SHELLEY’S PROSE WORKS
VOL. II.
_In Five Volumes, crown 8vo, cloth boards_, 3s. 6d. _each_.
THE COMPLETE WORKS IN VERSE AND PROSE OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
Edited, Prefaced, and Annotated by
RICHARD HERNE SHEPHERD.
=Poetical Works=, in Three Volumes.
Vol. I. Introduction by the Editor; Posthumous Fragments
of Margaret Nicholson; Shelley’s Correspondence with
Stockdale; The Wandering Jew (the only complete version);
Queen Mab, with the Notes; Alastor, and other Poems;
Rosalind and Helen; Prometheus Unbound; Adonais, &c.
Vol. II. Laon and Cythna (as originally published,
instead of the emasculated “Revolt of Islam”); The Cenci;
Julian and Maddalo (from Shelley’s manuscript); Swellfoot
the Tyrant (from the copy in the Dyce Library at South
Kensington); The Witch of Atlas; Epipsychidion; Hellas.
Vol. III. Posthumous Poems, published by Mrs. Shelley
in 1824 and 1839; The Masque of Anarchy (from Shelley’s
manuscript); and other pieces not brought together in the
ordinary editions.
=Prose Works=, in Two Volumes.
Vol. I. The two Romances of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne; the
Dublin and Marlow Pamphlets; A Refutation of Deism; Letters
to Leigh Hunt, and some Minor Writings and Fragments.
Vol. II. Essays: Letters from Abroad; Translations and
Fragments, edited by Mrs. Shelley, and first published
in 1840, with the addition of some Minor Pieces of great
interest and rarity, including one recently discovered by
Professor Dowden. With a Bibliography of Shelley, and an
exhaustive Index of the Prose Works.
CHATTO & WINDUS, 111 St. Martin’s Lane W.C.
THE PROSE WORKS
OF
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
_FROM THE ORIGINAL EDITIONS_
EDITED, PREFACED, AND ANNOTATED
BY
RICHARD HERNE SHEPHERD
_IN TWO VOLUMES_
VOL. II
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1897
_Printed by_ Ballantyne, Hanson & Co
_At the Ballantyne Press_
[Decoration]
CONTENTS.
PAGE
A DEFENCE OF POETRY 1
ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS,
AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS 39
ON THE SYMPOSIUM 48
THE BANQUET 51
ION; OR, OF THE ILIAD 114
MENEXENUS; OR, THE FUNERAL ORATION 132
FRAGMENTS FROM THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 136
ON A PASSAGE IN CRITO 145
THE ASSASSINS 147
ON THE PUNISHMENT OF DEATH 167
ON LIFE 174
ON A FUTURE STATE 180
SPECULATIONS ON METAPHYSICS:--
_The Mind_ 186
_What Metaphysics are.
Errors in the usual Methods of Considering them_ 189
_Difficulty of Analysing the Human Mind_ 190
_How the Analysis should be carried on_ 191
_Catalogue of the Phenomena of Dreams,
as connecting Sleeping and Waking_ 191
FRAGMENTS:--
_Speculations on Morals_:--
_Plan of a Treatise on Morals_ 194
_On the Nature of Virtue_ 196
_Benevolence_ 197
_Justice_ 201
_Moral Science consists in considering the Difference,
not the Resemblance, of Persons_ 204
GHOST STORIES 208
_Fragment from Journal_ 215
LETTERS FROM ITALY:--
_To Thomas Love Peacock_ 221
_To the Same_ 223
_To the Same_ 227
_To the Same_ 228
_To Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne_ 229
_To William Godwin_ 231
_To Mrs. Shelley_ 233
_To the Same_ 236
_To the Same_ 239
_To Thomas Love Peacock_ 241
_To the Same_ 244
_To the Same_ 249
_To the Same_ 255
_To the Same_ 259
_To the Same_ 268
_To the Same_ 277
_To the Same_ 286
_To Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne_ 290
_To Thomas Love Peacock_ 291
_To Leigh Hunt_ 294
_To Mrs. Gisborne_ 296
_To Henry Reveley_ 299
_To Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne_ 301
_To the Same_ 302
_To Mrs. Gisborne_ 305
_To Mr. John Gisborne_ 307
_To Henry Reveley_ 309
_To the Same_ 311
_To Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne_ 312
_To Mr. John Gisborne_ 313
_To Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne_ 314
_To the Same_ 314
_To the Same_ 315
_To the Same_ 317
_To Mrs. Shelley_ 319
_To the Same_ 321
_To the Editor of the “Quarterly Review”_ 322
_To Mr. John Gisborne_ 324
_To Henry Reveley_ 325
_To the Same_ 326
_To Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne_ 326
_To Mr. John Gisborne_ 327
_To Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne_ 329
_To the Same_ 329
_To Mrs. Shelley_ 330
_To the Same_ 331
_To the Same_ 332
_To the Same_ 334
_To the Same_ 341
_To Mrs. Shelley_ 342
_To the Same_ 342
_To Horatio Smith_ 347
_To Mr. John Gisborne_ 350
_To the Same_ 352
_To ----_ 356
_To Mrs. Shelley_ 358
_To Horatio Smith_ 359
_To ----_ 361
_To Mrs. Williams_ 363
_To Mrs. Shelley_ 363
MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS AND LETTERS:--
_A Letter to Lord Ellenborough_ 369
_Prince Alexy Haimatoff_ 387
THE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SHELLEY 397
INDEX TO THE PROSE WORKS 405
[Decoration]
A DEFENCE OF POETRY.
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action,
which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered
as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another,
however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts
so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them,
as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the
principle of its own integrity. The one is the τὸ ποιειν, or the
principle of synthesis, and has for its object those forms which are
common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the
τὸ λογιζειν, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the
relations of things simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in
their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which
conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of
quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of
those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the
differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to
imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit,
as the shadow to the substance.
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be “the expression of the
imagination:” and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an
instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions
are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an
Æolian lyre, which move it by their motion to ever-changing melody.
But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps within
all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in a lyre, and produces
not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds
and motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. It is
as if the lyre could accommodate its chords to the motions of that
which strikes them, in a determined proportion of sound; even as the
musician can accommodate his voice to the sound of the lyre. A child
at play by itself will express its delight by its voice and motions;
and every inflexion of tone and gesture will bear exact relation to a
corresponding anti-type in the pleasurable impressions which awakened
it; it will be the reflected image of that impression; and as the lyre
trembles and sounds after the wind has died away, so the child seeks,
by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to
prolong also a consciousness of the cause. In relation to the objects
which delight a child, these expressions are what poetry is to higher
objects. The savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to
years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in
a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or
pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those
objects and his apprehension of them. Man in society, with all his
passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and
pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented
treasure of expression; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts
become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the
picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony. The
social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its elements
society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two
human beings coexist; the future is contained within the present as
the plant within the seed; and equality, diversity, unity, contrast,
mutual dependence, become the principles alone capable of affording the
motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to
action, inasmuch as he is social; and constitute pleasure in sensation,
virtue in sentiment, beauty in art, truth in reasoning, and love in the
intercourse of kind. Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe
a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the
objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being
subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss
those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into
the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner
in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms.
In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural
objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm
or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the
same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song,
in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of
natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to
each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer
and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any
other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been called
taste by modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art, observes
an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which
this highest delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently
marked, as that its gradations should be sensible, except in those
instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation
to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation
between this highest pleasure and its cause) is very great. Those in
whom it exists to excess are poets, in the most universal sense of
the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they
express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds,
communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication
from the community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is,
it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates
their apprehension, until words, which represent them, become, through
time, signs for portions or classes of thought, instead of pictures
of integral thoughts; and then, if no new poets should arise to
create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganised,
language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.
These similitudes or relations are finely said by Bacon to be “the
same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the
world;”[1]--and he considers the faculty which perceives them as
the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancy of
society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is
poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful,
in a word, the good which exists in the relation subsisting, first
between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and
expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself
the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the
distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely
the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors
of laws and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the
arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity
with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the
agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all
original religions are allegorical or susceptible of allegory, and,
like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to
the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were
called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators or prophets: a
poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not
only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws
according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds
the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower
and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets
in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as
surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence
of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy,
rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in
the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his
conceptions, time and place and number are not. The grammatical forms
which express the moods of time, and the difference of persons, and
the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest
poetry without injuring it as poetry; and the choruses of Æschylus, and
the book of Job, and Dante’s _Paradiso_, would afford, more than any
other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did
not forbid citation. The creations of sculpture, painting, and music,
are illustrations still more decisive.
Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are
all the instruments and materials of poetry; they may be called poetry
by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of
the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those
arrangements of language, and especially metrical language, which are
created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within
the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself
of language, which is a more direct representation of the actions and
passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various
and delicate combinations, than colour, form, or motion, and is more
plastic and obedient to the control of that faculty of which it is the
creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and
has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments,
and conditions of art, have relations among each other, which limit and
interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a mirror
which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of
which both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors,
painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great
masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have
employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never
equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term; as two
performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar
and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religion, so long
as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of poets in the
restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we
deduct the celebrity which their flattery of the gross opinions of the
vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged to them
in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.
We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that
art which is the most familiar and the most perfect expression of
the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle
still narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and
unmeasured language; for the popular division into prose and verse is
inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and
towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of
those relations has always been found connected with a perception of
the order of the relations of thought. Hence the language of poets
has ever affected a sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of
sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less
indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words
themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity
of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that
you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as
seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a
poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no
flower--and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.
An observation of the regular mode of the recurrence of harmony in
the language of poetical minds, together with its relation to music,
produced metre, or a certain system of traditional forms of harmony
and language. Yet it is by no means essential that a poet should
accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony,
which is its spirit, be observed. The practice is indeed convenient
and popular, and to be preferred, especially in such composition as
includes much action: but every great poet must inevitably innovate
upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his
peculiar versification. The distinction between poets and prose-writers
is a vulgar error. The distinction between philosophers and poets
has been anticipated. Plato was essentially a poet--the truth and
splendour of his imagery, and the melody of his language, are the most
intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the harmony of
the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle
a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore
to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under
determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style. Cicero sought to
imitate the cadence of his periods, but with little success. Bacon
was a poet.[2] His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm, which
satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his
philosophy satisfies the intellect; it is a strain which distends, and
then bursts the circumference of the reader’s mind, and pours itself
forth together with it into the universal element with which it has
perpetual sympathy. All the authors of revolutions in opinion are not
only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words
unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in
the life of truth; but as their periods are harmonious and rhythmical,
and contain in themselves the elements of verse; being the echo of
the eternal music. Nor are those supreme poets, who have employed
traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their
subjects, less capable of perceiving and teaching the truth of things,
than those who have omitted that form. Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton
(to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very
loftiest power.
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There
is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time,
place, circumstance, cause, and effect; the other is the creation
of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as
existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all
other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period
of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again
recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of
a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should
invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and
wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence
epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the
poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures
and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which
makes beautiful that which is distorted.
The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition
as a whole being a poem. A single sentence may be considered as a
whole, though it may be found in the midst of a series of unassimilated
portions; a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable
thought. And thus all the great historians, Herodotus, Plutarch, Livy,
were poets; and although the plan of these writers, especially that
of Livy, restrained them from developing this faculty in its highest
degree, they made copious and ample amends for their subjection, by
filling all the interstices of their subjects with living images.
Having determined what is poetry, and who are poets, let us proceed to
estimate its effects upon society.
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits upon which it
falls open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its
delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor
their auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts
in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness;
and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure
the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and splendour of
their union. Even in modern times, no living poet ever arrived at the
fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet,
belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it
must be empannelled by time from the selectest of the wise of many
generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings
to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men
entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are
moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. The poems of Homer
and his contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were
the elements of that social system which is the column upon which
all succeeding civilisation has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal
perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those
who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to
Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship,
patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled
to their depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the
auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such
great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and
from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their
admiration. Nor let it be objected, that these characters are remote
from moral perfection, and that they are by no means to be considered
as edifying patterns for general imitation. Every epoch, under names
more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the
naked idol of the worship of a semibarbarous age; and Self-deceit is
the veiled image of unknown evil, before which luxury and satiety lie
prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the
temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover
without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or
dramatic personage is understood to wear them around his soul, as he
may the ancient armour or modern uniform around his body; whilst it is
easy to conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the
internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture,
but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very
disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it
is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves
through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the
highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in
its naked truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of
costume, habit, &c., be not necessary to temper this planetary music
for mortal ears.
