrepit Asiatics, like ordinary prisoners of war, the sort of slaves you could buy, but genuine Greeks, speaking their native tongue, if with less of muscular tension and energy, yet probably with pleasanter voice and accent than their essentially highland masters. Physically they throve, under something of the same discipline which had made 204 ^CEDiEMON those masters the masters also of all Greece. They saw them now and then — their younger lords, brought, under" strict tutelage, on those long hunting expeditions, one of their so rare enjoyments, prescribed for them, as was believed, by the founder of their polity. But sometimes (here was the report which made one shudder even in broad daylight, in those seemingly reposeful places) sometimes those young nobles of Lacedasmon reached them on a different kind of pursuit : came by night, secretly, though by no means contrarily to the laws of a state crafty as it was determined, to murder them at home, or a certain moiety of them ; one here or there perhaps who, with good Achaean blood in his veins, and under a wholesome mode of life, was grown too tall, or too handsome, or too fruitful a father, to feel quite like a slave. Under a sort of slavery that makes him strong and beautiful, where personal beauty was so greatly prized, his masters are in fact jealous of him. But masters thus hard to others, these Lace- daemonians, as we know, were the reverse of indulgent to themselves. While, as a matter of theory, power and privilege belonged exclusively to the old, to the seniors (ot yipovTei;, ^ yepovaia) ruling by a council wherein no question might be discussed, one might only deliver one's Aye ! or No ! Lacedasmon was in truth before all things an organised place of discipline, an organised 205 PLATO AND PLATpNISM opportunity also, for youth, for the sort of youth that knew how to command by serving — a con- stant exhibition of youthful courage, youthful self-respect, yet above all of true youthful docility; youth thus committing itself absolutely, soul and body, to a corporate sentiment in its very sports. There was a third sort of regulation visits the lads of Lacedaemon were driven to pay to those country places, the vales, the uplands, when, to brace youthful stomachs and develope resource, they came at stated intervals as a kind of mendi- cants or thieves, feet and head uncovered through frost and heat, to steal their sustenance, under penalties if detected — "a survival," as anthro- pologists would doubtless prove, pointing out collateral illustrations of the same, from a world of purely animal courage and keenness. Whips and rods used in a kind of monitorial system by themselves had a great part in the education of these young aristocrats, and, as pain surely must do, pain not of bodily disease or wretched accidents, but as it were by dignified rules of art, seem to have refined them, to have made them observant of the minutest direction in those musical exer- cises, wherein eye and ear and voice and foot all alike combined. There could be nothing irapaXeiTTOfievov, as Plato says, no " oversights," here. No ! every one, at every moment, quite at his best ; and, observe especially, with no superfluities ; seeing that when we have to do with music of any kind, with matters of art, in stone, in words, 206 I^ACEDiEMON in the actions Gi-Aife, all superfluities are in very truth " superfluities of naughtiness," such as annihilate music. The country through which our young traveller from his laxer school of Athens seeks his wray to Lacedaemon, this land of a noble slavery, so peacefully occupied but for those irregular nocturnal terrors, was perhaps the loveliest in Greece, with that peculiarly blent loveliness, in which, as at Florence, the expression of a luxurious lowland is duly checked by the severity of its mountain barriers. It was a type of the Dorian purpose in life — sternness, like sea- water infused into wine, overtaking a matter naturally rich, at the moment when fulness may lose its savour and expression. Amid the corn and oleanders — corn "so tall, close, and luxuriant," as the modern traveller there still finds — it was visible at last, Lacedaemon, KotK'n Xirdpri), " hollow Sparta," under the sheltering walls of Taygetus, the broken and rugged forms of which were attributed to earthquake, but without proper walls of its own. In that natural fastness, or trap, or falcon's nest, it had no need of them, the falcon of the land, with the hamlets (jrdkLxvui) a hundred and more, dispersed over it, in jealously enforced seclusion from one another. From the first he notes " the antiquated ap- pearance " of Lacedasmon, by no means a " grow- ing " place, always rebuilding, remodelling itself, after the newest fashion, with shapeless suburbs 207 PLATO AND PLAJONISM stretching farther and farthei^on every side of it, grown too large perhaps, as Plato threatens, to be a body, a corporate unity, at all : not that, but still, and to the last, itself only a great village, a solemn, ancient, mountain village. Even here of course there had been movement, some sort of progress, if so it is to be called, linking limb to limb ; but long ago. Originally a union, after the manner of early Rome, of perhaps three or four neighbouring villages which had never lost their physiognomy, like Rome it occupied a group of irregular heights, the outermost roots of Taygetus, on the bank of a river or mountain torrent, impetuous enough in winter, a series of wide shallows and deep pools in the blazing summer. It was every day however, all the year round, that Lacedagmonian youth plunged itself in the Eurotas. Hence, from this circumstance of the union there of originally disparate parts, the picturesque and expressive irregularity, had they had time to think it such, of the " city " properly so termed, the one open place or street, High Street, or Corso — Aphetais by name, lined, irregu- larly again, with various religious and other monuments. It radiated on all sides into a mazy coil, an ambush, of narrow crooked lanes, up and down, in which attack and defence would necessarily be a matter of hand-to-hand fighting. In the outskirts lay the citizens' houses, roomier far than those of Athens, with spacious, walled courts, almost in the country. Here, in contrast 208 LACEDiEMON to the homes of vmiens, the legitimate wife had a real dignity, the unmarried woman a singular freedom. There were no door-knockers : you shouted at the outer gate to be let in. Between the high walls lanes passed into country roads, sacred ways to ancient sacro-sanct localities, TherapnjB, Amycla, on this side or that, under the shade of mighty plane-trees. Plato, as you may remember, gives a hint that, like all other visible things, the very trees — how they grow — exercise an aesthetic influence on character. The diligent legislator therefore would have his preferences, even in this matter of the trees under which the citizens of the Perfect City might sit down to rest. What trees? you wonder. The olive? the laurel, as if wrought in grandiose metal ? the cypress ? that came to a wonderful height in Dorian Crete . the oak ? we think it very expressive of strenuous national character. Well ! certainly the plane- tree for one, characteristic tree of Lacedaemon then and now ; a very tranquil and tranquillising object, spreading its level or gravely curved masses on the air as regally as the tree of Lebanon itself. A vast grove of such was the distinguish- ing mark of Lacedaemon in any distant view of it ; that, and, as at Athens, a colossal image, older than the days of Phidias — the Demos of Lacedamon, it would seem, towering visibly above the people it protected. Below those mighty trees, on an island in their national river, p. VI 209 p PLATO AND PLA^NISM were the "playing-fields," wnefe Lacedasmonian yomth after sacrifice in the Ephebeufn delighted others rather than itself (no "shirking" was allowed) with a sort of football, under rigorous self-imposed rules — tearing, biting — a sport, rougher even than our own, et mSme trh dangereux^ as our Attic neighbours, the French, say of the English game. They were orderly enough perforce, the boys, the young men, within the city — seen, but not heard, except under regulations, when they made the best music in the world. Our visitor from Athens when he saw those youthful soldiers, or military students, as Xenophon in his pretty treatise on the polity of Lacedaemon describes, walking with downcast eyes, their hands meekly hidden in their cloaks, might have thought them young monks, had he known of such. A little mountain town, however ambitious, however successful in its ambition, would hardly be expected to compete with Athens, or Gorinth, itself a Dorian state, in art-production, yet had not only its characteristic preferences in this matter, in plastic and literary art, but had also many venerable and beautiful buildings to show. The Athenian visitor, who is standing now in the central space of Lacedsemon, notes here, as being a trait also of the " Perfect City " of academic theory, that precisely because these people find themselves very susceptible to the 210 LACEDiEMON influences of form and colour and sound, to external jesthetic influence, but have withal a special purpose, a certain strongly conceived dis- ciplinary or ethic ideal, that therefore a peculiar humour prevails among them, a self-denying humour, in regard to these things. Those ancient Pelopid princes, from whom the hereditary kings of historic Lacedaemon, come back from exile into their old home, claim to be descended, had had their palaces, with a certain Homeric, Asiatic splendour, of wrought metal and the like ; con- siderable relics of which still remained, but as public or sacred property now. At the time when Plato's scholar stands before them, the houses of these later historic kings — two kings, as you remember, always reigning together, in some not quite clearly evolved differentiation of the temporal and spiritual functions — were plain enough ; the royal doors, when beggar or courtier approached them, no daintier than Lycurgus had prescribed for all true Lacedaemonian citizens ; rude, strange things to look at, fashioned only, like the ceilings within, with axe and saw, of old mountain oak or pine from those great Taygetan forests, whence came also the abundant iron, which this stern people of iron and steel had super-induced on that earlier dreamy age of silver and gold — steel, however, admirably