hedges: the eagle himself would be starved if he always soared aloft
and against the sun. The sweetest fruit grows near the ground, and the
plants that bear it require ventilation and lopping. Were this not to
be done in thy garden, every walk and alley, every plot and border,
would be covered with runners and roots, with boughs and suckers. We
want no poets or logicians or metaphysicians to govern us: we want
practical men, honest men, continent men, unambitious men, fearful to
solicit a trust, slow to accept, and resolute never to betray one.
Experimentalists may be the best philosophers: they are always the
worst politicians. Teach people their duties, and they will know their
interests. Change as little as possible, and correct as much.
Philosophers are absurd from many causes, but principally from laying
out unthriftily their distinctions. They set up four virtues:
fortitude, prudence, temperance, and justice. Now a man may be a very
bad one, and yet possess three out of the four. Every cut-throat must,
if he has been a cut-throat on many occasions, have more fortitude and
more prudence than the greater part of those whom we consider as the
best men. And what cruel wretches, both executioners and judges, have
been strictly just! how little have they cared what gentleness, what
generosity, what genius, their sentence hath removed from the earth!
Temperance and beneficence contain all other virtues. Take them home,
Plato; split them, expound them; do what thou wilt with them, if thou
but use them.
Before I gave thee this lesson, which is a better than thou ever
gavest any one, and easier to remember, thou wert accusing me of
invidiousness and malice against those whom thou callest the great,
meaning to say the powerful. Thy imagination, I am well aware, had
taken its flight toward Sicily, where thou seekest thy great man, as
earnestly and undoubtingly as Ceres sought her Persephone. Faith!
honest Plato, I have no reason to envy thy worthy friend Dionysius.
Look at my nose! A lad seven or eight years old threw an apple at me
yesterday, while I was gazing at the clouds, and gave me nose enough
for two moderate men. Instead of such a godsend, what should I have
thought of my fortune, if, after living all my lifetime among golden
vases, rougher than my hand with their emeralds and rubies, their
engravings and embossments; among Parian caryatides and porphyry
sphinxes; among philosophers with rings upon their fingers and linen
next their skin; and among singing-boys and dancing-girls, to whom
alone thou speakest intelligibly--I ask thee again, what should I in
reason have thought of my fortune, if, after these facilities and
superfluities, I had at last been pelted out of my house, not by one
young rogue, but by thousands of all ages, and not with an apple (I
wish I could say a rotten one), but with pebbles and broken pots; and,
to crown my deserts, had been compelled to become the teacher of so
promising a generation? Great men, forsooth! thou knowest at last who
they are.
_Plato._ There are great men of various kinds.
_Diogenes._ No, by my beard, are there not!
_Plato._ What! are there not great captains, great geometricians,
great dialectitians?
_Diogenes._ Who denied it? A great man was the postulate. Try thy hand
now at the powerful one.
_Plato._ On seeing the exercise of power, a child cannot doubt who is
powerful, more or less; for power is relative. All men are weak, not
only if compared to the Demiurgos, but if compared to the sea or the
earth, or certain things upon each of them, such as elephants and
whales. So placid and tranquil is the scene around us, we can hardly
bring to mind the images of strength and force, the precipices, the
abysses----
_Diogenes._ Prithee hold thy loose tongue, twinkling and glittering
like a serpent's in the midst of luxuriance and rankness! Did never
this reflection of thine warn thee that, in human life, the precipices
and abysses would be much farther from our admiration if we were less
inconsiderate, selfish, and vile? I will not however stop thee long,
for thou wert going on quite consistently. As thy great men are
fighters and wranglers, so thy mighty things upon the earth and sea
are troublesome and intractable encumbrances. Thou perceivedst not
what was greater in the former case, neither art thou aware what is
greater in this. Didst thou feel the gentle air that passed us?
_Plato._ I did not, just then.
_Diogenes._ That air, so gentle, so imperceptible to thee, is more
powerful not only than all the creatures that breathe and live by it;
not only than all the oaks of the forest, which it rears in an age and
shatters in a moment; not only than all the monsters of the sea, but
than the sea itself, which it tosses up into foam, and breaks against
every rock in its vast circumference; for it carries in its bosom,
with perfect calm and composure, the incontrollable ocean and the
peopled earth, like an atom of a feather.
