Gorgias
of our own and the last century, which, together with the sister art of
review writing, threatens to absorb all literature, has even less of
seriousness in her composition. Do we not often hear the novel writer
censured for attempting to convey a lesson to the minds of his readers?
Yet the true office of a poet or writer of fiction is not merely to
give amusement, or to be the expression of the feelings of mankind,
good or bad, or even to increase our knowledge of human nature. There
have been poets in modern times, such as Goethe or Wordsworth, who have
not forgotten their high vocation of teachers; and the two greatest of
the Greek dramatists owe their sublimity to their ethical character.
The noblest truths, sung of in the purest and sweetest language, are
still the proper material of poetry. The poet clothes them with beauty,
and has a power of making them enter into the hearts and memories of
men. He has not only to speak of themes above the level of ordinary
life, but to speak of them in a deeper and tenderer way than they are
ordinarily felt, so as to awaken the feeling of them in others. The old
he makes young again; the familiar principle he invests with a new
dignity; he finds a noble expression for the common-places of morality
and politics. He uses the things of sense so as to indicate what is
beyond; he raises us through earth to heaven. He expresses what the
better part of us would fain say, and the half-conscious feeling is
strengthened by the expression. He is his own critic, for the spirit of
poetry and of criticism are not divided in him. His mission is not to
disguise men from themselves, but to reveal to them their own nature,
and make them better acquainted with the world around them. True poetry
is the remembrance of youth, of love, the embodiment in words of the
happiest and holiest moments of life, of the noblest thoughts of man,
of the greatest deeds of the past. The poet of the future may return to
his greater calling of the prophet or teacher; indeed, we hardly know
what may not be effected for the human race by a better use of the
poetical and imaginative faculty. The reconciliation of poetry, as of
religion, with truth, may still be possible. Neither is the element of
pleasure to be excluded. For when we substitute a higher pleasure for a
lower we raise men in the scale of existence. Might not the novelist,
too, make an ideal, or rather many ideals of social life, better than a
thousand sermons? Plato, like the Puritans, is too much afraid of
poetic and artistic influences. But he is not without a true sense of
the noble purposes to which art may be applied (Republic).
Modern poetry is often a sort of plaything, or, in Plato’s language, a
flattery, a sophistry, or sham, in which, without any serious purpose,
the poet lends wings to his fancy and exhibits his gifts of language
and metre. Such an one seeks to gratify the taste of his readers; he
has the “savoir faire,” or trick of writing, but he has not the higher
spirit of poetry. He has no conception that true art should bring order
out of disorder; that it should make provision for the soul’s highest
interest; that it should be pursued only with a view to “the
improvement of the citizens.” He ministers to the weaker side of human
nature (Republic); he idealizes the sensual; he sings the strain of
love in the latest fashion; instead of raising men above themselves he
brings them back to the “tyranny of the many masters,” from which all
his life long a good man has been praying to be delivered. And often,
forgetful of measure and order, he will express not that which is
truest, but that which is strongest. Instead of a great and
nobly-executed subject, perfect in every part, some fancy of a heated
brain is worked out with the strangest incongruity. He is not the
master of his words, but his words—perhaps borrowed from another—the
faded reflection of some French or German or Italian writer, have the
better of him. Though we are not going to banish the poets, how can we
suppose that such utterances have any healing or life-giving influence
on the minds of men?
“Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:” Art then must be
true, and politics must be true, and the life of man must be true and
not a seeming or sham. In all of them order has to be brought out of
disorder, truth out of error and falsehood. This is what we mean by the
greatest improvement of man. And so, having considered in what way “we
can best spend the appointed time, we leave the result with God.” Plato
does not say that God will order all things for the best (compare
Phaedo), but he indirectly implies that the evils of this life will be
corrected in another. And as we are very far from the best imaginable
world at present, Plato here, as in the Phaedo and Republic, supposes a
purgatory or place of education for mankind in general, and for a very
few a Tartarus or hell. The myth which terminates the dialogue is not
the revelation, but rather, like all similar descriptions, whether in
the Bible or Plato, the veil of another life. For no visible thing can
reveal the invisible. Of this Plato, unlike some commentators on
Scripture, is fully aware. Neither will he dogmatize about the manner
in which we are “born again” (Republic). Only he is prepared to
maintain the ultimate triumph of truth and right, and declares that no
one, not even the wisest of the Greeks, can affirm any other doctrine
without being ridiculous.