tempered and wrought in its application to military use, and much sought after throughout Greece. Layer upon layer, the relics of those earlier 211 PLATO AND PLATONISM generations, a whole succession ot remarkable races, lay beneath the strenuous footsteps of the present occupants, as there was old poetic legend in the depths of their seemingly so practical or prosaic souls. Nor beneath their feet only : the relics of their worship, their sanctuaries, their tombs, their very houses, were part of the scenery of actual life. Our young Platonic visitor from Athens, climbing through those narrow winding lanes, and standing at length on the open platform of the Aphetais, finds himself surrounded by treasures, modest treasures of ancient architecture, dotted irregularly here and there about him, as if with conscious design upon picturesque effect, such irregularities sometimes carrying in them the secret of expression, an accent. Old Alcman for one had been alive to the poetic opportunities of the place ; boasts that he belongs to Lacedxmon, " abounding in sacred tripods " ; that it was here the Heliconian Muses had revealed themselves to him. If the private abodes even of royalty were rude it was only that the splendour of places dedicated to religion and the state might the more abound. Most splendid of them all, the Stoa Pakile, a cloister or portico with painted walls, to which the spoils of the Persian war had been devoted, ranged its pillars of white marble on one side of the central space : on the other, connecting those high memories with the task of the living, lay the Choros^ where, at the Gymmpeedia^ the Spartan youth danced in honour of Apollo. 212 LACEDiEMON Scattered up and down among the monuments of victory in battle were the heroa^ tombs or chapels of the heroes who had purchased it with their blood — Pausanias, Leonidas, brought home from Thermopylae forty years after his death. " A pillar too," says Pausanias, " is erected here, on which the paternal names are inscribed of those who at Thermopylae sustained the attack of the Medes." Here in truth all deities put on a martial habit — Aphrodite, the Muses, Eros him- self, Athene Chaicicecus, Athene of the Brazen House, an antique temple towering above the rest, built from the spoils of some victory long since forgotten. The name of the artist who made the image of the tutelary goddess was remembered in the annals of early Greek art, Gitiades, a native of Lacedaemon. He had com- posed a hymn also in her praise. Could we have seen the place he had restored rather than con- structed, with its covering of mythological reliefs in brass or bronze, perhaps Homer's descriptions of a seemingly impossible sort of metallic archi- tecture would have been less taxing to his reader's imagination. Those who in other places had lost their taste amid the facile splendours of a later day, might here go to school again. Throughout Greece, in fact, it was the Doric style which came to prevail as the religious or hieratic manner, never to be surpassed for that purpose, as the Gothic style seems likely to do with us. Though it is not exclusively the in- 213 PLATO AND PLATONISM vention of Dorian men, yet, says Miiller, "the Dorian character created the Doric architecture," and he notes in it, especially, the severity of the perfectly straight, smartly tapering line of its column ; the bold projection of the capital ; the alternation of long unornamented plain surfaces with narrower bands of decorated work ; the profound shadows ; the expression of security, of harmony, infused throughout ; the magnificent pediment crowning the whole, like the cornice of mountain wall beyond, around, and above it. Standing there in the Aphetais, amid these vener- able works of art, the visitor could not forget the natural architecture about him. As the Dorian genius had differentiated itself from the common Hellenic type in the heart of the mountains of Epirus, so here at last, in its final and most characteristic home, it was still surrounded by them : — o^pva re Koi. KOiXalverai. We know, some of us, what such mountain neighbourhood means. The wholesome vigour, the clearness and purity they maintain in matters such as air, light, water ; how their presence multiplies the contrasts, the element of light and shadow, in things ; the untouched perfection of the minuter ornament, flower or crystal, they permit one sparingly ; their reproachful aloof- ness, though so close to us, keeping sensitive minds at least in a sort of moral alliance with their remoter solitudes. "The whole life of the Lacedaemonian community," says Miiller, 214 LACEDiEMON " had a secluded, impenetrable, and secret char- acter." You couldn't really know it unless you were of it. A system which conceived the whole of life as matter of attention, patience, a fidelity to detail, like that of good soldiers and musicians, could not but tell also on the merest handicrafts, constituting them in the fullest sense of a craft. If the money of Sparta was, or had recently been, of cumbrous iron, that was because its trade had a sufficient variety of stock to be mainly by barter, and we may suppose the market (into which, like our own academic youth at Oxford, young Spartans were forbidden to go) full enough of business — many a busy workshop in those winding lanes. The lower arts certainly no true Spartan might practise ; but even Helots, artisan Helots, would have more than was usual elsewhere of that sharpened intelligence and the disciplined hand in such labour which really dignify those who follow it. In Athens itself certain Lacedasmonian com- modities were much in demand, things of military service or for every-day use, turned out with flawless adaptation to their purpose. The Helots, then, to whom this business exclusively belonged, a race of slaves, dis- tinguishable however from the slaves or serfs who tilled the land, handing on their mastery in those matters in a kind of guild, father to son, through old-established families of flute- 215 PLATO AND PLATONISM players, wine-mixers, bakers, and the like, thus left their hereditary lords, Les Gens Fieur-de-lises (to borrow an expression from French feudalism) in unbroken leisure, to perfect themselves for the proper functions of gentlemen — leisure, in the two senses of the word, which in truth involve one another — their whole time free, to be told out in austere schools. Long easeful nights, with more than enough to eat and drink, the " illiberal " pleasures of appetite, as Aristotle and Plato agree in thinking them, are of course the appropriate reward or remedy of those who work painfully with their hands, and seem to have been freely conceded to those Helots, who by concession of the State, from first to last their legal owner, were in domestic service, and some- times much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded to the " golden youth " of Lacedsmon — youth of gold, or gilded steel. The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with the coarseness of vice, is probably a fable ; and there are other stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admira- tion for the brilliant qualities of one trained perhaps to despise him, by which the servitor must have become, in his measure, actually a sharer in them. Just here, for once, we see that slavish fieopi,K^ — the genuine Laconism of the Lacedemonians themselves, their traditional con- ception of life, with its earnestness, its precision and strength, its loyalty to its own type, its impassioned completeness ; a spectacle, assthetic- ally, at least, very interesting, like some perfect instrument shaping to what they visibly were, the most beautiful of all people, in Greece, in the world. Gymnastic, " bodily exercise," of course, does 218 LACEDiEMON not always and necessarily effect the like of that. A certain perfectly preserved old Roman mosaic pavement in the Lateran Museum, presents a terribly fresh picture of the results of another sort of " training," the monstrous development by a cruel art, by exercise, of this or that muscle, changing boy or man into a merely mechanic instrument with which his breeders might make money by amusing the Roman people. Victor Hugo's odius dream of Uhomme quirky must have had something of a prototype among those old Ronian gladiators. The Lacedasmonians, says Xenbphon on the other hand, o/i(»a>$ imo re r&v aKeX&v Kal avo ^eip&v xal dirb rpaj(TJ\ov jv/ivd^omai. Here too, that is to say, they aimed at, they found, proportion, Pythagorean symmetry or music, and bold as they could be in their exercises (it was a Lacedaemonian who, at Olympia, for the first time threw aside the heavy girdle and ran naked to the goal) forbade all that was likely to disfigure the body. Though we must not suppose all ties of nature rent asunder, nor all connexion between parents and children in those genial, retired houses at an end in very early life, it was yet a strictly public education which began with them betimes, and with a very clearly defined programme, con- servative of ancient traditional and unwritten rules, an aristocratic education for the few, the liberaks — " liberals," as we may say, in that the proper sense of the word. It made them, in 219 PLATO AND PLATONISM very deed, the lords, the masters, of those they were meant by-and-by to rule ; masters, of their very souls, of their imagination, enforcing on them an ideal, by a sort of spiritual authority, thus backing, or backed by, a very effective organisation of " the power of the sword." In speaking of Lacedaemon, you see, it comes naturally to speak out of proportion, it might seem, of its youth, and of the education of its youth. But in fact if you enter into the spirit of Lacedjemonian youth, you may conceive Lacedasmonian manhood for yourselves. You divine already what the boy, the youth, so late in obtaining his majority, in becoming a man, came to be in the action of life, and on the battle-field. " In a Doric state," says MuUer, " education was, on the whole, a matter of more importance than government." A young Lacedasmonian, then, of the privi- leged class left his home, his tender nurses in those large, quiet old suburban houses early, for a public school, a schooling all the stricter as years went on, to be followed, even so, by a peculiar kind of barrack-life, the temper of which, a sort of military monasticism (it must be re- peated) would beset him to the end. Though in the gymnasia of