The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon
a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the
moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which
poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of
civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that
men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one
another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and
enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from
the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if
they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the
impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the
minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that
gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and
actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is love; or
a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with
the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively;
he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the
pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great
instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to
the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference
of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new
delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their
own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and
interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens
the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same
manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A poet therefore would do ill to
embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those
of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate
in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting
the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but
imperfectly, he would resign a glory in the participation of the cause.
There was little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should
have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne
of their widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though
great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have
frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is
diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to
advert to this purpose.
Homer and the cyclic poets were followed at a certain interval by the
dramatic and lyrical poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously
with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the
poetical faculty; architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture,
philosophy, and we may add, the forms of civil life. For although the
scheme of Athenian society was deformed by many imperfections which
the poetry existing in chivalry and Christianity has erased from the
habits and institutions of modern Europe; yet never at any other
period has so much energy, beauty and virtue, been developed; never was
blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined and rendered subject
to the will of man, or that will less repugnant to the dictates of
the beautiful and the true, as during the century which preceded the
death of Socrates. Of no other epoch in the history of our species
have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the
divinity in man. But it is poetry alone, in form, in action, and in
language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others,
and the storehouse of examples to everlasting time. For written poetry
existed at that epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an
idle inquiry to demand which gave and which received the light, which
all, as from a common focus, have scattered over the darkest periods of
succeeding time. We know no more of cause and effect than a constant
conjunction of events: poetry is ever found to co-exist with whatever
other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. I appeal
to what has already been established to distinguish between the cause
and the effect.
It was at the period here adverted to, that the drama had its birth;
and however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those
few great specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved
to us, it is indisputable that the art itself never was understood
or practised according to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens.
For the Athenians employed language, action, music, painting, the
dance, and religious institutions, to produce a common effect in the
representation of the highest idealisms of passion and of power; each
division in the art was made perfect in its kind by artists of the
most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful proportion
and unity one towards the other. On the modern stage a few only of the
elements capable of expressing the image of the poet’s conception
are employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and
music and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they
are the fit accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity.
Religious institution has indeed been usually banished from the
stage. Our system of divesting the actor’s face of a mask, on which
the many expressions appropriated to his dramatic character might be
moulded into one permanent and unchanging expression, is favourable
only to a partial and inharmonious effect; it is fit for nothing but
a monologue, where all the attention may be directed to some great
master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of blending comedy
with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, is
undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy should
be as in King Lear, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the
intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour
of King Lear against the Œdipus Tyrannus or the Agamemnon, or, if you
will, the trilogies with which they are connected; unless the intense
power of the choral poetry, especially that of the latter, should be
considered as restoring the equilibrium. King Lear, if it can sustain
this comparison, may be judged to be the most perfect specimen of the
dramatic art existing in the world; in spite of the narrow conditions
to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance of the philosophy
of the drama which has prevailed in modern Europe. Calderon, in his
religious Autos, has attempted to fulfil some of the high conditions
of dramatic representation neglected by Shakespeare; such as the
establishing a relation between the drama and religion, and the
accommodating them to music and dancing; but he omits the observation
of conditions still more important, and more is lost than gained by the
substitution of the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a
distorted superstition for the living impersonations of the truth of
human passions.
But I digress.--The connexion of scenic exhibitions with the
improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been universally
recognised: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry, in
its most perfect and universal form, has been found to be connected
with good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been
imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in
its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the
periods of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not
corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of moral cause and
effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its
perfection, ever co-existed with the moral and intellectual greatness
of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which
the spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance,
stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one
feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and
would become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains
and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the
capacity of that by which they are conceived, the good affections are
strengthened by pity, indignation, terror and sorrow; and an exalted
calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror
and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence
of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
choice. In the drama of the highest order there is little food for
censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon
that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express
poetry, is a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the
brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the
simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and
beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the
power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathises with
that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great
masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment
of the kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak
attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral
truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some
gross vice or weakness, with which the author, in common with his
auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical and
domestic drama. Addison’s “Cato” is a specimen of the one; and would it
were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such purposes
poetry cannot be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever
unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. And thus
we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative
in a singular degree; they affect sentiment and passion, which,
divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite.
The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the
drama is the reign of Charles II., when all forms in which poetry had
been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly
power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating an age
unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle pervades all
the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed
upon them. Comedy loves its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour;
we laugh from self-complacency and triumph, instead of pleasure;
malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic merriment;
we hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy
against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very veil which it
assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a monster for which the
corruption of society for ever brings forth new food, which it devours
in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of
expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any
other, the connexion of poetry and social good is more observable
in the drama than in whatever other form. And it is indisputable
that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded
with the highest dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the
extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is
a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies
which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Macchiavelli says of
political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men
should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. And
this is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all
language, institution and form require not only to be produced but to
be sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the
divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.
Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of
the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so many symbols of
the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The
bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of
Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious
reign. Their poetry is intensely melodious; like the odour of the
tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness;
whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of June,
which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and
adds a quickening and harmonising spirit of its own which endows the
sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and
erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness
in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and
institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer.
Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it,
to which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility
to the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in
the writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former, especially, has
clothed sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. The
superiority in these to succeeding writers consists in the presence of
those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not
in the absence of those which are connected with the external: their
incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It
is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which
their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they were poets,
but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with
any plausibility as connected with the corruption of their age. Had
that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to
pleasure, passion, and natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an
imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. For
the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure;
and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the
intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralysing
venom, through the affections into the very appetites, until all become
a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. At the approach of such
a period, poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are
the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps
of Astræa, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates all
the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the
light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true
can have place in an evil time. It will readily be confessed that
those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who
were delighted with the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel,
and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must
utterly have destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can
ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely
disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached
to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence
is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life
of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at
once of its own and of social renovation. And let us not circumscribe
the effects of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the
sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have perceived
the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and
isolated portions: those who are more finely organised, or born in a
happier age, may recognise them as episodes to that great poem, which
all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built
up since the beginning of the world.
The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient
Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have
been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear
to have considered the Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the
selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from
creating in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture, any
thing which might bear a particular relation to their own condition,
whilst it should bear a general one to the universal constitution of
the world. But we judge from partial evidence, and we judge perhaps
partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have
been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high
sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are
as a mist of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding
truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry.
Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of
the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The
institutions also, and the religion of Rome, were less poetical than
those of Greece, as the shadow is less vivid than the substance. Hence
poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection
of political and domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in
its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic, they
contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates
the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of
Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of
the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the republic to make peace with
Hannibal, after the battle of Cannæ, were not the consequences of a
refined calculation of the probable personal advantage to result from
such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once
the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination
beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according
to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward everlasting
fame. These things are not the less poetry, _quia carent vate sacro_.
They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the
memories of men. The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the
theatre of everlasting generations with their harmony.
At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled
the circle of its evolutions. And the world would have fallen into
utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the
authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion,
who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived;
which, copied into the imaginations of men, became as generals to the
bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign to the present
purpose to touch upon the evil produced by these systems: except that
we protest, on the ground of the principles already established, that
no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry they contain.
It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
Isaiah, had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
of this extraordinary person are all instinct with the most vivid
poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a
certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded
upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had
distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and
became the object of the worship of the civilised world. Here it is to
be confessed that “Light seems to thicken,” and
“The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.”[3]
But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of
this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing
itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its
yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time. Listen to the music,
unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind,
nourishing its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus, and the mythology and
institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the
darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory,
and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is
an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian
doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of
evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of
the poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism and
superstition. Men, from causes too intricate to be here discussed, had
become insensible and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and
yet they were its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others:
but fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud, characterised a race amongst
whom no one was to be found capable of _creating_ in form, language,
or institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society are not
justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected
with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation which
could dissolve it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who
cannot distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies
have been incorporated into our popular religion.
It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of
the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest themselves. The
principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his
Republic, as the theoretical rule of the mode in which the materials of
pleasure and of power, produced by the common skill and labour of human
beings, ought to be distributed among them. The limitations of this
rule were asserted by him to be determined only by the sensibility of
each, or the utility to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines
of Timæus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual system
of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the
future condition of man. Jesus divulged the sacred and eternal truths
contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract
purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the
poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations
with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the
figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions. The
result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included
in it; for it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can
supersede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of that
which it supersedes. The abolition of personal and domestic slavery,
and the emancipation of women from a great part of the degrading
restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences of these events.
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political
hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The freedom
of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion,
the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues
of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had
walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled
by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and
proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was
created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation itself is
poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument
of their art: “Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo scrisse.” The Provençal
Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells,
which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is
in the grief of love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming
a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous
to explain how the gentleness and elevation of mind connected with
these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous
and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world
of self. Dante understood the secret things of love even more than
Petrarch. His _Vita Nuova_ is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of
sentiment and language: it is the idealised history of that period,
and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His
apotheosis to Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love
and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have
ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious
imagination of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed
the judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the
“Divina Commedia,” in the measure of the admiration which they accord
to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn
of everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone
of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest
writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the
caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms
and superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have
celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it were trophies in the
human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force. The
true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human kind
is distributed, has become less misunderstood; and if the error which
confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has
been partially recognised in the opinions and institutions of modern
Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was
the law, and poets the prophets.
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the
stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The
distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton
have idealised, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great
poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult
question to determine how far they were conscious of the distinction
which must have subsisted in their minds between their own creeds
and that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark the
full extent of it by placing Riphæus, whom Virgil calls _justissimus
unus_, in Paradise, and observing a most poetical caprice in his
distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton’s poem contains
within itself a philosophical refutation of that system of which, by a
strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support.
Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of
Satan as expressed in “Paradise Lost.” It is a mistake to suppose that
he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of
evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement
of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things
are evil; and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in
a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one
subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the victor.
Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one
who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent
in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security
of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his
enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a
perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating
him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular
creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as to have alleged no
superiority of moral virtue to his god over his devil. And this bold
neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the
supremacy of Milton’s genius. He mingled as it were the elements of
human nature as colours upon a single palette, and arranged them in the
composition of his great picture according to the laws of epic truth,
that is, according to the laws of that principle by which a series
of actions of the external universe and of intelligent and ethical
beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding generations
of mankind. The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon
modern mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have
added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen
and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed
in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly
forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second
poet, the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible
relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in
which he lived, and of the ages which followed it: developing itself
in correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the
wings of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and
Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the
fame of an imitator, even whilst he created anew all that he copied;
and none among the flock of mock-birds, though their notes are sweet,
Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Smyrnæus, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius,
or Claudian, have sought even to fulfil a single condition of epic
truth. Milton was the third epic poet. For if the title of epic in its
highest sense be refused to the Æneid, still less can it be conceded to
the Orlando Furioso, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiad, or the Fairy
Queen.
Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the ancient religion
of the civilised world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably
in the same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed
worship of modern Europe. The one preceded and the other followed the
Reformation at almost equal intervals. Dante was the first religious
reformer, and Luther surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony,
than in the boldness of his censures, of papal usurpation. Dante was
the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language, in
itself music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms.
He was the congregator of those great spirits who presided over the
resurrection of learning; the Lucifer of that starry flock which in the
thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as from a heaven,
into the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are instinct
with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable
thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and
pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All high
poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks
potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked
beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great poem is a fountain for
ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one
person and one age has exhausted all of its divine effluence which
their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another
succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an
unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio, was characterised by a revival of painting, sculpture,
and architecture. Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the
superstructure of English literature is based upon the materials of
Italian invention.
But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of
poetry and its influence on society. Be it enough to have pointed out
the effects of poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon
their own and all succeeding times.