There is a further paradox of ethics, in which pleasure and pain are
held to be indifferent, and virtue at the time of action and without
regard to consequences is happiness. From this elevation or
exaggeration of feeling Plato seems to shrink: he leaves it to the
Stoics in a later generation to maintain that when impaled or on the
rack the philosopher may be happy (compare Republic). It is observable
that in the Republic he raises this question, but it is not really
discussed; the veil of the ideal state, the shadow of another life, are
allowed to descend upon it and it passes out of sight. The martyr or
sufferer in the cause of right or truth is often supposed to die in
raptures, having his eye fixed on a city which is in heaven. But if
there were no future, might he not still be happy in the performance of
an action which was attended only by a painful death? He himself may be
ready to thank God that he was thought worthy to do Him the least
service, without looking for a reward; the joys of another life may not
have been present to his mind at all. Do we suppose that the mediaeval
saint, St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Catharine of Sienna, or the
Catholic priest who lately devoted himself to death by a lingering
disease that he might solace and help others, was thinking of the
“sweets” of heaven? No; the work was already heaven to him and enough.
Much less will the dying patriot be dreaming of the praises of man or
of an immortality of fame: the sense of duty, of right, and trust in
God will be sufficient, and as far as the mind can reach, in that hour.
If he were certain that there were no life to come, he would not have
wished to speak or act otherwise than he did in the cause of truth or
of humanity. Neither, on the other hand, will he suppose that God has
forsaken him or that the future is to be a mere blank to him. The
greatest act of faith, the only faith which cannot pass away, is his
who has not known, but yet has believed. A very few among the sons of
men have made themselves independent of circumstances, past, present,
or to come. He who has attained to such a temper of mind has already
present with him eternal life; he needs no arguments to convince him of
immortality; he has in him already a principle stronger than death. He
who serves man without the thought of reward is deemed to be a more
faithful servant than he who works for hire. May not the service of
God, which is the more disinterested, be in like manner the higher? And
although only a very few in the course of the world’s history—Christ
himself being one of them—have attained to such a noble conception of
God and of the human soul, yet the ideal of them may be present to us,
and the remembrance of them be an example to us, and their lives may
shed a light on many dark places both of philosophy and theology.
THE MYTHS OF PLATO.
The myths of Plato are a phenomenon unique in literature. There are
four longer ones: these occur in the Phaedrus, Phaedo, Gorgias, and
Republic. That in the Republic is the most elaborate and finished of
them. Three of these greater myths, namely those contained in the
Phaedo, the Gorgias and the Republic, relate to the destiny of human
souls in a future life. The magnificent myth in the Phaedrus treats of
the immortality, or rather the eternity of the soul, in which is
included a former as well as a future state of existence. To these may
be added, (1) the myth, or rather fable, occurring in the Statesman, in
which the life of innocence is contrasted with the ordinary life of man
and the consciousness of evil: (2) the legend of the Island of
Atlantis, an imaginary history, which is a fragment only, commenced in
the Timaeus and continued in the Critias: (3) the much less artistic
fiction of the foundation of the Cretan colony which is introduced in
the preface to the Laws, but soon falls into the background: (4) the
beautiful but rather artificial tale of Prometheus and Epimetheus
narrated in his rhetorical manner by Protagoras in the dialogue called
after him: (5) the speech at the beginning of the Phaedrus, which is a
parody of the orator Lysias; the rival speech of Socrates and the
recantation of it. To these may be added (6) the tale of the
grasshoppers, and (7) the tale of Thamus and of Theuth, both in the
Phaedrus: (8) the parable of the Cave (Republic), in which the previous
argument is recapitulated, and the nature and degrees of knowledge
having been previously set forth in the abstract are represented in a
picture: (9) the fiction of the earth-born men (Republic; compare
Laws), in which by the adaptation of an old tradition Plato makes a new
beginning for his society: (10) the myth of Aristophanes respecting the
division of the sexes, Sym.: (11) the parable of the noble captain, the
pilot, and the mutinous sailors (Republic), in which is represented the
relation of the better part of the world, and of the philosopher, to
the mob of politicians: (12) the ironical tale of the pilot who plies
between Athens and Aegina charging only a small payment for saving men
from death, the reason being that he is uncertain whether to live or
die is better for them (Gor.): (13) the treatment of freemen and
citizens by physicians and of slaves by their apprentices,—a somewhat
laboured figure of speech intended to illustrate the two different ways
in which the laws speak to men (Laws). There also occur in Plato
continuous images; some of them extend over several pages, appearing
and reappearing at intervals: such as the bees stinging and stingless
(paupers and thieves) in the Eighth Book of the Republic, who are
generated in the transition from timocracy to oligarchy: the sun, which
is to the visible world what the idea of good is to the intellectual,
in the Sixth Book of the Republic: the composite animal, having the
form of a man, but containing under a human skin a lion and a
many-headed monster (Republic): the great beast, i.e. the populace: and
the wild beast within us, meaning the passions which are always liable
to break out: the animated comparisons of the degradation of philosophy
by the arts to the dishonoured maiden, and of the tyrant to the
parricide, who “beats his father, having first taken away his arms”:
the dog, who is your only philosopher: the grotesque and rather paltry