To the world's turmoils and pageantries is attracted, not only the
admiration of the populace, but the zeal of the orator, the enthusiasm
of the poet, the investigation of the historian, and the contemplation
of the philosopher: yet how silent and invisible are they in the
depths of air! Do I say in those depths and deserts? No; I say in the
distance of a swallow's flight--at the distance she rises above us,
ere a sentence brief as this could be uttered.
What are its mines and mountains? Fragments welded up and dislocated
by the expansion of water from below; the most part reduced to mud,
the rest to splinters. Afterwards sprang up fire in many places, and
again tore and mangled the mutilated carcass, and still growls over
it.
What are its cities and ramparts, and moles and monuments? Segments of
a fragment, which one man puts together and another throws down. Here
we stumble upon thy great ones at their work. Show me now, if thou
canst, in history, three great warriors, or three great statesmen, who
have acted otherwise than spiteful children.
_Plato._ I will begin to look for them in history when I have
discovered the same number in the philosophers or the poets. A prudent
man searches in his own garden after the plant he wants, before he
casts his eyes over the stalls in Kenkrea or Keramicos.
Returning to your observation on the potency of the air, I am not
ignorant or unmindful of it. May I venture to express my opinion to
you, Diogenes, that the earlier discoverers and distributors of wisdom
(which wisdom lies among us in ruins and remnants, partly distorted
and partly concealed by theological allegory) meant by Jupiter the air
in its agitated state; by Juno the air in its quiescent. These are the
great agents, and therefore called the king and queen of the gods.
Jupiter is denominated by Homer the _compeller of clouds_: Juno
receives them, and remits them in showers to plants and animals.
I may trust you, I hope, O Diogenes?
_Diogenes._ Thou mayest lower the gods in my presence, as safely as
men in the presence of Timon.
_Plato._ I would not lower them: I would exalt them.
_Diogenes._ More foolish and presumptuous still!
_Plato._ Fair words, O Sinopean! I protest to you my aim is truth.
_Diogenes._ I cannot lead thee where of a certainty thou mayest always
find it; but I will tell thee what it is. Truth is a point; the
subtilest and finest; harder than adamant; never to be broken, worn
away, or blunted. Its only bad quality is, that it is sure to hurt
those who touch it; and likely to draw blood, perhaps the life-blood,
of those who press earnestly upon it. Let us away from this narrow
lane skirted with hemlock, and pursue our road again through the wind
and dust toward the _great_ man and the _powerful_. Him I would call
the powerful one who controls the storms of his mind, and turns to
good account the worst accidents of his fortune. The great man, I was
going on to demonstrate, is somewhat more. He must be able to do this,
and he must have an intellect which puts into motion the intellect of
others.
_Plato._ Socrates, then, was your great man.
_Diogenes._ He was indeed; nor can all thou hast attributed to him
ever make me think the contrary. I wish he could have kept a little
more at home, and have thought it as well worth his while to converse
with his own children as with others.
_Plato._ He knew himself born for the benefit of the human race.
_Diogenes._ Those who are born for the benefit of the human race go
but little into it: those who are born for its curse are crowded.
_Plato._ It was requisite to dispel the mists of ignorance and error.
_Diogenes._ Has he done it? What doubt has he elucidated, or what fact
has he established? Although I was but twelve years old and resident
in another city when he died, I have taken some pains in my inquiries
about him from persons of less vanity and less perverseness than his
disciples. He did not leave behind him any true philosopher among
them; any who followed his mode of argumentation, his subjects of
disquisition, or his course of life; any who would subdue the
malignant passions or coerce the looser; any who would abstain from
calumny or from cavil; any who would devote his days to the glory of
his country, or, what is easier and perhaps wiser, to his own
well-founded contentment and well-merited repose. Xenophon, the best
of them, offered up sacrifices, believed in oracles, consulted
soothsayers, turned pale at a jay, and was dysenteric at a magpie.
_Plato._ He had courage at least.
_Diogenes._ His courage was of so strange a quality, that he was
ready, if jay or magpie did not cross him, to fight for Spartan or
Persian. Plato, whom thou esteemest much, and knowest somewhat less,
careth as little for portent and omen as doth Diogenes. What he would
have done for a Persian I cannot say; certain I am that he would have
no more fought for a Spartan than he would for his own father: yet he
mortally hates the man who hath a kinder muse or a better milliner, or
a seat nearer the minion of a king. So much for the two disciples of
Socrates who have acquired the greatest celebrity!