Lacedsemon no idle by- standers, no — ^well ! Platonic loungers after truth or what not — ^were permitted, yet we are told, neither there nor in Sparta generally, neither there nor anywhere else, were the boys permitted 220 LACEDiEMON to be alone. If a certain love of reserve, of seclusion, characterised the Spartan citizen as such, it was perhaps the cicatrice of that wrench from a soft home into the imperative, inevitable gaze of his fellows, broad, searching, minute, his regret for, his desire to regain, moral and mental even more than physical ease. And his educa- tion continued late ; he could seldom think of marriage till the age of thirty. Ethically it aimed at the reality, assthetically at the expres- sion, of reserved power, and from the first set its subject on the thought of his personal dignity, of self-command, in the artistic way of a good musician, a good soldier. It is noted that " the general accent of the Doric dialect has itself the character not of question or entreaty, but of command or dictation." The place of deference, of obedience, was large in the education of Lacedasmonian youth ; and they never com- plained. It involved however for the most part, as with ourselves, the government of youth by itself; an implicit subordination of the younger to the older, in many degrees. Quite early in life, at school, they found that superiors and inferiors, S/toun and viro/ieiove the princely males, in Homer, sitting upright on their wooden benches ; were " inspected " fre- quently, and by free use of viva voce examination " became adepts in presence of mind," in mental readiness and vigour, in the brief mode of speech Plato commends, which took and has kept its name from them ; with no warm baths allowed ; a daily plunge in their river required. Yes ! The beauty of these most beautiful of all people was a male beauty, far remote from feminine tenderness ; had the expression of a certain ascesis in it ; was like un-sweetened wine. In comparison with it, beauty of another type might seem to be wanting in edge or accent. And they could be silent. Of the positive uses of the negation of speech, like genuine scholars of Pythagoras, the Lacedasmoniaos were well aware, gaining strength and intensity by repression. Long spaces of enforced silence had doubtless something to do with that expres- sive brevity of utterance, which could be also, when they cared, so inexpressive of what their intentions really were — something to do with the habit of mind to which such speaking would come naturally. In contrast with the ceaseless prattle of Athens, Lacedasmonian assemblies lasted as short a time as possible, all standing. A 222 LACED^MON Lacedaemonian ambassador being asked in whose name he was come, replies : " In the name of the State, if I succeed ; if I fail, in my own." What they lost in extension they gained in depth. Had our traveller been tempted to ask a young Lacedaemonian to return his visit at Athens, permission would have been refused him. He belonged to a community bent above all things on keeping indelibly its own proper colour. Its more strictly mental education centered, in fact, upon a faithful training of the memory, again in the spirit of Pythagoras, in regard to what seemed best worth remembering. Hard and practical as Lacedaemonians might seem, they lived neverthe- less very much by imagination ; and to train the memory, to preoccupy their minds with the past, as in our own classic or historic culture of youth, was in reality to develope a vigorous imagination. In music {futvaiK^) as they conceived it, there would be no strictly selfish reading, writing or listening ; and if there was little a Lacedsemonian lad had to read or write at all, he had much to learn, like a true conservative, by heart : those unwritten laws of which the Council of Elders was the authorised depositary, and on which the whole public procedure of the state depended ; the archaic forms of religious worship ; the names of their kings, of victors in their games or in battle ; the brief record of great events ; the oracles they had received ; the rhetrai^ from 223 PLATO AND PLATONISM Lycurgus downwards, composed in metrical Lace- demonian Greek ; their history and law, in short, actually set to music, by Terpander and others, as was said. What the Lacedaemonian learned by heart he was for the most part to sing, and we catch a glimpse, an echo, of their boys in school chanting ; one of the things in old Greece one would have liked best to see and hear — youth-l ful beauty and strength in perfect service — a' manifestation of the true and genuine Hellenism, though it may make one think of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of our own old English schools, nay, of the young Lace- daemonian's cousins at Sion, singing there the law and its praises. The Platonic student of the ways of the Lace- daemonians observes then, is interested in observ- ing, that their education, which indeed makes no sharp distinction between mental and bodily exercise, results as it had begun in "music" — ends with body, mind, memory above all, at their finest, on great show-days, in the dance. Austere, self-denying Lacedaemon had in fact one of the largest theatres in Greece, in part scooped out boldly on the hill-side, built partly of enormous blocks of stone, the foundations of which may still be seen. We read what Plato says in The Republic of "imitations," of the imitative arts, imitation reaching of course its largest develop- ment on the stage, and' are perhaps surprised at the importance he assigns, in every department of 224 LACEDiEMON human culture, to a matter of that kind. But here as elsewhere to see was to understand. We should have understood Plato's drift in his long criticism and defence of imitative art, his careful system of rules concerning it, could we have seen the famous dramatic Lacedasmonian dancing. They danced a theme, a subject. A complex and elaborate art this must necessarily have been, but, as we may gather, as concise, direct, economically expressive, in all its varied sound and motion, as those swift, lightly girt, impromptu Lacedemonian sayings. With no movement of voice or hand or foot, vapaXeiiro/jievov, unconsidered, as Plato forbids, it was the perfect flower of their correction, of that minute patience and care which ends in a perfect expressiveness ; not a note, a glance, a touch, but told obediently in the promotion of a firmly grasped mental conception, as in that perfect poetry or sculpture or painting, in which" " the finger of the master is on every part of his work." We have nothing really like it, and to comprehend it must remember that, though it took place in part at least on the stage of a theatre — ^was in fact a ballet-dance, it had also the character both of a liturgical service and of a military inspection ; and yet, in spite of its severity of rule, was a natural expression of the delight of all who took part in it. So perfect a spectacle the gods themselves might be thought pleased to witness ; were in p. VI 225 Q PLATO AND PLATONISM consequence presented with it as an importan element in the religious worship of the Lace dasmonians, in whose life religion had even i larger part than with the other Greeks, con spicuously religious, SeiiriSaijMove^, involved in reU gion or superstition, as the Greeks generally were More closely even than their so scrupuloui neighbours they associated the state, its acts ant officers, with a religious sanction, religious usages theories, traditions. While the responsibilities o secular government lay upon the Ephors, thosi mysteriously dual, at first sight useless, and yet s( sanctimoniously observed kings, " of the house o Heracles," with something of the splendour of th( old Achaean or Homeric kings, in life as also ii death, the splendid funerals, the passionate archai( laments which then followed them, were in fac of spiritual or priestly rank, the living and activ( centre of a poetic religious system, binding then " in a beneficent connexion " to the past, and ii the present with special closeness to the oracle o Delphi. Of that catholic or general centre of Creel religion the Lacedaemonians were the hereditary and privileged guardians, as also the peculia people of Apollo, the god of Delphi ; but observe ! of Apollo in a peculiar development o his deity. In the dramatic business of Lace daemon, centering in these almost liturgies dances, there was little comic acting. Tb fondness of the slaves for buffoonery and Iou( 996 LACEDiEMON laughter, was to their master, who had no taste for the like, a reassuring note of his superiority. He therefore indulged them in it on occasion, and you might fancy that the religion of a people so strenuous, ever so full of their dignity, must have been a religion of gloom. It was otherwise. The Lacedaemonians, like those monastic persons of whom they so often remind one, as a matter of fact however surprising, were a very cheerful people ; and the religion of which they had so much, deeply imbued everywhere with an optimism as of hopeful youth, encouraged that disposition, was above all a religion of sanity. The observant Platonic visitor might have taken note that something of that purgation of religious thought and sentiment, of its expression in literature, recommended in Plato's Republic, had been already quietly effected here, towards the establishment of a kind of cheerful daylight in men's tempers. In furtherance then of such a religion of sanity, of that harmony of functions, which is the Aristotelian definition of health, Apollo, sanest of the national gods, became also the tribal or home god of Lacedasmon. That common Greek worship of Apollo they made especially their own, but (just here is the noticeable point) with a marked preference for the human element in him, for the mental powers of his being over those elemental or physical forces of production, which he also mystically represents, and which resulted 227 PLATO AND PLATONISM sometimes in an orgiastic, an unintellectual, or even an immoral service. He remains youthful and unmarried. In congruity with this, it is observed that, in a quasi-Roman worship, abstract qualities and relationships, ideals, become sub- sidiary objects of religious consideration around him, such as sleep, death, fear, fortune, laughter even. Nay, other gods also are, so to speak, ApoUinised, adapted to the ApoUine presence; Aphrodite armed, Enyalius in fetters, perhaps