But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners
and mechanists, on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise
of the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that
of reason is more useful. Let us examine, as the grounds of this
distinction, what is here meant by utility. Pleasure or good, in a
general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and
intelligent being seeks, and in which, when found, it acquiesces. There
are two kinds of pleasure, one durable, universal, and permanent; the
other transitory and particular. Utility may either express the means
of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense, whatever
strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and
adds spirit to sense, is useful. But a narrower meaning may be assigned
to the word utility, confining it to express that which banishes the
importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with
security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition,
and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as
may consist with the motives of personal advantage.
Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have their
appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets, and
copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life. They
make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest value,
so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of the
inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the superior
ones. But while the sceptic destroys gross superstitions, let him spare
to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced, the eternal
truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist
abridges, and the political economist combines, labour, let them beware
that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first
principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have
in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
want. They have exemplified the saying, “To him that hath, more shall
be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be
taken away.”[4] The rich have become richer, and the poor have become
poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and
Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must
ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition
involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable
defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the
inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior
portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are
often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good.
Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy
delights by affording a shadow of that pleasure which exists in pain.
This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from
the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than
the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the saying, “It is better
to go to the house of mourning than to the house of mirth.”[5] Not
that this highest species of pleasure is necessarily linked with pain.
The delight of love and friendship, the ecstasy of the admiration of
nature, the joy of the perception and still more of the creation of
poetry, is often wholly unalloyed.
The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
poetical philosophers.
The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,[6] and their
disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled
to the gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree
of moral and intellectual improvement which the world would have
exhibited, had they never lived. A little more nonsense would have
been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women,
and children, burnt as heretics. We might not at this moment have been
congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain.
But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the
moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio,
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed;
if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew
poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek
literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture
had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the
ancient world had been extinguished together with its belief. The human
mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements,
have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and that
application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society,
which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the
inventive and creative faculty itself.
We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know
how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economical
knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the
produce which it multiplies. The poetry, in these systems of thought,
is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes.
There is no want of knowledge respecting what is wisest and best in
morals, government, and political economy, or at least what is wiser
and better than what men now practise and endure. But we let “_I dare
not_ wait upon _I would_, like the poor cat in the adage.” We want the
creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous
impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life:
our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we
can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged
the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for
want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of
the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains
himself a slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a
degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty, which
is the basis of all knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all
invention for abridging and combining labour, to the exasperation of
the inequality of mankind? From what other cause has it arisen that
the discoveries which should have lightened, have added a weight to
the curse imposed on Adam? Poetry, and the principle of Self, of which
money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of the world.
The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold; by one it creates
new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it
engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according
to a certain rhythm and order, which may be called the beautiful and
the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at
periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle,
the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity
of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.
The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same
time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that
from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren
world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree
of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all
things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture
of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendour of unfaded
beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were virtue,
love, patriotism, friendship,--what were the scenery of this beautiful
universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of
the grave--and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not
ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the
owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not
like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination
of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest
poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal,
which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to
transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour
of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach
or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original
purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the
results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the
decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated
to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of
the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether
it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are
produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay recommended by
critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful
observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of the
spaces between their suggestions, by the intertexture of conventional
expressions; a necessity only imposed by the limitedness of the
poetical faculty itself: for Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a
whole before he executed it in portions. We have his own authority also
for the muse having “dictated” to him the “unpremeditated song.” And
let this be an answer to those who would allege the fifty-six various
readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso. Compositions so
produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. The instinct and
intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in the
plastic and pictorial arts: a great statue or picture grows under the
power of the artist as a child in the mother’s womb; and the very mind
which directs the hands in formation, is incapable of accounting to
itself for the origin, the gradations, or the media of the process.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling, sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding
our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing
unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that
even in the desire and the regret they leave, there cannot but be
pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is
as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own;
but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the
morning calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled
sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being are
experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility
and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced
by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue,
love, patriotism, and friendship, is essentially linked with such
emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to
a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits
of the most refined organisation, but they can colour all that they
combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a
trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the
enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced
those emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the
past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful
in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
those with whom their sisters abide--abide, because there is no portal
of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into
the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of
the divinity in man.
Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that
which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure,
eternity and change; it subdues to union, under its light yoke, all
irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every
form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous
sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret
alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from
death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world,
and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its
forms.
All things exist as they are perceived; at least in relation to the
percipient.
“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”[7]
But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the
accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own
figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene
of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It
makes us the inhabitant of a world to which the familiar world is a
chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions
and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of
familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels
us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we
know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in
our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.
It justifies the bold and true word of Tasso: _Non merita nome di
creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta._
A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure,
virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best,
the wisest, and the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let time
be challenged to declare whether the fame of any other institutor of
human life be comparable to that of a poet. That he is the wisest,
the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is a poet, is equally
incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless
virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we would look into the
interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions,
as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet
inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confirm rather
than destroy the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration
of popular breath, and usurping and uniting in our own persons the
incompatible characters of accuser, witness, judge and executioner,
let us decide without trial, testimony, or form, that certain
motives of those who are “there sitting where we dare not soar,” are
reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was
a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that
Bacon was a speculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was
a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject
to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great
names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have
been dust in the balance; if their sins “were as scarlet, they are now
white as snow:” they have been washed in the blood of the mediator
and redeemer, time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations
of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary
calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how little is, as it
appears--or appears, as it is, look to your own motives, and judge not,
lest ye be judged.
Poetry, as has been said, differs in this respect from logic, that
it is not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind,
and that its birth and recurrence have no necessary connexion with
the consciousness or will. It is presumptuous to determine that these
are the necessary conditions of all mental causation, when mental
effects are experienced insusceptible of being referred to them. The
frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is obvious to suppose,
may produce in the mind a habit of order and harmony correlative
with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. But in
the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being
durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of
the influences under which others habitually live. But as he is more
delicately organised than other men, and sensible to pain and pleasure,
both his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will
avoid the one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to
this difference. And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he
neglects to observe the circumstances under which these objects of
universal pursuit and flight have disguised themselves in one another’s
garments.
But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty,
envy, revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have never formed
any portion of the popular imputations on the lives of poets.
I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down
these remarks according to the order in which they were suggested
to my mind, by a consideration of the subject itself, instead of
observing the formality of a polemical reply; but if the view which
they contain be just, they will be found to involve a refutation of the
arguers against poetry, so far at least as regards the first division
of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have moved the
gall of some learned and intelligent writers who quarrel with certain
versifiers; I, like them, confess myself unwilling to be stunned by the
Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day. Bavius and Mævius undoubtedly
are, as they ever were, insufferable persons. But it belongs to a
philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound.
The first part of these remarks has related to poetry in its elements
and principles: and it has been shown, as well as the narrow limits
assigned them would permit, that what is called poetry in a restricted
sense, has a common source with all other forms of order and of beauty,
according to which the materials of human life are susceptible of being
arranged, and which is poetry in an universal sense.
The second part will have for its object an application of these
principles to the present state of the cultivation of poetry, and a
defence of the attempt to idealise the modern forms of manners and
opinions, and compel them into a subordination to the imaginative
and creative faculty. For the literature of England, an energetic
development of which has ever preceded or accompanied a great and
free development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a
new birth. In spite of the low-thoughted envy which would undervalue
contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual
achievements, and we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass
beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national
struggle for civil and religious liberty. The most unfailing herald,
companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a
beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods
there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving
intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The
persons in whom this power resides may often, as far as regards many
portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with
that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst
they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the power which
is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read
the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day
without being startled with the electric life which burns within their
words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human
nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are
themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations;
for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are
the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which
express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle
and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but
moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _De Augment. Scient._, cap. 1., lib. iii.
[2] See the _Filum Labyrinthi_, and the Essay on Death particularly.
[3] Macbeth, act iii. scene 2.
[4] A misquotation of Mark iv. 25.--Ed.
[5] A misquotation of Ecclesiastes vii. 2.--Ed.
[6] Although Rousseau has been thus classed, he was essentially a poet.
The others, even Voltaire, were mere reasoners. [_Author’s note._]
[7] Paradise Lost, Book I. l, 254-5.
[Decoration]
ESSAY ON THE LITERATURE, THE ARTS, AND THE MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS.
A Fragment.
The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death
of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself, or with
reference to the effects which it has produced upon the subsequent
destinies of civilised man, the most memorable in the history of the
world. What was the combination of moral and political circumstances
which produced so unparalleled a progress during that period in
literature and the arts;--why that progress, so rapid and so sustained,
so soon received a check, and became retrograde,--are problems left
to the wonder and conjecture of posterity. The wrecks and fragments
of those subtle and profound minds, like the ruins of a fine statue,
obscurely suggest to us the grandeur and perfection of the whole.
Their very language--a type of the understandings of which it was the
creation and the image--in variety, in simplicity, in flexibility, and
in copiousness, excels every other language of the western world. Their
sculptures are such as we, in our presumption, assume to be the models
of ideal truth and beauty, and to which no artist of modern times can
produce forms in any degree comparable. Their paintings, according
to Pliny and Pausanias, were full of delicacy and harmony; and some
even were powerfully pathetic, so as to awaken, like tender music or
tragic poetry, the most overwhelming emotions. We are accustomed to
conceive the painters of the sixteenth century, as those who have
brought their art to the highest perfection, probably because none of
the ancient paintings have been preserved. For all the inventive arts
maintain, as it were, a sympathetic connexion between each other, being
no more than various expressions of one internal power, modified by
different circumstances, either of an individual, or of society; and
the paintings of that period would probably bear the same relation
as is confessedly borne by the sculptures to all succeeding ones. Of
their music we know little; but the effects which it is said to have
produced, whether they be attributed to the skill of the composer,
or the sensibility of his audience, are far more powerful than any
which we experience from the music of our own times; and if, indeed,
the melody of their compositions were more tender and delicate, and
inspiring, than the melodies of some modern European nations, their
superiority in this art must have been something wonderful, and wholly
beyond conception.
Their poetry seems to maintain a very high, though not so
disproportionate a rank, in the comparison. Perhaps Shakespeare, from
the variety and comprehension of his genius, is to be considered, on
the whole, as the greatest individual mind, of which we have specimens
remaining. Perhaps Dante created imaginations of greater loveliness
and energy than any that are to be found in the ancient literature of
Greece. Perhaps nothing has been discovered in the fragments of the
Greek lyric poets equivalent to the sublime and chivalric sensibility
of Petrarch.--But, as a poet, Homer must be acknowledged to excel
Shakespeare in the truth, the harmony, the sustained grandeur, the
satisfying completeness of his images, their exact fitness to the
illustration, and to that to which they belong. Nor could Dante,
deficient in conduct, plan, nature, variety, and temperance, have been
brought into comparison with these men, but for those fortunate isles,
laden with golden fruit, which alone could tempt any one to embark in
the misty ocean of his dark and extravagant fiction.
But, omitting the comparison of individual minds, which can afford no
general inference, how superior was the spirit and system of their
poetry to that of any other period! So that, had any other genius equal
in other respects to the greatest that ever enlightened the world,
arisen in that age, he would have been superior to all, from this
circumstance alone--that his conceptions would have assumed a more
harmonious and perfect form. For it is worthy of observation, that
whatever the poets of that age produced is as harmonious and perfect as
possible. If a drama, for instance, were the composition of a person of
inferior talent, it was still homogeneous and free from inequalities;
it was a whole, consistent with itself. The compositions of great minds
bore throughout the sustained stamp of their greatness. In the poetry
of succeeding ages the expectations are often exalted on Icarian wings,
and fall, too much disappointed to give a memory and a name to the
oblivious pool in which they fell.
In physical knowledge Aristotle and Theophrastus had already--no
doubt assisted by the labours of those of their predecessors whom
they criticise--made advances worthy of the maturity of science. The
astonishing invention of geometry, that series of discoveries which
have enabled man to command the elements and foresee future events,
before the subjects of his ignorant wonder, and which have opened
as it were the doors of the mysteries of nature, had already been
brought to great perfection. Metaphysics, the science of man’s intimate
nature, and logic, or the grammar and elementary principles of that
science, received from the latter philosophers of the Periclean age a
firm basis. All our more exact philosophy is built upon the labours of
these great men, and many of the words which we employ in metaphysical
distinctions were invented by them to give accuracy and system to
their reasonings. The science of morals, or the voluntary conduct of
men in relation to themselves or others, dates from this epoch. How
inexpressibly bolder and more pure were the doctrines of those great
men, in comparison with the timid maxims which prevail in the writings
of the most esteemed modern moralists! They were such as Phocion, and
Epaminondas, and Timoleon, who formed themselves on their influence,
were to the wretched heroes of our own age.