* * * * *
_Plato._ Diogenes! if you must argue or discourse with me, I will
endure your asperity for the sake of your acuteness; but it appears to
me a more philosophical thing to avoid what is insulting and
vexatious, than to breast and brave it.
_Diogenes._ Thou hast spoken well.
_Plato._ It belongs to the vulgar, not to us, to fly from a man's
opinions to his actions, and to stab him in his own house for having
received no wound in the school. One merit you will allow me: I always
keep my temper; which you seldom do.
_Diogenes._ Is mine a good or a bad one?
_Plato._ Now, must I speak sincerely?
_Diogenes._ Dost thou, a philosopher, ask such a question of me, a
philosopher? Ay, sincerely or not at all.
_Plato._ Sincerely as you could wish, I must declare, then, your
temper is the worst in the world.
_Diogenes._ I am much in the right, therefore, not to keep it. Embrace
me: I have spoken now in thy own manner. Because thou sayest the most
malicious things the most placidly, thou thinkest or pretendest thou
art sincere.
_Plato._ Certainly those who are most the masters of their resentments
are likely to speak less erroneously than the passionate and morose.
_Diogenes._ If they would, they might; but the moderate are not
usually the most sincere, for the same circumspection which makes them
moderate makes them likewise retentive of what could give offence:
they are also timid in regard to fortune and favour, and hazard
little. There is no mass of sincerity in any place. What there is must
be picked up patiently, a grain or two at a time; and the season for
it is after a storm, after the overflowing of banks, and bursting of
mounds, and sweeping away of landmarks. Men will always hold something
back; they must be shaken and loosened a little, to make them let go
what is deepest in them, and weightiest and purest.
_Plato._ Shaking and loosening as much about you as was requisite for
the occasion, it became you to demonstrate where and in what manner I
had made Socrates appear less sagacious and less eloquent than he was;
it became you likewise to consider the great difficulty of finding new
thoughts and new expressions for those who had more of them than any
other men, and to represent them in all the brilliancy of their wit
and in all the majesty of their genius. I do not assert that I have
done it; but if I have not, what man has? what man has come so nigh to
it? He who could bring Socrates, or Solon, or Diogenes through a
dialogue, without disparagement, is much nearer in his intellectual
powers to them, than any other is near to him.
_Diogenes._ Let Diogenes alone, and Socrates, and Solon. None of the
three ever occupied his hours in tingeing and curling the tarnished
plumes of prostitute Philosophy, or deemed anything worth his
attention, care, or notice, that did not make men brave and
independent. As thou callest on me to show thee where and in what
manner thou hast misrepresented thy teacher, and as thou seemest to
set an equal value on eloquence and on reasoning, I shall attend to
thee awhile on each of these matters, first inquiring of thee whether
the axiom is Socratic, that it is never becoming to get drunk,
_unless_ in the solemnities of Bacchus?
_Plato._ This god was the discoverer of the vine and of its uses.
_Diogenes._ Is drunkenness one of its uses, or the discovery of a god?
If Pallas or Jupiter hath given us reason, we should sacrifice our
reason with more propriety to Jupiter or Pallas. To Bacchus is due a
libation of wine; the same being his gift, as thou preachest.
Another and a graver question.
Did Socrates teach thee that 'slaves are to be scourged, and by no
means admonished as though they were the children of the master'?
_Plato._ He did not argue upon government.
_Diogenes._ He argued upon humanity, whereon all government is
founded: whatever is beside it is usurpation.
_Plato._ Are slaves then never to be scourged, whatever be their
transgressions and enormities?
_Diogenes._ Whatever they be, they are less than his who reduced them
to this condition.
_Plato._ What! though they murder his whole family?
_Diogenes._ Ay, and poison the public fountain of the city.
What am I saying? and to whom? Horrible as is this crime, and next in
atrocity to parricide, thou deemest it a lighter one than stealing a
fig or grape. The stealer of these is scourged by thee; the sentence
on the poisoner is to cleanse out the receptacle. There is, however, a
kind of poisoning which, to do thee justice, comes before thee with
all its horrors, and which thou wouldst punish capitally, even in such
a sacred personage as an aruspex or diviner: I mean the poisoning by
incantation. I, and my whole family, my whole race, my whole city, may
bite the dust in agony from a truss of henbane in the well; and little
harm done forsooth! Let an idle fool set an image of me in wax before
the fire, and whistle and caper to it, and purr and pray, and chant a
hymn to Hecate while it melts, entreating and imploring her that I may
melt as easily--and thou wouldst, in thy equity and holiness, strangle
him at the first stave of his psalmody.
