The Republic
than a sense of the decline and decay both in literature and in
politics which marked his own age. Nor can he have been expected to
look with favour on the licence of Aristophanes, now at the end of his
career, who had begun by satirizing Socrates in the Clouds, and in a
similar spirit forty years afterwards had satirized the founders of
ideal commonwealths in his Eccleziazusae, or Female Parliament (Laws).
There were other reasons for the antagonism of Plato to poetry. The
profession of an actor was regarded by him as a degradation of human
nature, for ‘one man in his life’ cannot ‘play many parts;’ the
characters which the actor performs seem to destroy his own character,
and to leave nothing which can be truly called himself. Neither can any
man live his life and act it. The actor is the slave of his art, not
the master of it. Taking this view Plato is more decided in his
expulsion of the dramatic than of the epic poets, though he must have
known that the Greek tragedians afforded noble lessons and examples of
virtue and patriotism, to which nothing in Homer can be compared. But
great dramatic or even great rhetorical power is hardly consistent with
firmness or strength of mind, and dramatic talent is often incidentally
associated with a weak or dissolute character.
In the Tenth Book Plato introduces a new series of objections. First,
he says that the poet or painter is an imitator, and in the third
degree removed from the truth. His creations are not tested by rule and
measure; they are only appearances. In modern times we should say that
art is not merely imitation, but rather the expression of the ideal in
forms of sense. Even adopting the humble image of Plato, from which his
argument derives a colour, we should maintain that the artist may
ennoble the bed which he paints by the folds of the drapery, or by the
feeling of home which he introduces; and there have been modern
painters who have imparted such an ideal interest to a blacksmith’s or
a carpenter’s shop. The eye or mind which feels as well as sees can
give dignity and pathos to a ruined mill, or a straw-built shed
(Rembrandt), to the hull of a vessel ‘going to its last home’ (Turner).
Still more would this apply to the greatest works of art, which seem to
be the visible embodiment of the divine. Had Plato been asked whether
the Zeus or Athene of Pheidias was the imitation of an imitation only,
would he not have been compelled to admit that something more was to be
found in them than in the form of any mortal; and that the rule of
proportion to which they conformed was ‘higher far than any geometry or
arithmetic could express?’ (Statesman.)
Again, Plato objects to the imitative arts that they express the
emotional rather than the rational part of human nature. He does not
admit Aristotle’s theory, that tragedy or other serious imitations are
a purgation of the passions by pity and fear; to him they appear only
to afford the opportunity of indulging them. Yet we must acknowledge
that we may sometimes cure disordered emotions by giving expression to
them; and that they often gain strength when pent up within our own
breast. It is not every indulgence of the feelings which is to be
condemned. For there may be a gratification of the higher as well as of
the lower—thoughts which are too deep or too sad to be expressed by
ourselves, may find an utterance in the words of poets. Every one would
acknowledge that there have been times when they were consoled and
elevated by beautiful music or by the sublimity of architecture or by
the peacefulness of nature. Plato has himself admitted, in the earlier
part of the Republic, that the arts might have the effect of
harmonizing as well as of enervating the mind; but in the Tenth Book he
regards them through a Stoic or Puritan medium. He asks only ‘What good
have they done?’ and is not satisfied with the reply, that ‘They have
given innocent pleasure to mankind.’
He tells us that he rejoices in the banishment of the poets, since he
has found by the analysis of the soul that they are concerned with the
inferior faculties. He means to say that the higher faculties have to
do with universals, the lower with particulars of sense. The poets are
on a level with their own age, but not on a level with Socrates and
Plato; and he was well aware that Homer and Hesiod could not be made a
rule of life by any process of legitimate interpretation; his ironical
use of them is in fact a denial of their authority; he saw, too, that
the poets were not critics—as he says in the Apology, ‘Any one was a
better interpreter of their writings than they were themselves. He
himself ceased to be a poet when he became a disciple of Socrates;
though, as he tells us of Solon, ‘he might have been one of the
greatest of them, if he had not been deterred by other pursuits’ (Tim.)
Thus from many points of view there is an antagonism between Plato and
the poets, which was foreshadowed to him in the old quarrel between
philosophy and poetry. The poets, as he says in the Protagoras, were
the Sophists of their day; and his dislike of the one class is
reflected on the other. He regards them both as the enemies of
reasoning and abstraction, though in the case of Euripides more with
reference to his immoral sentiments about tyrants and the like. For
Plato is the prophet who ‘came into the world to convince men’—first of
the fallibility of sense and opinion, and secondly of the reality of
abstract ideas. Whatever strangeness there may be in modern times in
opposing philosophy to poetry, which to us seem to have so many
elements in common, the strangeness will disappear if we conceive of
poetry as allied to sense, and of philosophy as equivalent to thought
and abstraction. Unfortunately the very word ‘idea,’ which to Plato is
expressive of the most real of all things, is associated in our minds
with an element of subjectiveness and unreality. We may note also how
he differs from Aristotle who declares poetry to be truer than history,
for the opposite reason, because it is concerned with universals, not
like history, with particulars (Poet).