that he may never depart thence. Amateurs everywhere of the virile element in life, the Lacedasmonians, in truth, impart to all things an intellectual character. Adding a vigorous logic to seemingly animal instincts, for them courage itself becomes, as for the strictly philosophic mind at Athens, with Plato and Aristotle, an intel- lectual condition, a form of right knowledge. Such assertion of the consciously human interest in a religion based originally on a pre- occupation with the unconscious forces of-fiature, was exemplified in the great religious festival of Lacedasmon. As a spectator of the Hyacinthiuy our Platonic student would have found himself one of a large body of strangers, gathered together from Lacedsmon and jts dependent towns and villages, within the ancient precincts of Amycls, at the season between spring and summer when under the first fierce heat of the year the abundant hyacinths fade from the fields. Blue flowers, 228 LACED^MON you remember, are the rarest, to many eyes the loveliest; and the Lacedaemonians with their guests were met together to celebrate the death of the hapless lad who had lent his name to them, Hyacinthus, son of Apollo, or son of an ancient mortal king who had reigned in this very place ; in either case, greatly beloved of the god, who had slain him by sad accident as they played at quoits together delightfully, to his immense sorrow. That Boreas (the north -wind) had maliciously miscarried the discus, is a circum- stance we hardly need to remind us that we have here, of course, only one of many transparent, unmistakable, parables or symbols of the great solar change, so sudden in the south, like the story of Proserpine, Adonis, and the like. But here, more completely perhaps than in any other of those stories, the primary elemental sense had obscured itself behind its really tragic analogue in human life, behind the figure of the dying youth. We know little of the details of the feast ; incidentally, that Apollo was vested on the occasion in a purple robe, brought in ceremony from Lacedaemon, woven there, Pausanias tells us, in a certain house called from that circumstance Chiton. You may remember how sparing these Lacedaemonians were of such dyed raiment, of any but the natural and virgin colouring of the fleece ; that purple or red, however, was the colour of their royal funerals, as indeed Amyclae itself was famous for purple stuffs — Amyclaa vestes. As 229 PLATO AND PLATONISM the general order of the feast, we discern clearly a single day of somewhat shrill gaiety, between two days or significant mourning after the manner of All Souls' Day, directed from mimic grief for a mythic object, to a really sorrowful com- memoration by the whole Lacedaemonian people — each separate family for its own deceased members. It was so again with those other youthful demi-gods, the Dioscuri, themselves also, in old heroic time, resident in this venerable place : Amyclai fratresy fraternal leaders of the Lace- demonian people. Their statues at this date were numerous in Laconia, or the docanOy primitive symbols of them, those two upright beams of wood, carried to battle before the two kings, until it happened that through their secret enmity a certain battle was lost, after which one king only proceeded to the field, and one part only of that token of fraternity, the other remaining at Sparta. Well ! they were two stars, you know, at their original birth in men's minds, Gemini, virginal fresh stars of dawn, rising and setting alternately — those two half-earthly, half-celestid brothers, one of whom, Polydeuces, was immortal. The other. Castor, the younger, subject to old age and death, had fallen in battle, was found breathing his last. Polydeuces thereupon, at his own prayer, was permitted to die : with undying fraternal affection, had forgone one moiety of his privilege, and lay in the grave for a day in his 230 LACED^MON brother's stead, but shone out again on the morrow ; the brothers thus ever coming and going, interchangeably, but both alike gifted now with immortal youth. In their origin, then, very obviously elemental deities, they were thus become almost wholly humanised, fraternised with the Lacedasmonian people, their closest friends of the whole celestial company, visitors, as fond legend told, at their very hearths, found warming themselves in the half-light at their rude fire-sides. Themselves thus visible on occasion, at all times in devout art, they were the starry patrons of all that youth was proud of, delighted in, horsemanship, games, battle ; and always with that profound fraternal sentiment. Brothers, comrades, who could not live without each other, they were the most fitting patrons of a place in which friendship, comradeship, like theirs, came to so much. Lovers of youth they remained, those enstarred types of it, arrested thus at that moment of miraculous good fortune as a consecration of the clean, youthful friendship, " passing even the love of woman," which, by system, and under the sanction of their founder's name, elaborated into a kind of art, became an elementary part of education. A part of their duty and discipline, it was also their great solace and encouragement. The beloved and the lover, side by side through their long days of eager labour, and above all on the battlefield, became respectively, ahtii, the 231 PLATO AND PLATONISM hearer, and elatrv^Xai}, the inspirer ; the elder inspiring the younger with his own strength and noble taste in things. What, it has been asked, what was there to occupy persons of the privileged class in Lace- d?emon from morning to night, thus cut off as they were from politics and business, and many of the common interests of men's lives ? Our Platonic visitor would have asked rather. Why this strenuous task-work, day after day ; why this loyalty to a system, so costly to you individually, though it may be thought to have survived its original purpose ; this laborious, endless, educa- tion, which does not propose to give you anything very useful or enjoyable in itself? An intelligent young Spartan might have replied : " To the end that I inyself may be a perfect work of art, issu- ing thus into the eyes of all Greece." He might have observed — we may safely observe for him — that the institutions of his country, whose he was, had a beauty in themselves, as we may observe also of some at least of our own institutions, educational or religious : that they bring out, for instance, the lights and shadows of human character, and relieve the present by maintaining in it an ideal sense of the past. He might have added that he had his friendships to solace him ; and to encourage him, the sense of honour. Honour, friendship, loyalty to the ideal of the 232 LACEDiEMON past, himself as a work of art ! There was much of course in his answer. Yet still, after all, to understand, to be capable of, such motives, was itself but a result of that exacting discipline of character we are trying to account for ; and the question still recurs, To what purpose ? Why, with no prospect of Israel's reward, are you as scrupulous, minute, self-taxing, as he ? A tincture of asceticism in the Lacedaemonian rule may remind us again of the monasticism of the Middle Ages. But then, monastic severity was for the purging of a troubled conscience, or for the hope of an immense prize, neither of which conditions is to be supposed here. In fact the surprise of Saint Paul, as a practical man, at the slightness of the reward for which a Greek spent himself, natural as it is about all pagan perfection, is especially applicable about these Lacedaemonians, who indeed had actually invented that so "corruptible" and essentially worthless parsley crown in place of the more tangible prizes of an earlier age. Strange people ! Where, precisely, may be the spring of action in you, who are so severe to yourselves ; you who, in the words of Plato's supposed objector that the rulers of the ideal state are not to be envied, have nothing you can really call your own, but are like hired servants in your own houses, — qui manducatis panem doloris ? Another day-dream, you may say, about those 233 PLATO AND PLATONISM obscure ancient people, it was ever so difficult really to know, who had hidden their actual life with so much success ; but certainly a quite natural dream upon the paradoxical things we are told of them, on good authority. It is because they make us ask that question ; puzzle us by a paradoxical idealism in life ; are thus distinguished from their neighbours ; that, like some of our old English places of education, though we might not care to live always at school there, it is good to visit them on occasion ; as some philosophic Athenians, as we have now seen, loved to do, at least in thought. S34 IX THE REPUBLIC " The Republic," as we may realise it mentally within the limited proportions of some quite imaginable Greek city, is the protest of Plato, in enduring stone, in law and custom more im- perishable still, against the principle of flam- boyancy or fluidity in things, and in men's thoughts about them. Political "ideals" may provide not only types for new states, but also, in humbler function, a due corrective of the errors, thus renewing the life, of old ones. But like other medicines the corrective or critical ideal may come too late, too near the natural end of things. The theoretic attempt made by Plato to arrest the process of disintegration in the life of Athens, of Greece, by forcing it back upon a simpler and more strictly Hellenic type, ended, so far as they were concerned, in theory. It comes of Plato's literary skill, his really dramatic handling of a conversation, that one subject rises naturally out of another in the 235 PLATO AND PLATONISM course of it, that in the lengthy span of The Republic^ though they are linked together after all with a true logical coherency, now justice, now the ideal state, now the analysis of the individual soul, or the nature of a true philo- sopher, or his right education, or the law of political change, may seem to emerge as the proper subject of the whole book. It is thus incidentally, and by way of setting forth the definition of Justice or Rightness, as if in big letters, that the constitution of the typically Right_State is introduced into what, according to one of its traditional titles — Jlepl Aixaioa-vvTii — might actually have figured as a dialogue on the nature of Justice. But t6S' ^v mi eoiKe