_Plato._ If this is an absurdity, can you find another?
_Diogenes._ Truly, in reading thy book, I doubted at first, and for a
long continuance, whether thou couldst have been serious; and whether
it were not rather a satire on those busy-bodies who are incessantly
intermeddling in other people's affairs. It was only on the
protestation of thy intimate friends that I believed thee to have
written it in earnest. As for thy question, it is idle to stoop and
pick out absurdities from a mass of inconsistency and injustice; but
another and another I could throw in, and another and another
afterward, from any page in the volume. Two bare, staring falsehoods
lift their beaks one upon the other, like spring frogs. Thou sayest
that no punishment decreed by the laws tendeth to evil. What! not if
immoderate? not if partial? Why then repeal any penal statute while
the subject of its animadversion exists? In prisons the less criminal
are placed among the more criminal, the inexperienced in vice together
with the hardened in it. This is part of the punishment, though it
precedes the sentence; nay, it is often inflicted on those whom the
judges acquit: the law, by allowing it, does it.
The next is, that he who is punished by the laws is the better for it,
however the less depraved. What! if anteriorly to the sentence he
lives and converses with worse men, some of whom console him by
deadening the sense of shame, others by removing the apprehension of
punishment? Many laws as certainly make men bad, as bad men make many
laws; yet under thy regimen they take us from the bosom of the nurse,
turn the meat about upon the platter, pull the bed-clothes off, make
us sleep when we would wake, and wake when we would sleep, and never
cease to rummage and twitch us, until they see us safe landed at the
grave. We can do nothing (but be poisoned) with impunity. What is
worst of all, we must marry certain relatives and connexions, be they
distorted, blear-eyed, toothless, carbuncled, with hair (if any)
eclipsing the reddest torch of Hymen, and with a hide outrivalling in
colour and plaits his trimmest saffron robe. At the mention of this
indeed, friend Plato, even thou, although resolved to stand out of
harm's way, beginnest to make a wry mouth, and findest it difficult to
pucker and purse it up again, without an astringent store of moral
sentences. Hymen is truly no acquaintance of thine. We know the
delicacies of love which thou wouldst reserve for the gluttony of
heroes and the fastidiousness of philosophers. Heroes, like gods, must
have their own way; but against thee and thy confraternity of elders I
would turn the closet-key, and your mouths might water over, but your
tongues should never enter those little pots of comfiture. Seriously,
you who wear embroidered slippers ought to be very cautious of
treading in the mire. Philosophers should not only live the simplest
lives, but should also use the plainest language. Poets, in employing
magnificent and sonorous words, teach philosophy the better by thus
disarming suspicion that the finest poetry contains and conveys the
finest philosophy. You will never let any man hold his right station:
you would rank Solon with Homer for poetry. This is absurd. The only
resemblance is in both being eminently wise. Pindar, too, makes even
the cadences of his dithyrambics keep time to the flute of Reason. My
tub, which holds fifty-fold thy wisdom, would crack at the
reverberation of thy voice.
_Plato._ Farewell.
* * * * *
_Diogenes._ I mean that every one of thy whimsies hath been picked up
somewhere by thee in thy travels; and each of them hath been rendered
more weak and puny by its place of concealment in thy closet. What
thou hast written on the immortality of the soul goes rather to prove
the immortality of the body; and applies as well to the body of a
weasel or an eel as to the fairer one of Agathon or of Aster. Why not
at once introduce a new religion, since religions keep and are
relished in proportion as they are salted with absurdity, inside and
out? and all of them must have one great crystal of it for the centre;
but Philosophy pines and dies unless she drinks limpid water. When
Pherecydes and Pythagoras felt in themselves the majesty of
contemplation, they spurned the idea that flesh and bones and arteries
should confer it: and that what comprehends the past and the future
should sink in a moment and be annihilated for ever. 'No,' cried they,
'the power of thinking is no more in the brain than in the hair,
although the brain may be the instrument on which it plays. It is not
corporeal, it is not of this world; its existence is eternity, its
residence is infinity.' I forbear to discuss the rationality of their
belief, and pass on straightway to thine; if, indeed, I am to consider
as one, belief and doctrine.
