"To use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts
upwards, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms,
and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair
notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of
absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is;
this, my dear Socrates," said the prophetess of Mantineia, "is
that life, above all others, which man should live, in the
contemplation of beauty absolute. Do you not see that in that
communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will
be enabled to bring forth not images of beauty, but realities; for
he has hold not of an image, but of a reality; and bringing forth
and educating true virtue to become the friend of God, and be
immortal, if mortal man may?"
Such are the æsthetics of Plato, put into the mouth of that mysterious
Diotima, who was a wise woman in many branches of knowledge. As we
read them nowadays we are apt to smile with incredulity not unmixed
with bitterness. Is all this not mere talk, charming and momentarily
elating us like so much music; itself mere beauty which, because we
like it, we half voluntarily confuse with _truth_? And, on the other
hand, is not the truth of æsthetics, the bare, hard fact, a very
different matter? For we have learned that we human creatures will
never know the absolute or the essence, that notions, which Plato took
for realities, are mere relative conceptions; that virtue and truth
are social ideals and intellectual abstractions, while beauty is a
quality found primarily and literally only in material existences and
sense-experiences; and every day we are hearing of new discoveries
connecting our æsthetic emotions with the structure of eye and ear,
the movement of muscles, the functions of nerve centres, nay, even
with the action of heart and lungs and viscera. Moreover, all round us
schools of criticism and cliques of artists are telling us forever
that so far from bringing forth and educating true virtue, art has the
sovereign power, by mere skill and subtlety, of investing good and
evil, healthy and unwholesome, with equal merit, and obliterating the
distinctions drawn by the immortal gods, instead of helping the
immortal gods to their observance.
Thus we are apt to think, and to take the words of Diotima as merely
so much lovely rhetoric. But--as my previous chapters must have led
you to expect--I think we are so far mistaken. I believe that,
although explained in the terms of fantastic, almost mythical
metaphysic, the speech of Diotima contains a great truth, deposited in
the heart of man by the unnoticed innumerable experiences of centuries
and peoples; a truth which exists in ourselves also as an instinctive
expectation, and which the advance of knowledge will confirm and
explain. For in that pellucid atmosphere of the Greek mind, untroubled
as yet by theoretic mists, there may have been visible the very things
which our scientific instruments are enabling us to see and
reconstruct piecemeal, great groupings of reality metamorphosed into
Fata Morgana cities seemingly built by the gods.
And thus I am going to try to reinstate in others' belief, as it is
fully reinstated in my own, the theory of higher æsthetic harmonies,
which the prophetess of Mantineia taught Socrates: to wit, that
through the contemplation of true beauty we may attain, by the
constant purification--or, in more modern language, the constant
selecting and enriching--of our nature, to that which transcends
material beauty; because the desire for harmony begets the habit of
harmony, and the habit thereof begets its imperative desire, and thus
on in never-ending alternation.