Their political and religious institutions are more difficult to bring
into comparison with those of other times. A summary idea may be formed
of the worth of any political and religious system, by observing the
comparative degree of happiness and of intellect produced under its
influence. And whilst many institutions and opinions, which in ancient
Greece were obstacles to the improvement of the human race, have been
abolished among modern nations, how many pernicious superstitions and
new contrivances of misrule, and unheard-of complications of public
mischief, have not been invented among them by the ever-watchful spirit
of avarice and tyranny!
The modern nations of the civilised world owe the progress which they
have made--as well in those physical sciences in which they have
already excelled their masters, as in the moral and intellectual
inquiries, in which, with all the advantage of the experience of
the latter, it can scarcely be said that they have yet equalled
them,--to what is called the revival of learning; that is, the study
of the writers of the age which preceded and immediately followed the
government of Pericles, or of subsequent writers, who were, so to
speak, the rivers flowing from those immortal fountains. And though
there seems to be a principle in the modern world, which, should
circumstances analogous to those which modelled the intellectual
resources of the age to which we refer, into so harmonious a
proportion, again arise, would arrest and perpetuate them, and consign
their results to a more equal, extensive, and lasting improvement of
the condition of man--though justice and the true meaning of human
society are, if not more accurately, more generally understood; though
perhaps men know more, and therefore are more, as a mass, yet this
principle has never been called into action, and requires indeed a
universal and an almost appalling change in the system of existing
things. The study of modern history is the study of kings, financiers,
statesmen, and priests. The history of ancient Greece is the study
of legislators, philosophers, and poets; it is the history of men,
compared with the history of titles. What the Greeks were, was a
reality, not a promise. And what we are and hope to be, is derived,
as it were, from the influence and inspiration of these glorious
generations.
Whatever tends to afford a further illustration of the manners and
opinions of those to whom we owe so much, and who were perhaps, on
the whole, the most perfect specimens of humanity of whom we have
authentic record, were infinitely valuable. Let us see their errors,
their weaknesses, their daily actions, their familiar conversation,
and catch the tone of their society. When we discover how far the
most admirable community ever framed was removed from that perfection
to which human society is impelled by some active power within each
bosom to aspire, how great ought to be our hopes, how resolute our
struggles! For the Greeks of the Periclean age were widely different
from us. It is to be lamented that no modern writer has hitherto
dared to show them precisely as they were. Barthélemi cannot be
denied the praise of industry and system; but he never forgets
that he is a Christian and a Frenchman. Wieland, in his delightful
novels, makes indeed a very tolerable Pagan, but cherishes too many
political prejudices, and refrains from diminishing the interest of
his romances by painting sentiments in which no European of modern
times can possibly sympathise. There is no book which shows the Greeks
precisely as they were; they seem all written for children, with the
caution that no practice or sentiment, highly inconsistent with our
present manners, should be mentioned, lest those manners should receive
outrage and violation. But there are many to whom the Greek language
is inaccessible, who ought not to be excluded by this prudery from
possessing an exact and comprehensive conception of the history of man;
for there is no knowledge concerning what man has been and may be, from
partaking of which a person can depart, without becoming in some degree
more philosophical, tolerant, and just.
One of the chief distinctions between the manners of ancient Greece
and modern Europe, consisted in the regulations and the sentiments
respecting sexual intercourse. Whether this difference arises from
some imperfect influence of the doctrines of Jesus, who alleges the
absolute and unconditional equality of all human beings, or from the
institutions of chivalry, or from a certain fundamental difference
of physical nature existing in the Celts, or from a combination of
all or any of these causes acting on each other, is a question worthy
of voluminous investigation. The fact is, that the modern Europeans
have in this circumstance, and in the abolition of slavery, made an
improvement the most decisive in the regulation of human society; and
all the virtue and the wisdom of the Periclean age arose under other
institutions, in spite of the diminution which personal slavery and the
inferiority of women, recognised by law and opinion, must have produced
in the delicacy, the strength, the comprehensiveness, and the accuracy
of their conceptions, in moral, political, and metaphysical science,
and perhaps in every other art and science.
The women, thus degraded, became such as it was expected they would
become. They possessed, except with extraordinary exceptions, the
habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably not extremely
beautiful; at least there was no such disproportion in the attractions
of the external form between the female and male sex among the Greeks,
as exists among the modern Europeans. They were certainly devoid of
that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the acquisition of
knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment animates, as with another
life of overpowering grace, the lineaments and the gestures of every
form which they inhabit. Their eyes could not have been deep and
intricate from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no
heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths.
Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of its
legitimate object, they were incapable of sentimental love; and that
this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern
times. This object or its archetype forever exists in the mind, which
selects among those who resemble it that which most resembles it; and
instinctively fills up the interstices of the imperfect image, in
the same manner as the imagination moulds and completes the shapes
in clouds, or in the fire, into the resemblances of whatever form,
animal, building, &c., happens to be present to it. Man is in his
wildest state a social being: a certain degree of civilisation and
refinement ever produces the want of sympathies still more intimate
and complete; and the gratification of the senses is no longer all
that is sought in sexual connexion. It soon becomes a very small part
of that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love, which
is rather the universal thirst for a communion not only of the senses,
but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative and sensitive, and
which, when individualised, becomes an imperious necessity, only to be
satisfied by the complete or partial, actual or supposed fulfilment
of its claims. This want grows more powerful in proportion to the
development which our nature receives from civilisation, for man never
ceases to be a social being. The sexual impulse, which is only one,
and often a small part of those claims, serves, from its obvious and
external nature, as a kind of type or expression of the rest, a common
basis, an acknowledged and visible link. Still it is a claim which even
derives a strength not its own from the accessory circumstances which
surround it, and one which our nature thirsts to satisfy. To estimate
this, observe the degree of intensity and durability of the love of
the male towards the female in animals and savages; and acknowledge
all the duration and intensity observable in the love of civilised
beings beyond that of savages to be produced from other causes. In the
susceptibility of the external senses there is probably no important
difference.
Among the ancient Greeks the male sex, one half of the human race,
received the highest cultivation and refinement: whilst the other, so
far as intellect is concerned, were educated as slaves, and were raised
but few degrees in all that related to moral or intellectual excellence
above the condition of savages. The gradations in the society of man
present us with slow improvement in this respect. The Roman women
held a higher consideration in society, and were esteemed almost as
the equal partners with their husbands in the regulation of domestic
economy and the education of their children. The practices and customs
of modern Europe are essentially different from and incomparably less
pernicious than either, however remote from what an enlightened mind
cannot fail to desire as the future destiny of human beings.
[Decoration]
[Decoration]
ON THE SYMPOSIUM,
OR PREFACE TO THE BANQUET OF PLATO.
A Fragment.
The dialogue entitled “The Banquet,” was selected by the translator
as the most beautiful and perfect among all the works of Plato.[8] He
despairs of having communicated to the English language any portion
of the surpassing graces of the composition, or having done more than
present an imperfect shadow of the language and the sentiment of this
astonishing production.
Plato is eminently the greatest among the Greek philosophers, and
from, or, rather, perhaps through him, from his master Socrates,
have proceeded those emanations of moral and metaphysical knowledge,
on which a long series and an incalculable variety of popular
superstitions have sheltered their absurdities from the slow contempt
of mankind. Plato exhibits the rare union of close and subtle logic
with the Pythian enthusiasm of poetry, melted by the splendour and
harmony of his periods into one irresistible stream of musical
impressions, which hurry the persuasions onward, as in a breathless
career. His language is that of an immortal spirit, rather than a man.
Bacon is, perhaps, the only writer who, in these particulars, can be
compared with him: his imitator, Cicero, sinks in the comparison into
an ape mocking the gestures of a man. His views into the nature of mind
and existence are often obscure, only because they are profound; and
though his theories respecting the government of the world, and the
elementary laws of moral action, are not always correct, yet there is
scarcely any of his treatises which do not, however stained by puerile
sophisms, contain the most remarkable intuitions into all that can be
the subject of the human mind. His excellence consists especially in
intuition, and it is this faculty which raises him far above Aristotle,
whose genius, though vivid and various, is obscure in comparison with
that of Plato.
The dialogue entitled the “Banquet,” is called Ερωτικος,
or a Discussion upon Love, and is supposed to have taken place at
the house of Agathon, at one of a series of festivals given by that
poet, on the occasion of his gaining the prize of tragedy at the
Dionysiaca. The account of the debate on this occasion is supposed to
have been given by Apollodorus, a pupil of Socrates, many years after
it had taken place, to a companion who was curious to hear it. This
Apollodorus appears, both from the style in which he is represented
in this piece, as well as from a passage in the Phædon, to have been
a person of an impassioned and enthusiastic disposition; to borrow
an image from the Italian painters, he seems to have been the St.
John of the Socratic group. The drama (for so the lively distinction
of character and the various and well-wrought circumstances of the
story almost entitle it to be called) begins by Socrates persuading
Aristodemus to sup at Agathon’s, uninvited. The whole of this
introduction affords the most lively conception of refined Athenian
manners.
[8] The Republic, though replete with considerable errors of
speculation, is, indeed, the greatest repository of important truths of
all the works of Plato. This, perhaps, is because it is the longest. He
first, and perhaps last, maintained that a state ought to be governed,
not by the wealthiest, or the most ambitious, or the most cunning, but
by the wisest; the method of selecting such rulers, and the laws by
which such a selection is made, must correspond with and arise out of
the moral freedom and refinement of the people.
[Decoration]
THE BANQUET.
_TRANSLATED FROM PLATO_
_THE PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE_
APOLLODORUS
A FRIEND OF APOLLODORUS
GLAUCO
ARISTODEMUS
SOCRATES
AGATHON
PHÆDRUS
PAUSANIAS
ERYXIMACHUS
ARISTOPHANES
DIOTIMA
ALCIBIADES
[Decoration]
THE BANQUET.
Translated from Plato.
APOLLODORUS.
I think that the subject of your inquiries is still fresh in my memory;
for yesterday, as I chanced to be returning home from Phaleros, one
of my acquaintance, seeing me before him, called out to me from a
distance, jokingly, “Apollodorus, you Phalerian, will you not wait a
minute?”--I waited for him, and as soon as he overtook me, “I have just
been looking for you, Apollodorus,” he said, “for I wished to hear what
those discussions were on Love, which took place at the party, when
Agathon, Socrates, Alcibiades, and some others, met at supper. Some one
who heard it from Phœnix, the son of Philip, told me that you could
give a full account, but he could relate nothing distinctly himself.
Relate to me, then, I entreat you, all the circumstances. I know you
are a faithful reporter of the discussions of your friends; but, first
tell me, were you present at the party or not?”
“Your informant,” I replied, “seems to have given you no very clear
idea of what you wish to hear, if he thinks that these discussions took
place so lately as that I could have been of the party.”--“Indeed, I
thought so,” replied he.--“For how,” said I, “O Glauco! could I have
been present? Do you not know that Agathon has been absent from the
city many years? But, since I began to converse with Socrates, and to
observe each day all his words and actions, three years are scarcely
past. Before this time I wandered about wherever it might chance,
thinking that I did something, but being in truth, a most miserable
wretch, not less than you are now, who believe that you ought to do
anything rather than practise the love of wisdom.”--“Do not cavil,”
interrupted Glauco, “but tell me, when did this party take place?”
“Whilst we were yet children,” I replied, “when Agathon first gained
the prize of tragedy, and the day after that on which he and the chorus
made sacrifices in celebration of their success.”--“A long time ago,
it seems. But who told you all the circumstances of the discussion?
Did you hear them from Socrates himself?” “No, by Jupiter! But the
same person from whom Phœnix had his information, one Aristodemus,
a Cydathenean,--a little man who always went about without sandals.