wpooifuor-- the discussion of the theory of the abstract and invisible rightness was but to introduce the practical architect, the creator of J;lie„ right state. Plato then assumes rather than demonstrates that so facile parallel between the individual cori- sciousness and the^pcjal-aggregate, passes lightly backwards and 'forwards from the rightness or wrongness, the normal or abnormal conditions, of the one to those of the other, from you and me to the " colossal man," whose good or bad qualities, being written up there on a larger scale, are easier to read, and if one may say so, "once in bricks and mortar," though but on paper, is lavish of a world as it should be. A strange world in some ways ! Let us look from the small type of the individual to the monu- 236 THE REPUBLIC mental inscription on those high walls, as he proposes ; while his fancy wandering further and further, over tower and temple, its streets and the people in them, as if forgetful of his original purpose he tells us all he sees in thought of the City of the Perfect. To the view of Plato, as of all other Greek citizens, the state, in its local habitation here or there, had been in all cases the gift or ordinance of one or another real though half-divine founder, some Solon or Lycurgus, thereafter a proper object of piety, of filial piety, for ever, among those to whom he had bequeathed the blessings of civilised life. Himself actually of Solon's lineage, Plato certainly is less aware than those who study these matters in the " historic spirit " of the modern world that for the most part, like other more purely physical things, states "are not made, but grow." Yet his own work as a designer or architect of what shall be new is developed quite naturally out of the question how an already existing state, such as the actual Athens of the day, might secure its pre-eminence, or its very existence. Close always, by the concrete turn of his genius, to the facts of the place and the hour, his first thought is to suggest a remedy for the peculiar evils of the Athenians at that moment ; and in his delineation of the ideal state he does but elevate what Athens in particular, a ship so early going to pieces, might well be forced to become for her salvation, were 337 PLATO AND PLATONISM it still possible, into the eternal type of veritable statecraft, of a city as such, " a city at unity in itself," defiant of time. He seems to be seeking in the first instance a remedy for the sick, a desperate political remedy ; and thereupon, as happens with really philosophic enquirers, the view enlarges on all sides around him. Those evils of Athens then, which were found in very deed somewhat later to be the infirmity of Greece as a whole, when, though its versatile gifts of intellect might constitute it the teacher of its eventual masters, it was found too incoherent politically to hold its own against Rome : — those evils of Athens, of Greece, came from an exaggerated assertion of the fluxional, flamboyant, centrifugal Ionian element in the Hellenic character. They could be cured only by a counter-assertion of the centripetal Dorian ideal, as actually seen best at Lacedaemon ; by the way of simplification, of a rigorous limitation of all things, of art and life, of the souls, aye, and of the very bodies of men, as being the integral factors of all beside. It is in those simpler, corrected outlines of a reformed Athens that Plato finds the " eternal form " of the State, of a city as such, like a well-knit athlete, or one of those perfectly disciplined Spartan dancers. His actual purpose therefore is at once reforming and conservative. The drift of his charge is, in his own words, that no political constitution then existing is suitable to the philosophic, that is to 238 THE REPUBLIC say, as he conceives it, to the aristocratic or kingly nature. How much that means we shall see by and bye, when he maintains that in the City of the Perfect the kings will be philo- sophers. It means that those called, like the gifted, lost Alcibiades, to be the saviours of the state, as a matter of fact become instead its destroyers. The proper soil in which alone that precious exotic seed, the kingly or aristocratic seed, will attain its proper qualities, in which alone it will not yield wine inferior to its best, or rather, instead of bearing any wine at all, become a deadly poison, is still, to be laid down according to rules of art, the ethic or political art ; but once provided must be jealously kept from innovation. Organic vmity with one's self,! body and soul, is the well-being, the rightness, or righteousness, or justice of the individual, of the microcosm ; but is the ideal also, it supplies the true definition, of the well-being of the macrocosm, of the social organism, the statej On this Plato has to insist, to the disadvantage of what we actually see in Greece, in Athens, with all its intricacies of disunion, faction against faction, as displayed in the later books of Thucy-, dides. Remember ! the question Plato is asking throughout The Republic^ with a touch perhaps of the narrowness, the fanaticism, or " fixed idea," of Machiavel himself, is, not how shall the state, the place we must live in, be gay or rich or populous, but strong — strong enough to remain 239 PLATO AND PLATONISM i itself, to resist solvent influences within or from without, such as would deprive it not merely of ;the accidental notes of prosperity but of its own very being. Now what hinders this strengthening macro- cosmic unity, the oneness of the political organism with itself, is that the unit, the indi- vidual, the microcosm, fancies itself, or would fain be, a rival macrocosm, independent, many- sided, all-sufficient. To make him that, as you know, had been the conscious aim of the Athenian system in the education of its youth, as also in its later indirect education of the citizen by the way of political life. It was the ideal of one side of the Greek character in general, of much that was brilliant in it and seductive to others. In this sense, Pericles himself interprets the educational function of the city towards the citizen : — to take him as he is, and develope him to the utmost on all his various sides, with a variety in those parts how- ever, as Plato thinks, by no means likely to promote the unity of the whole, of the state as such, which must move all together if it is to move at all, at least against its foes. With this at first sight quite limited purpose then, para- doxical as it might seem to those whose very ideal lay precisely in such manifold development, to Plato himself perhaps, manifold as his own genius and culture conspicuously were — para- 240 THE REPUBLIC ioxical as it might seem, Plato's demand is for the Limitation, the simplifying, of those constituent parts or units ; that the unit should be indeed 10 more than a part, it might be a very small part, in a community, which needs, if it is still to subsist, the wholeness of an army in motion, of the stars in their courses, of well-concerted music, if you prefer that figure, or, as the modern reader might perhaps object, of a machine. The design of Plato is to bring back[ the Athenian people, the Greeks, to thoughts of] order, to disinterestedness in their functions, to/ that self-concentration of soul on one's own part, that loyal concession of their proper parts to others, on which such order depends, to a love of it, a sense of its extreme aesthetic beauty andl fitness, according to that indefectible definition! of Justice, of what is right, to Iv nrpdrreiv. rb rd} avTov wpdrreiv, in opposition, as he thinks, to those so fascinating conditions of Injustice, irotKikia, nrXiove^ia, wokwrpar/fioavvr), figuring away, as they do sometimes, so brilliantly. For Plato would have us understand that men are in truth after all naturally much simpler, iliuch more limited in character and capacity, than they seem. Such diversity of parts and function as is presupposed in his definition of Justice has been fixed by nature itself on human life. The individual, as such, humble as his proper function may be, is unique in fitness for, in a consequent "call" to, that function. We p. VI 241 R PLATO AND PLATONISM know how much has been done to educate thi world, under the supposition that man is i creature of very malleable substance, indiiFeren in himself, pretty much what influences maj make of him. Plato, on the other hand, assure us that no one of us " is like another all in all."— Hp&TOv ijiv ^verai eKavrm ov irdvv ofioio^ eKcurrtp, aK\t Siaipo»v Trjv ff>vtri,v, aK\o^ h> ^pftdxov elSei rh, tp-evSrj rh ev Siovri •yevofieva, medicinablc lies or fictions, with a pro- visional or economised truth in them, set forth under such terms as simple souls could best receive. Just here, at the end of the third book of The Republic he introduces such a fable : ^oiviKiKov -f ewSos, he calls it, a miner's story, about copper and silver and gold, such as may really 247 PLATO AND PLATONISM have been current among the primitive inhabit- ants of the island from which metal and the art of working it had been introduced into Greece. — ' And I shall try first of all to persuade the rulers themselves and our soldiers, and afterwards the rest of the community, as to the matter of the rearing and the education we gave them, that in fact it did but seem to happen with them, they seemed to experience all that, only as in dreams. They were then in very truth nourished and fashioned beneath the earth within, and the armour upon them and their equipment put together ; and when they were perfectly wrought out the earth even their mother put them forth. Now, therefore, it is their duty to think concerning the land in which they are as of a mother, or foster-mother, and to protect it if any roe come against it, and to think of their fellow-citizens as being their brothers, born of the earth as they. All ye in the city, therefore, are brothers, we shall say to them proceeding with our story j but God, when he made you, mixed gold in the generation of those among you fit to be our kings, for which cause they are the most precious of all ; and silver in those fit to be our guards ; and in the husbandmen and all other handicraftsmen iron and brass. Forasmuch then as ye are all of one kindred, for the most part ye would beget offspring like to yourselves ; but at times a silver child will come of one golden, and from the silver a child of gold, and so forth, interchangeably. To those who rule, then, first and above all God enjoins that of nothing shall they be so careful guardians, nothing shall they so earnestly regard, as the young children — what metal has been mixed to their hands in the souls of these. And if a child of their own be born with an alloy of iron or brass, they shall by no means have pity upon it, but, allotting unto it the value which befits its nature, they shall thrust it into the class of husbandmen or artisans. And if, again, of these a child be born with gold or silver in him, with due estimate they shall promote such to wardenship or to arms, inasmuch as an oracular saying declares that the city is perished already when it has iron or brass to guard it. Can you suggest a way of getting them to believe this my thus? Republic^ 414. 