The things which are seen are opposed in Scripture to the things which
are unseen—they are equally opposed in Plato to universals and ideas.
To him all particulars appear to be floating about in a world of sense;
they have a taint of error or even of evil. There is no difficulty in
seeing that this is an illusion; for there is no more error or
variation in an individual man, horse, bed, etc., than in the class
man, horse, bed, etc.; nor is the truth which is displayed in
individual instances less certain than that which is conveyed through
the medium of ideas. But Plato, who is deeply impressed with the real
importance of universals as instruments of thought, attributes to them
an essential truth which is imaginary and unreal; for universals may be
often false and particulars true. Had he attained to any clear
conception of the individual, which is the synthesis of the universal
and the particular; or had he been able to distinguish between opinion
and sensation, which the ambiguity of the words (Greek) and the like,
tended to confuse, he would not have denied truth to the particulars of
sense.
But the poets are also the representatives of falsehood and feigning in
all departments of life and knowledge, like the sophists and
rhetoricians of the Gorgias and Phaedrus; they are the false priests,
false prophets, lying spirits, enchanters of the world. There is
another count put into the indictment against them by Plato, that they
are the friends of the tyrant, and bask in the sunshine of his
patronage. Despotism in all ages has had an apparatus of false ideas
and false teachers at its service—in the history of Modern Europe as
well as of Greece and Rome. For no government of men depends solely
upon force; without some corruption of literature and morals—some
appeal to the imagination of the masses—some pretence to the favour of
heaven—some element of good giving power to evil, tyranny, even for a
short time, cannot be maintained. The Greek tyrants were not insensible
to the importance of awakening in their cause a Pseudo-Hellenic
feeling; they were proud of successes at the Olympic games; they were
not devoid of the love of literature and art. Plato is thinking in the
first instance of Greek poets who had graced the courts of Dionysius or
Archelaus: and the old spirit of freedom is roused within him at their
prostitution of the Tragic Muse in the praises of tyranny. But his
prophetic eye extends beyond them to the false teachers of other ages
who are the creatures of the government under which they live. He
compares the corruption of his contemporaries with the idea of a
perfect society, and gathers up into one mass of evil the evils and
errors of mankind; to him they are personified in the rhetoricians,
sophists, poets, rulers who deceive and govern the world.
A further objection which Plato makes to poetry and the imitative arts
is that they excite the emotions. Here the modern reader will be
disposed to introduce a distinction which appears to have escaped him.
For the emotions are neither bad nor good in themselves, and are not
most likely to be controlled by the attempt to eradicate them, but by
the moderate indulgence of them. And the vocation of art is to present
thought in the form of feeling, to enlist the feelings on the side of
reason, to inspire even for a moment courage or resignation; perhaps to
suggest a sense of infinity and eternity in a way which mere language
is incapable of attaining. True, the same power which in the purer age
of art embodies gods and heroes only, may be made to express the
voluptuous image of a Corinthian courtezan. But this only shows that
art, like other outward things, may be turned to good and also to evil,
and is not more closely connected with the higher than with the lower
part of the soul. All imitative art is subject to certain limitations,
and therefore necessarily partakes of the nature of a compromise.
Something of ideal truth is sacrificed for the sake of the
representation, and something in the exactness of the representation is
sacrificed to the ideal. Still, works of art have a permanent element;
they idealize and detain the passing thought, and are the intermediates
between sense and ideas.
In the present stage of the human mind, poetry and other forms of
fiction may certainly be regarded as a good. But we can also imagine
the existence of an age in which a severer conception of truth has
either banished or transformed them. At any rate we must admit that
they hold a different place at different periods of the world’s
history. In the infancy of mankind, poetry, with the exception of
proverbs, is the whole of literature, and the only instrument of
intellectual culture; in modern times she is the shadow or echo of her
former self, and appears to have a precarious existence. Milton in his
day doubted whether an epic poem was any longer possible. At the same
time we must remember, that what Plato would have called the charms of
poetry have been partly transferred to prose; he himself (Statesman)
admits rhetoric to be the handmaiden of Politics, and proposes to find
in the strain of law (Laws) a substitute for the old poets. Among
ourselves the creative power seems often to be growing weaker, and
scientific fact to be more engrossing and overpowering to the mind than
formerly. The illusion of the feelings commonly called love, has
hitherto been the inspiring influence of modern poetry and romance, and
has exercised a humanizing if not a strengthening influence on the
world. But may not the stimulus which love has given to fancy be some
day exhausted? The modern English novel which is the most popular of