He was present at this feast, being, I believe, more than any of his
contemporaries, a lover and admirer of Socrates. I have questioned
Socrates concerning some of the circumstances of his narration, who
confirms all that I have heard from Aristodemus.”--“Why, then,” said
Glauco, “why not relate them, as we walk, to me? The road to the city
is every way convenient, both for those who listen and those who speak.”
Thus as we walked I gave him some account of those discussions
concerning Love; since, as I said before, I remember them with
sufficient accuracy. If I am required to relate them also to you,
that shall willingly be done; for, whensoever either I myself talk
of philosophy, or listen to others talking of it, in addition to the
improvement which I conceive there arises from such conversation, I am
delighted beyond measure; but whenever I hear your discussions about
moneyed men and great proprietors, I am weighed down with grief, and
pity you, who, doing nothing, believe that you are doing something.
Perhaps you think that I am a miserable wretch; and, indeed, I believe
that you think truly. I do not think, but well know, that you are
miserable.
COMPANION.
You are always the same, Apollodorus--always saying some ill of
yourself and others. Indeed, you seem to me to think every one
miserable except Socrates, beginning with yourself. I do not know what
could have entitled you to the surname of the “Madman,” for, I am sure,
you are consistent enough, for ever inveighing with bitterness against
yourself and all others, except Socrates.
APOLLODORUS.
My dear friend, it is manifest that I am out of my wits from this
alone--that I have such opinion as you describe concerning myself and
you.
COMPANION.
It is not worth while, Apollodorus, to dispute now about these things;
but do what I entreat you, and relate to us what were these discussions.
APOLLODORUS.
They were such as I will proceed to tell you. But let me attempt to
relate them in the order which Aristodemus observed in relating them
to me. He said that he met Socrates washed, and, contrary to his
usual custom, sandalled, and having inquired whither he went so gaily
dressed, Socrates replied, “I am going to sup at Agathon’s; yesterday
I avoided it, disliking the crowd, which would attend at the prize
sacrifices then celebrated; to-day I promised to be there, and I made
myself so gay, because one ought to be beautiful to approach one who
is beautiful. But you, Aristodemus, what think you of coming uninvited
to supper?”--“I will do,” he replied, “as you command.”--“Follow,
then, that we may, by changing its application, disarm that proverb
which says, _To the feasts of the good, the good come uninvited._
Homer, indeed, seems not only to destroy, but to outrage the proverb;
for, describing Agamemnon as excellent in battle, and Menelaus but a
faint-hearted warrior, he represents Menelaus as coming uninvited to
the feast of one better and braver than himself.”--Aristodemus hearing
this, said, “I also am in some danger, Socrates, not as you say, but
according to Homer, of approaching like an unworthy inferior, the
banquet of one more wise and excellent than myself. Will you not, then,
make some excuse for me? for I shall not confess that I came uninvited,
but shall say that I was invited by you.”--“As we walk together,” said
Socrates, “we will consider together what excuse to make--but let us
go.”
Thus discoursing, they proceeded. But, as they walked, Socrates,
engaged in some deep contemplation, slackened his pace, and, observing
Aristodemus waiting for him, he desired him to go on before. When
Aristodemus arrived at Agathon’s house he found the door open, and it
occurred somewhat comically, that a slave met him at the vestibule, and
conducted him where he found the guests already reclined. As soon as
Agathon saw him, “You arrive just in time to sup with us, Aristodemus,”
he said; “if you have any other purpose in your visit, defer it to a
better opportunity. I was looking for you yesterday, to invite you to
be of our party; I could not find you anywhere. But how is it that you
do not bring Socrates with you?”
But he turning round, and not seeing Socrates behind him, said to
Agathon, “I just came hither in his company, being invited by him to
sup with you.”--“You did well,” replied Agathon, “to come; but where is
Socrates?”--“He just now came hither behind me; I myself wonder where
he can be.”--“Go and look, boy,” said Agathon, “and bring Socrates
in; meanwhile, you, Aristodemus, recline there near Eryximachus.” And
he bade a slave wash his feet that he might recline. Another slave,
meanwhile, brought word that Socrates had retired into a neighbouring
vestibule, where he stood, and, in spite of his message, refused to
come in.--“What absurdity you talk,” cried Agathon, “call him, and do
not leave him till he comes.”--“Leave him alone, by all means,” said
Aristodemus, “it is customary with him sometimes to retire in this way
and stand wherever it may chance. He will come presently, I do not
doubt; do not disturb him.”--“Well, be it as you will,” said Agathon;
“as it is, you boys, bring supper for the rest; put before us what
you will, for I resolved that there should be no master of the feast.
Consider me, and these, my friends, as guests, whom you have invited to
supper, and serve them so that we may commend you.”
After this they began supper, but Socrates did not come in. Agathon
ordered him to be called, but Aristodemus perpetually forbade it. At
last he came in, much about the middle of supper, not having delayed
so long as was his custom. Agathon (who happened to be reclining at
the end of the table, and alone,) said, as he entered, “Come hither,
Socrates, and sit down by me; so that by the mere touch of one so wise
as you are, I may enjoy the fruit of your meditations in the vestibule;
for, I well know, you would not have departed till you had discovered
and secured it.”
Socrates having sat down as he was desired, replied, “It would be well,
Agathon, if wisdom were of such a nature, as that when we touched each
other, it would overflow of its own accord, from him who possesses much
to him who possesses little; like the water in two chalices, which will
flow through a flock of wool from the fuller into the emptier, until
both are equal. If wisdom had this property, I should esteem myself
most fortunate in reclining near to you. I should thus soon be filled,
I think, with the most beautiful and various wisdom. Mine, indeed, is
something obscure, and doubtful, and dreamlike. But yours is radiant,
and has been crowned with amplest reward; for, though you are yet so
young, it shone forth from you, and became so manifest yesterday, that
more than thirty thousand Greeks can bear testimony to its excellence
and loveliness.”--“You are laughing at me, Socrates,” said Agathon,
“but you and I will decide this controversy about wisdom by and bye,
taking Bacchus for our judge. At present turn to your supper.”
After Socrates and the rest had finished supper, and had reclined back
on their couches, and the libations had been poured forth, and they
had sung hymns to the god, and all other rites which are customary
had been performed, they turned to drinking. Then Pausanias made this
kind of proposal. “Come, my friends,” said he, “in what manner will
it be pleasantest for us to drink? I must confess to you that, in
reality, I am not very well from the wine we drank last night, and I
have need of some intermission. I suspect that most of you are in the
same condition, for you were here yesterday. Now, consider how we shall
drink most easily and comfortably.”
“’Tis a good proposal, Pausanias,” said Aristophanes, “to contrive, in
some way or other, to place moderation in our cups. I was one of those
who were drenched last night.”--Eryximachus, the son of Acumenius,
hearing this, said: “I am of your opinion; I only wish to know one
thing--whether Agathon is in the humour for hard drinking?”--“Not at
all,” replied Agathon, “I confess that I am not able to drink much this
evening.”--“It is an excellent thing for us,” replied Eryximachus,
“I mean myself, Aristodemus, Phædrus, and these others, if you who
are such invincible drinkers, now refuse to drink. I ought to except
Socrates, for he is capable of drinking everything, or nothing; and
whatever we shall determine will equally suit him. Since, then, no one
present has any desire to drink much wine, I shall perhaps give less
offence if I declare the nature of drunkenness. The science of medicine
teaches us that drunkenness is very pernicious: nor would I choose to
drink immoderately myself, or counsel another to do so, especially
if he had been drunk the night before.”--“Yes,” said Phædrus, the
Myrinusian, interrupting him, “I have been accustomed to confide in
you, especially in your directions concerning medicine; and I would now
willingly do so, if the rest will do the same.” All then agreed that
they would drink at this present banquet not for drunkenness, but for
pleasure.
“Since, then,” said Eryximachus, “it is decided that no one shall be
compelled to drink more than he pleases, I think that we may as well
send away the flute-player to play to herself; or, if she likes, to
the women within. Let us devote the present occasion to conversation
between ourselves, and if you wish, I will propose to you what shall be
the subject of our discussion.” All present desired and entreated that
he would explain.--“The exordium of my speech,” said Eryximachus, “will
be in the style of the Menalippe of Euripides, for the story which I
am about to tell belongs not to me, but to Phædrus. Phædrus has often
indignantly complained to me, saying--‘Is it not strange, Eryximachus,
that there are innumerable hymns and pæans composed for the other gods,
but that not one of the many poets who spring up in the world have
ever composed a verse in honour of Love, who is such and so great a
god? Nor any one of those accomplished sophists, who, like the famous
Prodicus, have celebrated the praise of Hercules and others, have ever
celebrated that of Love; but what is more astonishing, I have lately
met with the book of some philosopher, in which salt is extolled on
account of its utility, and many other things of the same nature are
in like manner celebrated with elaborate praise. That so much serious
thought is expended on such trifles, and that no man has dared to this
day to frame a hymn in honour of Love, who being so great a deity, is
thus neglected, may well be sufficient to excite my indignation.’
“There seemed to me some justice in these complaints of Phædrus; I
propose, therefore, at the same time for the sake of giving pleasure
to Phædrus, and that we may on the present occasion do something well
and befitting us, that this God should receive from those who are
now present the honour which is most due to him. If you agree to my
proposal, an excellent discussion might arise on the subject. Every one
ought, according to my plan, to praise Love with as much eloquence as
he can. Let Phædrus begin first, both because he reclines the first in
order, and because he is the father of the discussion.”
“No one will vote against you, Eryximachus,” said Socrates, “for how
can I oppose your proposal, who am ready to confess that I know nothing
on any subject but love? Or how can Agathon, or Pausanias, or even
Aristophanes, whose life is one perpetual ministration to Venus and
Bacchus? Or how can any other whom I see here? Though we who sit last
are scarcely on an equality with you; for if those who speak before us
shall have exhausted the subject with their eloquence and reasonings,
our discourses will be superfluous. But in the name of Good Fortune,
let Phædrus begin and praise Love.” The whole party agreed to what
Socrates said, and entreated Phædrus to begin.
What each then said on this subject, Aristodemus did not entirely
recollect, nor do I recollect all that he related to me; but only the
speeches of those who said what was most worthy of remembrance. First,
then, Phædrus began thus:--
“Love is a mighty deity, and the object of admiration, both to Gods
and men, for many and for various claims; but especially on account of
his origin. For that he is to be honoured as one of the most ancient
of the gods, this may serve as a testimony, that Love has no parents,
nor is there any poet or other person who has ever affirmed that
there are such. Hesiod says, that first ‘Chaos was produced; then the
broad-bosomed Earth, to be a secure foundation for all things; then
Love.’ He says that after Chaos these two were produced, the Earth and
Love. Parmenides, speaking of generation, says:--‘But he created Love
before any of the gods.’ Acusileus agrees with Hesiod. Love, therefore,
is universally acknowledged to be among the oldest of things. And in
addition to this, Love is the author of our greatest advantages; for I
cannot imagine a greater happiness and advantage to one who is in the
flower of youth than an amiable lover, or to a lover, than an amiable
object of his love. For neither birth, nor wealth, nor honours, can
awaken in the minds of men the principles which should guide those
who from their youth aspire to an honourable and excellent life, as
Love awakens them. I speak of the fear of shame, which deters them
from that which is disgraceful; and the love of glory, which incites
to honourable deeds. For it is not possible that a state or private
person should accomplish, without these incitements, anything beautiful
or great. I assert, then, that should one who loves be discovered in
any dishonourable action, or tamely enduring insult through cowardice,
he would feel more anguish and shame if observed by the object of his
passion, than if he were observed by his father, or his companions,
or any other person. In like manner, among warmly attached friends,
a man is especially grieved to be discovered by his friend in any
dishonourable act. If, then, by any contrivance, a state or army
could be composed of friends bound by strong attachment, it is beyond
calculation how excellently they would administer their affairs,
refraining from anything base, contending with each other for the
acquirement of fame, and exhibiting such valour in battle as that,
though few in numbers, they might subdue all mankind. For should one
friend desert the ranks or cast away his arms in the presence of the
other, he would suffer far acuter shame from that one person’s regard,
than from the regard of all other men. A thousand times would he prefer
to die, rather than desert the object of his attachment, and not
succour him in danger.