248 THE REPUBLIC Its application certainly is on the surface : the Lacedxmonian details also — the military turn taken, the disinterestedness of the powerful, their monastic renunciation of what the world prizes most, above all the doctrine of a natural aristocracy with its "privileges and also its duties." Men are of simpler structure and capacities than you have fancied, Plato would assure us, and more decisively appointed to this rather than to that order of service. Nay, with the boldness proper to an idealist, he does not hesitate to represent them (that is the force of the mythus) as actually made of different stuff; and society, assuming a certain aristocratic humour in the nature of things, has for its business to sanction, safeguard, further promote it, by law. The state therefore, if it is to be really a living creature, will have, like the individual soul, those sensuous appetites which call the productive powers into action, and its armed conscience, and its far-reaching intellectual light : its industrial class, that is to say, its soldiers, its kings — the last, a kind of military monks, as you might think, on a distant view, their minds full of a kind of heavenly effulgence, yet superintending the labours of a large body of work-people in the town and the fields about it. Of the industrial or productive class, the artists and artisans, Plato speaks only in outline, but is significant in what he says ; and enough remains of the actual fruits 249 PLATO AND PLATONISM of Greek industry to enable us to complete his outline for ourselves, as we may also, by aid of Greek art, together with the words of Homer and Pindar, equip and realise the full character of the true Platonic " war-man " or knight ; and again, through some later approximate instances, discern something of those extraordinary, half- divine, philosophic kings. We must let industry then mean for Plato all it meant, would naturally mean, for a Greek, amid the busy spectacle of Athenian handicrafts. The " rule " of Plato, its precepts of temperance, proportion, economy, though designed primarily for its soldiers, and its kings or archons, for the military and spiritual orders, would probably have been incumbent also in relaxed degree upon those who work with their hands ; and we. have but to walk through the classical department of the Louvre or the British Museum to be reminded how those qualities of temperance and the like did but enhance, could not chill or im- poverish, the artistic genius of Greek workmen. In proportion to what we know of the minor handicrafts of Greece we shall find ourselves able to fill up, as the condition of everyday life in the streets of Plato's City of the Perfect, a picture of happy protected labour, " skilled " to the utmost degree in all its applications. Those who pro- secute it will be allowed, as we may gather, in larger proportion than those who "watch," in silent thought or sword in hand, such animal 250 THE REPUBLIC liberties as seem natural and right, and are not really " illiberal," for those who labour all day with their bodies, though they too will have on them in their service some measure of the com- pulsion which shapes the action of our kings and soldiers to such effective music. With more or less of asceticism, of a "common life," among themselves, they will be the peculiar sphere of the virtue of temperance in the State, as being the entirely willing subjects of wholesome rule. They represent, as we saw, in the social organism, the bodily appetites of the individual, its converse with matter, in a perfect correspondence, if all be right there, with the conscience and with the reasonable soul in it. Labouring by system at the production of perfect swords, perfect lamps, perfect poems too, and a perfect coinage, such as we know, to enable them the more readily to exchange their produce {vofuafM 7^9 aWoy^? eveKo) working perhaps in guilds and under rules to insure perfection in each specific craft, refining matter to the last degree, they would constitute the beautiful body of the State, in rightful service, like the copper and iron, the bronze and the steel, they manipulate so finely, to its beautiful soul — to its natural though hereditary aristocracy, its " golden " humanity, its kings, in whom Wisdom, the light, of a comprehensive Synopsis^ indefectibly resides, and who, as being not merely its dis- cursive or practical reason, but its faculty of con- templation likewise, will be also its priests, the 251 PLATO AND PLATONISM medium of its worship, of its intercourse with the gods. Between them, between that intellectual or spiritual order, those novel philosophic kings, and the productive class of the artists and artisans, moves the military order, as the sensitive armed conscience, the armed will, of the State, its executive power in the fullest sense of that term — a " standing army," as Plato supposes, recruited from a great hereditary caste born and bred to such functions, and certainly very dijfferent from the mere " militia " of actual Greek states, hastily summoned at need to military service from the fields and workshops. Remember that the veritable bravery also, as the philosopher sees it, is a form of that " knowledge," which in truth includes in itself all other virtues, all good things whatever ; that it is a form of " right opinion," and has a kind of insight in it, a real apprehension of the occasion and its claims on one's courage, whether it is worth while to fight, and to what point. Platonic knighthood then will have in it something of the philosophy which resides in plenitude in the class above it, by which indeed this armed conscience of the State, the military order, is continuously en- lightened, as we know the conscience of each one of us severally needs to be. And though Plato will not expect his fighting-men, like the Christian knight, like Saint Ranieri Gualberto, 252 THE REPUBLIC to forgive their enemies, yet, moving one degree out of the narrower circle of Greek habits, he does require them, in conformity with a certain Pan-Hellenic, a now fully realised national sense, which fills himself, to love the whole Greek race, to spare the foe, if he be Greek, the last horrors of war, to think of the soil, of the dead, of the arms and armour taken from them, with certain scruples of a natural piety. As the knights share the dignity of the regal order, are in fact ultimately distinguished from it by degree rather than in kind, so they will be sharers also in its self-denying "rule." In common with it, they will observe a singular precept which forbids them so much as to come under the same roof with vessels or other objects wrought of gold or silver — they " who are most worthy of it," precisely because while "many iniquities have come from the world's coinage, they have gold in them undefiled." Yet again we are not to suppose in Platonic Greece — how could we indeed anywhere within the range of Greek conceptions ? — anything rude, uncomely, or unadorned. No one who reads carefully in this very book of The Republic those pages of criticism which concern art quite as much as poetry, a criticism which drives everywhere at a conscientious nicety of workmanship, will suppose that. If kings and knights never drink from vessels of silver or gold, their earthen cups and platters, we may be sure, would be what we can 253 PLATO AND PLATONISM still see ; and the iron armour on their bodies exquisitely fitted to them, to its purpose, with that peculiar beauty which such fitness secures. See them, then, moving, in perfect "Justice" or "Rightness," to their Dorian music, their so expressive plain-song, under the guidance of their natural leaders, those who can see and fore-see — of those who know. That they may be one ! — If, like an individual soul, the state has attained its normal differentia- tion of parts, as with that also its vitality and effectiveness will be proportionate to the unity of those parts in their various single operations. The productive, the executive, the contemplative orders, respectively, like their psychological analogues, the senses, the will, and the intelli- gence, will be susceptible each of its own proper virtue or excellence, temperance, bravery, spiritual illumination. Only, let each work aright in its own order, and a fourth virtue will supervene upon their united perfections, the virtue or perfection of the organic whole as such. The Justice vv^hich Plato has been so long iH-Search of wlirbe manifest at last-^^that perfect olKeio-n-payla, which will be also perfect co-operation. One- ness, uhity, community, an absolute community of interests among fellow-citizens, philadelphiay over against the selfish ambition of those natur- ally ascendant, like Alcibiades or Crito, in that competition for office, for wealth and honours, which has. rent Athens into factions ever breeding 254 THE REPUBLIC on themselves, the centripetal force versus all centrifugal forces : — on this situation, Plato, in the central books of The Republic, dwells untired, in all its variety of synonym and epithet, the conditions, the hazard and difficulty of its realisa- tion, its analogies in art, in music, in practical life, like three strings of a lyre, or Uke one colossal person, the painted £^^9 or civic genius on the walls of a Greek town-house, or, again, like the consummate athlete whose body, with no superfluities, is the precise, the perfectly finished, instrument of his will. Hence, at once cause and effect of such " se amles s " unity, his paradoxical new law of property in the~City of the Perfect — mandatum novuniy a " new command- ment," we might fairly call it — rh. r&v CKa>v koivL " And no one said that aught of the things he possessed was his own but they had all things common." Ah, you see ! Put yourself in Plato's company, and inevitably, from time to time, he will seem to pass with you beyond the utmost horizon actually opened to him. Upon the aristocratic class therefore, in its two divisions, the army and the church or hierarchy, so to speak, the "rule" of Plato — poverty, obedience, contemplation, will be incumbent in its fullest rigour. " Like hired servants in their own house," they may not seem very enviable persons, on first thoughts. But remember again that Plato's charge against things as they are is partly in a theoretic interest — the philosopher, 255 PLATO AND PLATONISM the philosophic soul, loves unity, but finds it nowhere, neither in the State nor in its individual members : it is partly also practical, and of the hour. Divided Athens, divided Greece, like some big, lax, self-neglectful person would be an easy prey to any well-knit adversary really at unity in himself. It is by way of introducing a constringent principal into a mass of amorphic particles, that Plato proclaims that these friends will have all things in common ; and, challenged by the questions of his companions in the dialogue to say how far he will be ready to go in the application of so paradoxical a rule, he braces himself to a surprising degree of consistency. How far then will Plato, a somewhat Machia- veUan theorist, as you saw, and with something of "fixed" ideas about practical things, taking desperate means towards a somewhat exclusively conceived ideal of social well-being, be ready to go? Now we have seen that the genuine citizens of his Perfect City will have much of monasticism, of the character of military monks, about them already, with their poverty, their obedience^ their contemplative habit. And there is yet another indispensable condition of the monastic life. The great Pope Hildebrand, by the rule of celibacy, by making "regulars" to that extent of the secular clergy, succeeded, as many have thought, in his design of making them in very deed, soul and body, but parts of the corporate order they 256 THE REPUBLIC belonged to ; and what Plato is going to add to his rule of life, for the S.fyxpvre<:. who are to be ^tXoTToXtSe?, to love the corporate body they belong to better than themselves, is in its actual effects something very like a law of celibacy. Difficult, paradoxical, as he admits it to be, he is pressed on by his hearers, and by the natural force of his argument, reluctantly to declare that the rule of communism will apply to a man's ownership of his wife and children. Observe ! Plato proposes this singular modifica- tion of married life as an elevation or expansion of the family, but, it may be rightly objected, is, in truth, only colouring with names exclusively appropriate to the family, arrangements which will be a suppression of all those sentiments that naturally pertain to it. The wisdom of Plato would certainly deprive mothers of that privacy of affection, regarding which the wisdom of Solomon beamed forth, by sending all infants soon after birth to be reared in a common nursery, where the facts of their actual parentage would be carefully obliterated. The result, as he supposes, will be a common and universal parent- age, sonship, brotherhood ; but surely with but a shadowy realisation of the affections, the claims, of these relationships. It will involve a loss of differentiation in life, and be, as such, a movement backward, to a barbarous or merely animal grade of existence. p. VI 257 * PLATO AND PLATONISM T^ T&v t^'iKmv Koivd. — With this soft phrase, then, Plato would take away all those precious differences that come of our having a little space in things to do what one will or can with. The Platonic state in fact, with its extraordinary common marriages, would be dealing precisely after the manner of those who breed birds or dogs. A strange forbidding experiment, it seems, or should seem, to us, looking back on it in the light of laws now irrevocably fixed on these subjects by the judgment of the Christian church. We must remember however, in fair- ness, that Plato in this matter of the relation of the sexes especially, found himself in a world very different from ours, regulated and refined, as it already is in some degree, by Christian ideas about women and children. A loose law of marriage, beyond it concubinage in some degree sanctioned by religion, beyond that again morbid vice : such was the condition of the Greek world. What Christian marriage, in harmonious action with man's true nature, has done to counteract this condition, that Plato tried to do by a some- what forced legislation, which was altogether out of harmony with the facts of man's nature. Neither the church nor the world has endorsed his theories about it. Think, in contrast, of the place occupied in Christian art by the mother and her child. What that represents in life Plato wishes to take from us, though, as he would have us think, in our own behalf. 258 THE REPUBLIC And his views of the community of male and female education, and of the functions of men and women in the State, do but come of the relief of women in large measure from home- duties. Such duties becoming a carefully economised department of the State, the women will have leisure to share the work of men ; and will need a corresponding education. The details of their common life in peace and war he certainly makes effective and bright. But if we think of his proposal as a reinstatement of the Amazon we have in effect condemned it. For the Amazon of mythology and art is but a survival from a half- animal world, which Theseus, the embodiment of adult reason, had long since overcome. Plato himself divides this confessedly so difficult question into two : Is the thing good ? and in the second place. Is it possible ? Let us admit that at that particular crisis, or even generally, what he proposes is for the best. Thereupon the question which suggested itself in regard to the community of goods recurs with double force : Where may lie the secret of the magnanimity (that is the term to hold by) which will make wealth and office, with all their opportunities for puissant wills, no motive in life at all ? Is it possible, and under what conditions — this disinterestedness on the part of those who might do what they will as with their own, this indifference, this surrender, not of one's goods and 259 PLATO AND PLATONISM time only, but of one's last resource, one's very home, for " the greatest happiness of the greatest number." — Those are almost the exact words of Plato. How shall those who might be egotists on the scale of an Alcibiades or an Alexander be kept to this strange " new mandate " of altruism ? How shall a paradox so bold be brought within the range of possibilities ? Well ! by the realisation of another paradox, — if we make philosophers our kings or our kings philosophers. It is the last " wave of paradox," from the advancing crest of which Plato still shrinks back, oddly reluctant, as we may think, to utter his whole mind. But, concede his position, and all beside, in the strange, paradoxical new world he is constructing, its extraordinary reaches of Philadelphia^ will be found practicable. Our kings must be philosophers. But not, we must carefully note, because, as people are apt to fancy, philosophers as such necessarily despise or are unable to feel what is fascinating in the world of action, are un-formed or withered on one side, and, as regards the allurements of the world of sense, are but "corpses." For Plato certainly they are no starvelings. The philosophic, or aristocratic, or kingly, nature, as he conceives it, will be the perfect flower of the whole compass of natural endowments, promoted to the utmost by the artificial influences of society- — KaKoKc^aGoo<}. Art, as such, as Plato knows, has no purpose but itself, its own perfection. The proper art of the p. VI 27s T 2 PLATO AND PLATONISM Perfect City is in fact the art of discipline. Music (fiovaiK'q) all the various forms of fine art, will be but the instruments of its one over- mastering social or political purpose, irresistibly conforming its so imitative subject units to type : they will be neither more nor less than so many variations, so to speak, of the trumpet-call. Or suppose again that a poet finds his way to us, " able by his genius, as he chooses, or as his audience chooses, to become all things, or all persons, in turn, and able to transform us too into all things and persons in turn, as we listen or read, with a fluidity, a versatility of humour almost equal to his own, a poet myriad-minded, as we say, almost in Plato's precise words, as our finest touch of praise, of Shakespeare for instance, or of Homer, of whom he was thinking : — Well ! we shall have been set on our guard. We have no room for him. Divine, delightful, being, " if he came to our city with his works, his poems, wishing to make an exhibition of them, we should certainly do him reverence as an object, sacred, wonderful, delightful, but we should not let him stay. We should tell him that there neither is, nor may be, any one like that among us, and so send him on his way to some other city, having anointed his head with myrrh and crowned him with a garland of wool,;, as something in himself half-divine, and for our- selves should make use of some more austere and less pleasing sort of poet, for his practical! 