_Plato._ As you will.
_Diogenes._ I should rather, then, regard these things as mere
ornaments; just as many decorate their apartments with lyres and
harps, which they themselves look at from the couch, supinely
complacent, and leave for visitors to admire and play on.
_Plato._ I foresee not how you can disprove my argument on the
immortality of the soul, which, being contained in the best of my
dialogues, and being often asked for among my friends, I carry with
me.
_Diogenes._ At this time?
_Plato._ Even so.
_Diogenes._ Give me then a certain part of it for my perusal.
_Plato._ Willingly.
_Diogenes._ Hermes and Pallas! I wanted but a cubit of it, or at most
a fathom, and thou art pulling it out by the plethron.
_Plato._ This is the place in question.
_Diogenes._ Read it.
_Plato._ [_Reads._] 'Sayest thou not that death is the opposite of
life, and that they spring the one from the other?' '_Yes._' 'What
springs then from the living?' '_The dead._' 'And what from the dead?'
'_The living._' 'Then all things alive spring from the dead.'
_Diogenes._ Why the repetition? but go on.
_Plato._ [_Reads._] 'Souls therefore exist after death in the infernal
regions.'
_Diogenes._ Where is the _therefore_? where is it even as to
_existence_? As to the _infernal regions_, there is nothing that
points toward a proof, or promises an indication. Death neither
springs from life, nor life from death. Although death is the
inevitable consequence of life, if the observation and experience of
ages go for anything, yet nothing shows us, or ever hath signified,
that life comes from death. Thou mightest as well say that a
barley-corn dies before the germ of another barley-corn grows up from
it, than which nothing is more untrue; for it is only the protecting
part of the germ that perishes, when its protection is no longer
necessary. The consequence, that souls exist after death, cannot be
drawn from the corruption of the body, even if it were demonstrable
that out of this corruption a live one could rise up. Thou hast not
said that the soul is among those dead things which living things must
spring from; thou hast not said that a living soul produces a dead
soul, or that a dead soul produces a living one.
_Plato._ No, indeed.
_Diogenes._ On my faith, thou hast said, however, things no less
inconsiderate, no less inconsequent, no less unwise; and this very
thing must be said and proved, to make thy argument of any value. Do
dead men beget children?
_Plato._ I have not said it.
_Diogenes._ Thy argument implies it.
_Plato._ These are high mysteries, and to be approached with
reverence.
_Diogenes._ Whatever we cannot account for is in the same predicament.
We may be gainers by being ignorant if we can be thought mysterious.
It is better to shake our heads and to let nothing out of them, than
to be plain and explicit in matters of difficulty. I do not mean in
confessing our ignorance or our imperfect knowledge of them, but in
clearing them up perspicuously: for, if we answer with ease, we may
haply be thought good-natured, quick, communicative; never deep,
never sagacious; not very defective possibly in our intellectual
faculties, yet unequal and chinky, and liable to the probation of
every clown's knuckle.
_Plato._ The brightest of stars appear the most unsteady and tremulous
in their light; not from any quality inherent in themselves, but from
the vapours that float below, and from the imperfection of vision in
the surveyor.
_Diogenes._ Draw thy robe round thee; let the folds fall gracefully,
and look majestic. That sentence is an admirable one; but not for me.
I want sense, not stars. What then? Do no vapours float below the
others? and is there no imperfection in the vision of those who look
at _them_, if they are the same men, and look the next moment? We must
move on: I shall follow the dead bodies, and the benighted driver of
their fantastic bier, close and keen as any hyena.
_Plato._ Certainly, O Diogenes, you excel me in elucidations and
similes: mine was less obvious.
* * * * *
_Diogenes._ I know the respect thou bearest to the dogly character,
and can attribute to nothing else the complacency with which thou hast
listened to me since I released thy cloak. If ever the Athenians, in
their inconstancy, should issue a decree to deprive me of the
appellation they have conferred on me, rise up, I pray thee, in my
defence, and protest that I have not merited so severe a mulct.
Something I do deserve at thy hands; having supplied thee, first with
a store of patience, when thou wert going without any about thee,
although it is the readiest viaticum and the heartiest sustenance of
human life; and then with weapons from this tub, wherewith to drive
the importunate cock before thee out of doors again.
ALFIERI AND SALOMON THE FLORENTINE JEW