“There is none so worthless whom Love cannot impel, as it were by a
divine inspiration, towards virtue, even so that he may through this
inspiration become equal to one who might naturally be more excellent;
and, in truth, as Homer says: The God breathes vigour into certain
heroes--so Love breathes into those who love, the spirit which is
produced from himself. Not only men, but even women who love, are those
alone who willingly expose themselves to die for others. Alcestis,
the daughter of Pelias, affords to the Greeks a remarkable example
of this opinion; she alone being willing to die for her husband, and
so surpassing his parents in the affection with which love inspired
her towards him, as to make them appear, in the comparison with her,
strangers to their own child, and related to him merely in name; and so
lovely and admirable did this action appear, not only to men, but even
to the Gods, that, although they conceded the prerogative of bringing
back the spirit from death to few among the many who then performed
excellent and honourable deeds, yet, delighted with this action, they
redeemed her soul from the infernal regions: so highly do the Gods
honour zeal and devotion in love. They sent back indeed Orpheus, the
son of Œagrus, from Hell, with his purpose unfulfilled, and, showing
him only the spectre of her for whom he came, refused to render up
herself. For Orpheus seemed to them, not as Alcestis, to have dared
die for the sake of her whom he loved, and thus to secure to himself a
perpetual intercourse with her in the regions to which she had preceded
him, but like a cowardly musician, to have contrived to descend
alive into Hell; and, indeed, they appointed as a punishment for his
cowardice, that he should be put to death by women.
“Far otherwise did they reward Achilles, the son of Thetis, whom they
sent to inhabit the islands of the blessed. For Achilles, though
informed by his mother that his own death would ensue upon his killing
Hector, but that if he refrained from it he might return home and
die in old age, yet preferred revenging and honouring his beloved
Patroclus; not to die for him merely, but to disdain and reject that
life which he had ceased to share. Therefore the Greeks honoured
Achilles beyond all other men, because he thus preferred his friend to
all things else.
“On this account have the Gods rewarded Achilles more amply than
Alcestis; permitting his spirit to inhabit the islands of the blessed.
Hence do I assert that Love is the most ancient and venerable of
deities, and most powerful to endow mortals with the possession of
happiness and virtue, both whilst they live and after they die.”
Thus Aristodemus reported the discourse of Phædrus; and after Phædrus,
he said that some others spoke, whose discourses he did not well
remember. When they had ceased, Pausanias began thus:--
“Simply to praise Love, O Phædrus, seems to me too bounded a scope for
our discourse. If Love were one, it would be well. But since Love is
not one, I will endeavour to distinguish which is the Love whom it
becomes us to praise, and having thus discriminated one from the other,
will attempt to render him who is the subject of our discourse the
honour due to his divinity. We all know that Venus is never without
Love; and if Venus were one, Love would be one; but since there are
two Venuses, of necessity also must there be two Loves. For assuredly
are there two Venuses; one, the eldest, the daughter of Uranus,
born without a mother, whom we call the Uranian; the other younger,
the daughter of Jupiter and Dione, whom we call the Pandemian;--of
necessity must there also be two Loves, the Uranian and Pandemian
companions of these goddesses. It is becoming to praise all the Gods,
but the attributes which fall to the lot of each may be distinguished
and selected. For any particular action whatever in itself is neither
good nor evil; what we are now doing--drinking, singing, talking, none
of these things are good in themselves, but the mode in which they are
done stamps them with its own nature; and that which is done well, is
good, and that which is done ill, is evil. Thus, not all love, nor
every mode of love is beautiful, or worthy of commendation, but that
alone which excites us to love worthily. The Love, therefore, which
attends upon Venus Pandemos is, in truth, common to the vulgar, and
presides over transient and fortuitous connexions, and is worshipped
by the least excellent of mankind. The votaries of this deity seek
the body rather than the soul, and the ignorant rather than the wise,
disdaining all that is honourable and lovely, and considering how they
shall best satisfy their sensual necessities. This Love is derived
from the younger goddess, who partakes in her nature both of male and
female. But the attendant on the other, the Uranian, whose nature is
entirely masculine, is the Love who inspires us with affection, and
exempts us from all wantonness and libertinism. Those who are inspired
by this divinity seek the affections of those who are endowed by nature
with greater excellence and vigour both of body and mind. And it is
easy to distinguish those who especially exist under the influence of
this power, by their choosing in early youth as the objects of their
love those in whom the intellectual faculties have begun to develop.
For those who begin to love in this manner seem to me to be preparing
to pass their whole life together in a community of good and evil,
and not ever lightly deceiving those who love them, to be faithless
to their vows. There ought to be a law that none should love the
very young; so much serious affection as this deity enkindles should
not be doubtfully bestowed; for the body and mind of those so young
are yet unformed, and it is difficult to foretell what will be their
future tendencies and power. The good voluntarily impose this law upon
themselves, and those vulgar lovers ought to be compelled to the same
observance, as we deter them with all the power of the laws from the
love of free matrons. For these are the persons whose shameful actions
embolden those who observe their importunity and intemperance to
assert, that it is dishonourable to serve and gratify the objects of
our love. But no one who does this gracefully and according to law, can
justly be liable to the imputation of blame.
“Not only friendship, but philosophy and the practice of the gymnastic
exercises, are represented as dishonourable by the tyrannical
governments under which the barbarians live. For I imagine it would
little conduce to the benefit of the governors, that the governed
should be disciplined to lofty thoughts and to the unity and communion
of steadfast friendship, of which admirable effects the tyrants
of our own country have also learned that Love is the author. For
the love of Harmodius and Aristogiton, strengthened into a firm
friendship, dissolved the tyranny. Wherever, therefore, it is declared
dishonourable in any case to serve and benefit friends, that law is a
mark of the depravity of the legislator, the avarice and tyranny of
the rulers, and the cowardice of those who are ruled. Wherever it is
simply declared to be honourable without distinction of cases, such a
declaration denotes dulness and want of subtlety of mind in the authors
of the regulation. Here the degrees of praise or blame to be attributed
by law are far better regulated; but it is yet difficult to determine
the cases to which they should refer.
“It is evident, however, for one in whom passion is enkindled, it is
more honourable to love openly than secretly; and most honourable to
love the most excellent and virtuous, even if they should be less
beautiful than others. It is honourable for the lover to exhort and
sustain the object of his love in virtuous conduct. It is considered
honourable to attain the love of those whom we seek, and the contrary
shameful; and to facilitate this attainment, opinion has given to the
lover the permission of acquiring favour by the most extraordinary
devices, which if a person should practise for any purpose besides
this, he would incur the severest reproof of philosophy. For if any one
desirous of accumulating money, or ambitious of procuring power, or
seeking any other advantage, should, like a lover seeking to acquire
the favour of his beloved, employ prayers and entreaties in his
necessity, and swear such oaths as lovers swear, and sleep before the
threshold, and offer to subject himself to such slavery as no slave
even would endure; he would be frustrated of the attainment of what he
sought, both by his enemies and friends, these reviling him for his
flattery, those sharply admonishing him, and taking to themselves the
shame of his servility. But there is a certain grace in a lover who
does all these things, so that he alone may do them without dishonour.
It is commonly said that the Gods accord pardon to the lover alone if
he should break his oath, and that there is no oath by Venus. Thus, as
our law declares, both gods and men have given to lovers all possible
indulgence.
“The affair, however, I imagine, stands thus: As I have before
said, love cannot be considered in itself as either honourable or
dishonourable: if it is honourably pursued, it is honourable; if
dishonourably, dishonourable: it is dishonourable basely to serve and
gratify a worthless person; it is honourable honourably to serve a
person of virtue. That Pandemic lover who loves rather the body than
the soul is worthless, nor can be constant and consistent, since he
has placed his affections on that which has no stability. For as soon
as the flower of the form, which was the sole object of his desire,
has faded, then he departs and is seen no more; bound by no faith nor
shame of his many promises and persuasions. But he who is the lover of
virtuous manners is constant during life, since he has placed himself
in harmony and desire with that which is consistent with itself.
“These two classes of persons we ought to distinguish with careful
examination, so that we may serve and converse with the one and avoid
the other; determining, by that inquiry, by what a man is attracted,
and for what the object of his love is dear to him. On the same
account it is considered as dishonourable to be inspired with love at
once, lest time should be wanting to know and approve the character
of the object. It is considered dishonourable to be captivated by the
allurements of wealth and power, or terrified through injuries to
yield up the affections, or not to despise in the comparison with an
unconstrained choice all political influence and personal advantage.
For no circumstance is there in wealth or power so invariable and
consistent, as that no generous friendship can ever spring up from
amongst them. We have an opinion with respect to lovers which declares
that it shall not be considered servile or disgraceful, though the
lover should submit himself to any species of slavery for the sake of
his beloved. The same opinion holds with respect to those who undergo
any degradation for the sake of virtue. And also it is esteemed among
us, that if any one chooses to serve and obey another for the purpose
of becoming more wise or more virtuous through the intercourse that
might thence arise, such willing slavery is not the slavery of a
dishonest flatterer. Through this we should consider in the same
light a servitude undertaken for the sake of love as one undertaken
for the acquirement of wisdom or any other excellence, if indeed the
devotion of a lover to his beloved is to be considered a beautiful
thing. For when the lover and the beloved have once arrived at the
same point, the province of each being distinguished; the one able to
assist in the cultivation of the mind and in the acquirement of every
other excellence; the other yet requiring education, and seeking the
possession of wisdom; then alone, by the union of these conditions,
and in no other case, is it honourable for the beloved to yield up
the affections to the lover. In this servitude alone there is no
disgrace in being deceived and defeated of the object for which it was
undertaken, whereas every other is disgraceful, whether we are deceived
or no.
“On the same principle, if any one seeks the friendship of another,
believing him to be virtuous, for the sake of becoming better through
such intercourse and affection, and is deceived, his friend turning
out to be worthless, and far from the possession of virtue; yet it
is honourable to have been so deceived. For such a one seems to have
submitted to a kind of servitude, because he would endure anything for
the sake of becoming more virtuous and wise; a disposition of mind
eminently beautiful.
“This is that Love who attends on the Uranian deity, and is Uranian;
the author of innumerable benefits both to the state and to
individuals, and by the necessity of whose influence those who love are
disciplined into the zeal of virtue. All other loves are the attendants
on Venus Pandemos. So much, although unpremeditated, is what I have to
deliver on the subject of love, O Phædrus.”
Pausanias having ceased (for so the learned teach me to denote the
changes of the discourse), Aristodemus said that it came to the turn
of Aristophanes to speak; but it happened that, from repletion or some
other cause, he had an hiccough which prevented him; so he turned to
Eryximachus, the physician, who was reclining close beside him, and
said--“Eryximachus, it is but fair that you should cure my hiccough,
or speak instead of me until it is over.”--“I will do both,” said
Eryximachus; “I will speak in your turn, and you, when your hiccough
has ceased, shall speak in mine. Meanwhile, if you hold your breath
some time, it will subside. If not, gargle your throat with water;
and if it still continue, take something to stimulate your nostrils,
and sneeze; do this once or twice, and even though it should be very
violent it will cease.”--“Whilst you speak,” said Aristophanes, “I will
follow your directions.”--Eryximachus then began:--
“Since Pausanias, beginning his discourse excellently, placed no fit
completion and development to it, I think it necessary to attempt to
fill up what he has left unfinished. He has reasoned well in defining
love as of a double nature. The science of medicine, to which I have
addicted myself, seems to teach me that the love which impels towards
those who are beautiful, does not subsist only in the souls of men,
but in the bodies also of those of all other living beings which are
produced upon earth, and, in a word, in all things which are. So
wonderful and mighty is this divinity, and so widely is his influence
extended over all divine and human things! For the honour of my
profession, I will begin by adducing a proof from medicine. The nature
of the body contains within itself this double love. For that which is
healthy and that which is diseased in a body differ and are unlike:
that which is unlike loves and desires that which is unlike. Love,
therefore, is different in a sane and in a diseased body. Pausanias has
asserted rightly that it is honourable to gratify those things in the
body which are good and healthy, and in this consists the skill of the
physician; whilst those which are bad and diseased ought to be treated
with no indulgence. The science of medicine, in a word, is a knowledge
of the love affairs of the body, as they bear relation to repletion
and evacuation; and he is the most skilful physician who can trace
those operations of the good and evil love, can make the one change
places with the other, and attract love into those parts from which
he is absent, or expel him from those which he ought not to occupy.