276 PLATO'S ^ESTHETICS uses. To) avaTTiporipq) koI ariSeareptp rronjry, &^e\ia% eveKo. Not, as I said, that the Republic any more than Lacedamon will be an artless place. Plato's assthetic scheme is actually based on a high degree of sensibility to such influences in the people he is dealing with. — Right speech, then, and Tightness of harmony and form and rhythm minister to goodness of nature ; not that good- nature which we so call with a soft name, being really silli- ness, but the frame of mind which in very truth is righuy and feirly ordered in regard to the moral habit. — ^Most certainly he said. — ^Must not these qualities, then, be everywhere pursued by the young men if they are to do each his own business ? — Pursued, certainly. — Now painting, I suppose, is full of them (those qualities which are partly ediical, partly aesthetic) and aU handicraft such as that ; the weaver's art is full of them, and the inlayer's art and the building of houses, and the working of all the other apparatus of life ; moreover the nature of our own bodies, and of all other living things. For in all these, rightness or wrongness of form is inherent. And wrongness of form, and the lack of rhythm, the lack of harmony, are fraternal to fauldness of mind and character, and the opposite qualities to the opposite condition — the temperate and good character : — fraternal, aye I and copies of them. — ^Yes, entirely so : he said. — Must our poets, then, alone be under control, and compelled to work the image of the good into their poetic works, or not to work among us at all ; or must the other craftsmen too be controlled, and restrained from working this faultiness and intemperance and illiberality and formlessness of character whether into the images of living creatures, or the houses they build, or any other product of their craft whatever ; or must he who is unable so to do be forbidden to practise his art among us, to the end that our guardians may not, nurtured in images of vice as in a vicious pasture, cropping and culling much every day little by little from many sources, composing together some one great evil in their own souls, go undetected i Must we not rather seek for those craftsmen who have the 277 PLATO AND PLATONISM power, by way of their own natural virtue, to track out the nature of the beautiful and seemly, to the end that, living as in some wholesome place, the young men may receive good from every side, whencesoever, from fair works of art, either upon sight or upon hearing anything may strike, as it were a breeze bearing health from kindly places, and from childhood straightway bring them unaware to likeness and friendship and harmony with fair reason ? — Yes : he answered : in this vsray they would be by far best educated. — Well then, I said, Glaucon, on these grounds is not education in music of the greatest importance — because, more than anything else, rhythm and harmony make their way down into the inmost part of the soul, and take hold upon it with the utmost force, bringing with them rightness of form, and rendering its form right, if one be correctly trained ; if not, the opposite ? and again because he who has been trained in that department duly, would have the sharpest sense of oversights (rwv jropaXewro/ttvuv) and of things not fairly turned out, whether by art or nature (jiij KoXm dtri/iiiOvpyridivTtiiv ^ fii^ KaXJos tjiivriav) and disliking them, as he should, would commend things beautiful, and, by reason of his delight in these, receiving diem into his soul, be nurtured of them, and become Ka\oKayad6^ while he blamed the base, as he should, ' and hated it, while still young, before he was able to apprehend a reason, and when reason comes would welcome it, recognising it by its kinship to himself — most of all one thus taught ? — Yes : he answered : it seems to me that for reasons such as these their education should be in music. Republic^ 400. Understand, then, the poetry and music, the arts and crafts, of the City of the Perfect — what is left of them there, and remember how the Greeks themselves were used to say that " the half is more than the whole." Liken its music, if you will, to Gregorian music, and call to mind the kind of architecture, military or monastic again, that must be built to such music, and then the kind of colouring that will fill its 278 PLATO'S ESTHETICS jealously allotted space upon the walls, the sort of carving that will venture to display itself on cornice or capital. The walls, the pillars, the streets — you see them in thought ! nay, the very trees and animals, the attire of those who move along the streets, their looks and voices, their style — the hieratic Dorian architecture, to speak precisely, the Dorian manner everywhere, in possession of the whole of life. Compare it, for further vividness of effect, to Gothic building, to the Cistercian Gothic, if you will, when Saint Bernard had purged it of a still barbaric superfluity of ornament. It seems a long way from the Parthenon to Saint Ouen "of the aisles and arches," or Notre-Dame de Bourges ; yet they illustrate almost equally the direction of the Platonic ssthetics. Those churches of the Middle Age have, as we all feel, their loveliness, yet of a stern sort, which fascinates while perhaps it repels us. We may try hard to like as well or better architecture of a more or less different kind, but coming back to them again find that the secret of final success is theirs. The rigid logic of their charm controls our taste, as logic proper binds the intelligence : we would have something of that quality, if we might, for our- selves, in what we do or make ; feel, under its influence, very diffident of our own loose, or gaudy, or literally insignificant, decorations. "Stay then," says the Platonist, too sanguine perhaps, — " Abide," he says to youth, " in these 279 PLATO AND PLATONISM places, and the like of them, and mechanically, irresistibly, the soul of them will impregnate yours. With whatever beside is in congruity with them in the order of hearing and sight, they will tell (despite, it may be, of unkindly nature at your first making) upon your very coun- tenance, your walk and gestures, in the course and concatenation of your inmost thoughts." And equation being duly made of what is merely personal and temporary in Plato's view of the arts, it may be salutary to return from time to time to the Platonic aesthetics, to find ourselves under the more exclusive influence of those qualities in the Hellenic genius he has thus emphasised. What he would promote, then, is the art, the literature, of which among other things it may be said that it solicits a certain effort from the reader or spectator, who is promised a great expressiveness on the part of the writer, the artist, if he for his part will bring with him a great attentiveness. And how satisfying, how reassuring, how flattering to himself after all, such work really is — the work which deals with one as a scholar, formed, mature and manly. Bravery — avZpela or manliness — manliness and temperance, as we know, were the two characteristic virtues of that old pagan world ; and in art certainly they seem to be involved in one another. Manliness in art, what can it be, as distinct from that which in opposition to it 280 PLATO'S ^ESTHETICS must be called the feminine quality there, — what but a full conciousness of what one does, of art itself in the work of art, tenacity of intuition and of consequent purpose, the spirit of con- struction as opposed to what is literally incoherent or ready to fall to pieces, and, in opposition to what is hysteric or works at random, the main- tenance of a standard. Of such art ^0o9 rather than irddoi will be the predominant mood. To use Plato's own expression there will be here no -TTopaKemofieva, no " negligences," no feminine forgetfulness of one's self, nothing in the work of art unconformed to the leading intention of the artist, who will but increase his power by reserve. An artist of that kind will be apt, of course, to express more than he seems actually to say. He economises. He will not spoil good things by exaggeration. The rough, pro- miscuous wealth of nature he reduces to grace and order : reduces, it may be, lax verse to staid and temperate prose. With him, the rhythm, the music, the notes, will be felt to follow, or rather literally accompany as ministers, the sense, dKoKovdeiv top \6yov. We may fairly prefer the broad daylight of Veronese to the contrasted light and shade of Rembrandt even ; and a painter will tell you that the former is actually more difficult to attain. Temperance, the temperance of the youthful Charmides, super-induced on a nature originally rich and impassioned, — Plato's own 281 PLATO AND PLATONISM native preference for that is only reinforced by the special needs of his time, and the very conditions of the ideal state. The diamond, we are told, if it be a fine one, may gain in value by w^hat is cut away. It was after such fashion that the manly youth of Lacedaemon had been cut and carved. Lenten or monastic colours, brown and black, white and grey, give their utmost value for the eye (so much is obvious) to the scarlet flower, the lighted candle, the cloth of gold. And Platonic aesthetics, remember ! as such, are ever in close connexion with Plato's ethics. It is life itself, action and character, he proposes to colour ; to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic or impassioned acts. Such Platonic quality you may trace of course not only in work of Doric, or, more largely, of Hellenic lineage, but at all times, as the very conscience of art, its saving salt, even in ages of decadence. You may analyse it, as a condition of literary style, in historic narrative, for in- stance ; and then you have the stringent, short- hand art of Thucydides at his best, his masterly feeling for master-facts, and the half as so much more than the whole. Pindar is in a certain sense his analogue in verse. Think of the amount of attention he must have looked for, in those who were, not to read, but to sing him, or to listen while he was sung, and to under- 282 PLATO'S ^ESTHETICS stand. With those fine, sharp-cut gems or chasings of his, so sparely set, how much he leaves for a well-drilled intelligence to supply in the way of connecting thought. And you may look for the correlative of that in Greek clay, in Greek marble, as you walk through the British Museum. But observe it, above all, at work, checking yet reinforcing his naturally fluent and luxuriant genius, in Plato himself. His prose is a practical illustration of the value of that capacity for correction, of the effort, the intellectual astringency, which he demands of the poet also, the musician, of all true citizens of the ideal Republic, enhancing the sense of power in one's self, and its effect upon others, by a certain crafty reserve in its exercise, after the manner of a true expert. Xakevct rk KoKa — he is faithful to the old Greek saying. Patience, "infinite patience," may or may not be, as was said, of the very essence of genius ; but is certainly, quite as much as fire, of the mood of all true lovers. "Io-ib? to \ey6fj^vov aXriOh, on xa^ewet rh, Kokd. Heraclitus had pre- ferred the " dry soul," or the " dry light " in it, as Bacon after him the siccum lumen. And the dry beauty, — let Plato teach us, to love that also, duly. 1891-1892. Printed in Great Britain ly R. & R. Clakk, Limited, Ediniurgli.