He ought to make those things which are most inimical, friendly, and
excite them to mutual love. But those things are most inimical which
are most opposite to each other; cold to heat, bitterness to sweetness,
dryness to moisture. Our progenitor, Æsculapius, as the poets inform
us, (and indeed I believe them,) through the skill which he possessed
to inspire love and concord in these contending principles, established
the science of medicine.
“The gymnastic arts and agriculture, no less than medicine, are
exercised under the dominion of this God. Music, as any one may
perceive who yields a very slight attention to the subject, originates
from the same source; which Heraclitus probably meant, though he could
not express his meaning very clearly in words, when he says, ‘One
though apparently differing, yet so agrees with itself, as the harmony
of a lyre and a bow.’ It is great absurdity to say that a harmony
differs, and can exist between things whilst they are dissimilar;
but probably he meant that from sounds which first differed, like the
grave and the acute, and which afterwards agreed, harmony was produced
according to musical art. For no harmony can arise from the grave and
the acute whilst yet they differ. But harmony is symphony: symphony is,
as it were, concord. But it is impossible that concord should subsist
between things that differ, so long as they differ. Between things
which are discordant and dissimilar there is then no harmony. A rhythm
is produced from that which is quick, and that which is slow, first
being distinguished and opposed to each other, and then made accordant;
so does medicine, no less than music, establish a concord between the
objects of its art, producing love and agreement between adverse things.
“Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony
and system. In the very system of harmony and rhythm, it is easy to
distinguish love. The double love is not distinguishable in music
itself; but it is required to apply it to the service of mankind by
system and harmony, which is called poetry, or the composition of
melody; or by the correct use of songs and measures already composed,
which is called discipline; then one can be distinguished from the
other, by the aid of an extremely skilful artist. And the better love
ought to be honoured and preserved for the sake of those who are
virtuous, and that the nature of the vicious may be changed through
the inspiration of its spirit. This is that beautiful Uranian love,
the attendant on the Uranian muse: the Pandemian is the attendant of
Polyhymnia; to whose influence we should only so far subject ourselves,
as to derive pleasure from it without indulging to excess; in the
same manner as, according to our art, we are instructed to seek the
pleasures of the table, only so far as we can enjoy them without the
consequences of disease. In music, therefore, and in medicine, and in
all other things, human and divine, this double love ought to be traced
and discriminated; for it is in all things.
“Even the constitution of the seasons of the year is penetrated with
these contending principles. For so often as heat and cold, dryness
and moisture, of which I spoke before, are influenced by the more
benignant love, and are harmoniously and temperately intermingled
with the seasons, they bring maturity and health to men, and to all
the other animals and plants. But when the evil and injurious love
assumes the dominion of the seasons of the year, destruction is spread
widely abroad. Then pestilence is accustomed to arise, and many other
blights and diseases fall upon animals and plants: and hoar frosts,
and hails, and mildew on the corn, are produced from that excessive
and disorderly love, with which each season of the year is impelled
towards the other; the motions of which and the knowledge of the stars,
is called astronomy. All sacrifices, and all those things in which
divination is concerned (for these things are the links by which is
maintained an intercourse and communion between the Gods and men), are
nothing else than the science of preservation and right government of
Love. For impiety is accustomed to spring up, so soon as any one ceases
to serve the more honourable Love, and worship him by the sacrifice
of good actions; but submits himself to the influences of the other,
in relation to his duties towards his parents, and the Gods, and the
living, and the dead. It is the object of divination to distinguish and
remedy the effects of these opposite loves; and divination is therefore
the author of the friendship of Gods and men, because it affords the
knowledge of what in matters of love is lawful or unlawful to men.
“Thus every species of love possesses collectively a various and vast,
or rather universal power. But love which incites to the acquirement
of its objects according to virtue and wisdom, possesses the most
exclusive dominion, and prepares for his worshippers the highest
happiness through the mutual intercourse of social kindness which it
promotes among them, and through the benevolence which he attracts to
them from the Gods, our superiors.
“Probably in thus praising Love, I have unwillingly omitted many
things; but it is your business, O Aristophanes, to fill up all that
I have left incomplete; or, if you have imagined any other mode of
honouring the divinity: for I observe your hiccough is over.”
“Yes,” said Aristophanes, “but not before I applied the sneezing. I
wonder why the harmonious construction of our body should require such
noisy operations as sneezing; for it ceased the moment I sneezed.”--“Do
you not observe what you do, my good Aristophanes?” said Eryximachus;
“you are going to speak, and you predispose us to laughter, and compel
me to watch for the first ridiculous idea which you may start in your
discourse, when you might have spoken in peace.”--“Let me unsay what I
have said, then,” replied Aristophanes, laughing. “Do not watch me, I
entreat you; though I am not afraid of saying what is laughable (since
that would be all gain, and quite in the accustomed spirit of my muse),
but lest I should say what is ridiculous.”--“Do you think to throw your
dart, and escape with impunity, Aristophanes? Attend, and what you say
be careful you maintain; then, perhaps, if it pleases me, I may dismiss
you without question.”
“Indeed, Eryximachus,” proceeded Aristophanes, “I have designed that my
discourse should be very different from yours and that of Pausanias. It
seems to me that mankind are by no means penetrated with a conception
of the power of Love, or they would have built sumptuous temples and
altars, and have established magnificent rites of sacrifice in his
honour; he deserves worship and homage more than all the other Gods,
and he has yet received none. For Love is of all the Gods the most
friendly to mortals; and the physician of those wounds, whose cure
would be the greatest happiness which could be conferred upon the human
race. I will endeavour to unfold to you his true power, and you can
relate what I declare to others.
“You ought first to know the nature of man, and the adventures he has
gone through; for his nature was anciently far different from that
which it is at present. First, then, human beings were formerly not
divided into two sexes, male and female; there was also a third, common
to both the others, the name of which remains, though the sex itself
has disappeared. The androgynous sex, both in appearance and in name,
was common both to male and female; its name alone remains, which
labours under a reproach.
“At the period to which I refer, the form of every human being was
round, the back and the sides being circularly joined, and each had
four arms and as many legs; two faces fixed upon a round neck, exactly
like each other; one head between the two faces; four ears, and
everything else as from such proportions it is easy to conjecture. Man
walked upright as now, in whatever direction he pleased; but when he
wished to go fast he made use of all his eight limbs, and proceeded
in a rapid motion by rolling circularly round,--like tumblers, who,
with their legs in the air, tumble round and round. We account for the
production of three sexes by supposing that, at the beginning, the
male was produced from the sun, the female from the earth; and that
sex which participated in both sexes, from the moon, by reason of the
androgynous nature of the moon. They were round, and their mode of
proceeding was round, from the similarity which must needs subsist
between them and their parent.
“They were strong also, and had aspiring thoughts. They it was who
levied war against the Gods; and what Homer writes concerning Ephialtus
and Otus, that they sought to ascend heaven and dethrone the Gods, in
reality relates to this primitive people. Jupiter and the other Gods
debated what was to be done in this emergency. For neither could they
prevail on themselves to destroy them, as they had the giants, with
thunder, so that the race should be abolished; for in that case they
would be deprived of the honours of the sacrifices which they were in
the custom of receiving from them; nor could they permit a continuance
of their insolence and impiety. Jupiter, with some difficulty having
desired silence, at length spoke. ‘I think,’ said he, ‘I have contrived
a method by which we may, by rendering the human race more feeble,
quell the insolence which they exercise, without proceeding to their
utter destruction. I will cut each of them in half; and so they will at
once be weaker and more useful on account of their numbers. They shall
walk upright on two legs. If they show any more insolence, and will not
keep quiet, I will cut them up in half again, so they shall go about
hopping on one leg.’
“So saying, he cut human beings in half, as people cut eggs before
they salt them, or as I have seen eggs cut with hairs. He ordered
Apollo to take each one as he cut him, and turn his face and half
his neck towards the operation, so that by contemplating it he might
become more cautious and humble; and then, to cure him, Apollo turned
the face round, and drawing the skin upon what we now call the belly,
like a contracted pouch, and leaving one opening, that which is
called the navel, tied it in the middle. He then smoothed many other
wrinkles, and moulded the breast with much such an instrument as the
leather-cutters use to smooth the skins upon the block. He left only
a few wrinkles in the belly, near the navel, to serve as a record of
its former adventure. Immediately after this division, as each desired
to possess the other half of himself, these divided people threw their
arms around and embraced each other, seeking to grow together; and from
this resolution to do nothing without the other half, they died of
hunger and weakness: when one half died and the other was left alive,
that which was thus left sought the other and folded it to its bosom;
whether that half were an entire woman (for we now call it a woman) or
a man; and thus they perished. But Jupiter, pitying them, thought of
another contrivance. In this manner is generation now produced, by the
union of male and female; so that from the embrace of a man and woman
the race is propagated.
“From this period, mutual love has naturally existed between human
beings; that reconciler and bond of union of their original nature,
which seeks to make two one, and to heal the divided nature of man.
Every one of us is thus the half of what may be properly termed a man,
and like a pselta cut in two, is the imperfect portion of an entire
whole, perpetually necessitated to seek the half belonging to him.
“Such as I have described is ever an affectionate lover and a faithful
friend, delighting in that which is in conformity with his own nature.
Whenever, therefore, any such as I have described are impetuously
struck, through the sentiment of their former union, with love and
desire and the want of community, they are unwilling to be divided
even for a moment. These are they who devote their whole lives to each
other, with a vain and inexpressible longing to obtain from each other
something they know not what; for it is not merely the sensual delights
of their intercourse for the sake of which they dedicate themselves to
each other with such serious affection; but the soul of each manifestly
thirsts for, from the other, something which there are no words to
describe, and divines that which it seeks, and traces obscurely the
footsteps of its obscure desire. If Vulcan should say to persons thus
affected, ‘My good people, what is it that you want with one another?’
And if, while they were hesitating what to answer, he should proceed
to ask, ‘Do you not desire the closest union and singleness to exist
between you, so that you may never be divided night or day? If so, I
will melt you together, and make you grow into one, so that both in
life and death ye may be undivided. Consider, is this what you desire?
Will it content you if you become that which I propose?’ We all know
that no one would refuse such an offer, but would at once feel that
this was what he had ever sought; and intimately to mix and melt and to
be melted together with his beloved, so that one should be made out of
two.
“The cause of this desire is, that according to our original nature,
we were once entire. The desire and the pursuit of integrity and union
is that which we all love. First, as I said, we were entire, but now
we have been dwindled through our own weakness, as the Arcadians by
the Lacedemonians. There is reason to fear, if we are guilty of any
additional impiety towards the Gods, that we may be cut in two again,
and may go about like those figures painted on the columns, divided
through the middle of our nostrils, as thin as lispæ. On which account
every man ought to be exhorted to pay due reverence to the Gods, that
we may escape so severe a punishment, and obtain those things which
Love, our general and commander, incites us to desire; against whom
let none rebel by exciting the hatred of the Gods. For if we continue
on good terms with them, we may discover and possess those lost and
concealed objects of our love; a good-fortune which now befalls to few.
“I assert, then, that the happiness of all, both men and women,
consists singly in the fulfilment of their love, and in that possession
of its objects by which we are in some degree restored to our ancient
nature. If this be the completion of felicity, that must necessarily
approach nearest to it, in which we obtain the possession and society
of those whose natures most intimately accord with our own. And if
we would celebrate any God as the author of this benefit, we should
justly celebrate Love with hymns of joy; who, in our present condition,
brings good assistance in our necessity, and affords great hopes, if
we persevere in piety towards the Gods, that he will restore us to our
original state, and confer on us the complete happiness alone suited to
our nature.
“Such, Eryximachus, is my discourse on the subject of Love; different
indeed from yours, which I nevertheless entreat you not to turn into
ridicule, that we may not interrupt what each has separately to deliver
on the subject.”
“I will refrain at present,” said Eryximachus, “for your discourse
delighted me. And if I did not know that Socrates and Agathon
were profoundly versed in the science of love affairs, I should
fear that they had nothing new to say, after so many and such
various imaginations. As it is, I confide in the fertility of their
geniuses.”--“Your part of the contest, at least, was strenuously
fought, Eryximachus,” said Socrates, “but if you had been in the
situation in which I am, or rather shall be, after the discourse of
Agathon, like me, you would then have reason to fear, and be reduced to
your wits’ end.”--“Socrates,” said Agathon, “wishes to confuse me with
the enchantments of his wit, sufficiently confused already with the
expectation I see in the assembly in favour of my discourse.”--“I must
have lost my memory, Agathon,” replied Socrates, “if I imagine that you
could be disturbed by a few private persons, after having witnessed
your firmness and courage in ascending the rostrum with the actors,
and in calmly reciting your compositions in the presence of so great
an assembly as that which decreed you the prize of tragedy.”--“What
then, Socrates,” retorted Agathon, “do you think me so full of the
theatre as to be ignorant that the judgment of a few wise is more
awful than that of a multitude of others, to one who rightly balances
the value of their suffrages?”--“I should judge ill indeed, Agathon,”
answered Socrates, “in thinking you capable of any rude and unrefined
conception, for I well know that if you meet with any whom you consider
wise, you esteem such alone of more value than all others. But we
are far from being entitled to this distinction, for we were also of
that assembly, and to be numbered among the rest. But should you meet
with any who are really wise, you would be careful to say nothing in
their presence which you thought they would not approve--is it not
so?”--“Certainly,” replied Agathon.--“You would not then exercise
the same caution in the presence of the multitude in which they were
included?”--“My dear Agathon,” said Phædrus, interrupting him, “if
you answer all the questions of Socrates, they will never have an
end; he will urge them without conscience so long as he can get any
person, especially one who is so beautiful, to dispute with him. I own
it delights me to hear Socrates discuss; but at present, I must see
that Love is not defrauded of the praise, which it is my province to
exact from each of you. Pay the God his due, and then reason between
yourselves if you will.”
“Your admonition is just, Phædrus,” replied Agathon, “nor need any
reasoning I hold with Socrates impede me: we shall find many future
opportunities for discussion. I will begin my discourse then; first
having defined what ought to be the subject of it. All who have
already spoken seem to me not so much to have praised Love, as to
have felicitated mankind on the many advantages of which that deity
is the cause; what he is, the author of these great benefits, none
have yet declared. There is one mode alone of celebration which would
comprehend the whole topic, namely, first to declare what are those
benefits, and then what he is who is the author of those benefits,
which are the subject of our discourse. Love ought first to be praised,
and then his gifts declared. I assert, then, that although all the
Gods are immortally happy, Love, if I dare trust my voice to express
so awful a truth, is the happiest, and most excellent, and the most
beautiful. That he is the most beautiful is evident; first, O Phædrus,
from this circumstance, that he is the youngest of the Gods; and,
secondly, from his fleetness, and from his repugnance to all that
is old; for he escapes with the swiftness of wings from old age; a
thing in itself sufficiently swift, since it overtakes us sooner than
there is need; and which Love, who delights in the intercourse of the
young, hates, and in no manner can be induced to enter into community
with. The ancient proverb, which says that like is attracted by like,
applies to the attributes of Love. I concede many things to you, O
Phædrus, but this I do not concede, that Love is more ancient than
Saturn and Jupiter. I assert that he is not only the youngest of the
Gods, but invested with everlasting youth. Those ancient deeds among
the Gods recorded by Hesiod and Parmenides, if their relations are to
be considered as true, were produced not by Love, but by Necessity. For
if Love had been then in Heaven, those violent and sanguinary crimes
never would have taken place; but there would ever have subsisted that
affection and peace, in which the Gods now live, under the influence of
Love.
“He is young, therefore, and being young is tender and soft. There were
need of some poet like Homer to celebrate the delicacy and tenderness
of Love. For Homer says, that the goddess Calamity is delicate, and
that her feet are tender. ‘Her feet are soft,’ he says, ‘for she treads
not upon the ground, but makes her path upon the heads of men.’ He
gives as an evidence of her tenderness, that she walks not upon that
which is hard, but that which is soft. The same evidence is sufficient
to make manifest the tenderness of Love. For Love walks not upon the
earth, nor over the heads of men, which are not indeed very soft; but
he dwells within, and treads on the softest of existing things, having
established his habitation within the souls and inmost nature of Gods
and men; not indeed in all souls--for wherever he chances to find a
hard and rugged disposition, there he will not inhabit, but only where
it is most soft and tender. Of needs must he be the most delicate of
all things, who touches lightly with his feet only the softest parts of
those things which are the softest of all.
“He is then the youngest and the most delicate of all divinities; and
in addition to this, he is, as it were, the most moist and liquid.
For if he were otherwise, he could not, as he does, fold himself
around everything, and secretly flow out and into every soul. His
loveliness, that which Love possesses far beyond all other things, is
a manifestation of the liquid and flowing symmetry of his form; for
between deformity and Love there is eternal contrast and repugnance.
His life is spent among flowers, and this accounts for the immortal
fairness of his skin; for the winged Love rests not in his flight on
any form, or within any soul the flower of whose loveliness is faded,
but there remains most willingly where is the odour and radiance of
blossoms, yet unwithered. Concerning the beauty of the God, let this be
sufficient, though many things must remain unsaid. Let us next consider
the virtue and power of Love.
“What is most admirable in Love is, that he neither inflicts nor
endures injury in his relations either with Gods or men. Nor if he
suffers any thing does he suffer it through violence, nor doing any
thing does he act it with violence, for Love is never even touched
with violence. Every one willingly administers every thing to Love;
and that which every one voluntarily concedes to another, the laws,
which are the kings of the republic, decree that is just for him to
possess. In addition to justice, Love participates in the highest
temperance; for if temperance is defined to be the being superior to
and holding under dominion pleasures and desires; then Love, than whom
no pleasure is more powerful, and who is thus more powerful than all
persuasions and delights, must be excellently temperate. In power and
valour Mars cannot contend with Love: the love of Venus possesses Mars;
the possessor is always superior to the possessed, and he who subdues
the most powerful must of necessity be the most powerful of all.
“The justice and temperance and valour of the God have been thus
declared;--there remains to exhibit his wisdom. And first, that, like
Eryximachus, I may honour my own profession, the God is a wise poet;
so wise that he can even make a poet one who was not before: for every
one, even if before he were ever so undisciplined, becomes a poet as
soon as he is touched by Love;--a sufficient proof that Love is a great
poet, and well skilled in that science according to the discipline
of music. For what any one possesses not, or knows not, that can he
neither give nor teach another. And who will deny that the divine
poetry, by which all living things are produced upon the earth, is not
harmonised by the wisdom of Love? Is it not evident that Love was the
author of all the arts of life with which we are acquainted, and that
he whose teacher has been Love, becomes eminent and illustrious, whilst
he who knows not Love, remains forever unregarded and obscure? Apollo
invented medicine, and divination, and archery, under the guidance
of desire and Love; so that Apollo was the disciple of Love. Through
him the Muses discovered the arts of literature, and Vulcan that of
moulding brass, and Minerva the loom, and Jupiter the mystery of the
dominion which he now exercises over gods and men. So were the Gods
taught and disciplined by the love of that which is beautiful; for
there is no love towards deformity.
“At the origin of things, as I have before said, many fearful deeds are
reported to have been done among the Gods, on account of the dominion
of Necessity. But so soon as this deity sprang forth from the desire
which forever tends in the universe towards that which is lovely, then
all blessings descended upon all living things, human and divine. Love
seems to me, O Phædrus, a divinity the most beautiful and the best of
all, and the author to all others of the excellencies with which his
own nature is endowed. Nor can I restrain the poetic enthusiasm which
takes possession of my discourse, and bids me declare that Love is
the divinity who creates peace among men, and calm upon the sea, the
windless silence of storms, repose and sleep in sadness. Love divests
us of all alienation from each other, and fills our vacant hearts with
overflowing sympathy; he gathers us together in such social meetings
as we now delight to celebrate, our guardian and our guide in dances,
and sacrifices, and feasts. Yes, Love, who showers benignity upon the
world, and before whose presence all harsh passions flee and perish;
the author of all soft affections; the destroyer of all ungentle
thoughts; merciful, mild; the object of the admiration of the wise, and
the delight of gods; possessed by the fortunate, and desired by the
unhappy, therefore unhappy because they possess him not; the father of
grace, and delicacy, and gentleness, and delight, and persuasion, and
desire; the cherisher of all that is good, the abolisher of all evil;
our most excellent pilot, defence, saviour and guardian in labour and
in fear, in desire and in reason; the ornament and governor of all
things human and divine; the best, the loveliest; in whose footsteps
every one ought to follow, celebrating him excellently in song, and
bearing each his part in that divinest harmony which Love sings to all
things which live and are, soothing the troubled minds of Gods and men.
This, O Phædrus, is what I have to offer in praise of the divinity;
partly composed, indeed, of thoughtless and playful fancies, and partly
of such serious ones as I could well command.”
No sooner had Agathon ceased, than a loud murmur of applause arose from
all present; so becomingly had the fair youth spoken, both in praise
of the God, and in extenuation of himself. Then Socrates, addressing
Eryximachus, said, “Was not my fear reasonable, son of Acumenus? Did
I not divine what has, in fact, happened,--that Agathon’s discourse
would be so wonderfully beautiful, as to preoccupy all interest in
what I should say?”--“You, indeed, divined well so far, O Socrates,”
said Eryximachus, “that Agathon would speak eloquently, but not that,
therefore, you would be reduced to any difficulty.”--“How, my good
friend, can I or any one else be otherwise than reduced to difficulty,
who speak after a discourse so various and so eloquent, and which
otherwise had been sufficiently wonderful, if, at the conclusion,
the splendour of the sentences, and the choice selection of the
expressions, had not struck all the hearers with astonishment; so that
I, who well know that I can never say anything nearly so beautiful as
this, would, if there had been any escape, have run away for shame. The
story of Gorgias came into my mind, and I was afraid lest in reality
I should suffer what Homer describes; and lest Agathon, scanning my
discourse with the head of the eloquent Gorgias, should turn me to
stone for speechlessness. I immediately perceived how ridiculously
I had engaged myself with you to assume a part in rendering praise
to love, and had boasted that I was well skilled in amatory matters,
being so ignorant of the manner in which it is becoming to render him
honour, as I now perceive myself to be. I, in my simplicity, imagined
that the truth ought to be spoken concerning each of the topics of
our praise, and that it would be sufficient, choosing those which
are the most honourable to the God, to place them in as luminous an
arrangement as we could. I had, therefore, great hopes that I should
speak satisfactorily, being well aware that I was acquainted with the
true foundations of the praise which we have engaged to render. But
since, as it appears, our purpose has been, not to render Love his
due honour, but to accumulate the most beautiful and the greatest
attributes of his divinity, whether they in truth belong to it or not,
and that the proposed question is not how Love ought to be praised, but
how we should praise him most eloquently, my attempt must of necessity
fail. It is on this account, I imagine, that in your discourses you
have attributed everything to Love, and have described him to be the
author of such and so great effects as, to those who are ignorant of
his true nature, may exhibit him as the most beautiful and the best of
all things. Not, indeed, to those who know the truth. Such praise has a
splendid and imposing effect, but as I am unacquainted with the art of
rendering it, my mind, which could not foresee what would be required
of me, absolves me from that which my tongue promised. Farewell, then,
for such praise I can never render.
“But if you desire, I will speak what I feel to be true; and that I
may not expose myself to ridicule, I entreat you to consider that I
speak without entering into competition with those who have preceded
me. Consider, then, Phædrus, whether you will exact from me such a
discourse, containing the mere truth with respect to Love, and composed
of such unpremeditated expressions as may chance to offer themselves to
my mind.”--Phædrus and the rest bade him speak in the manner which he
judged most befitting.--“Permit me, then, O Phædrus, to ask Agathon
a few questions, so that, confirmed by his agreement with me, I may
proceed.”--“Willingly,” replied Phædrus, “ask.”--Then Socrates thus
began:--
“I applaud, dear Agathon, the beginning of your discourse, where you
say we ought first to define and declare what Love is, and then his
works. This rule I particularly approve. But, come, since you have
given us a discourse of such beauty and majesty concerning Love, you
are able, I doubt not, to explain this question, whether Love is
the love of something or nothing? I do not ask you of what parents
Love is; for the inquiry, of whether Love is the love of any father
or mother, would be sufficiently ridiculous. But if I were asking
you to describe that which a father is, I should ask, not whether a
father was the love of any one, but whether a father was the father
of any one or not; you would undoubtedly reply, that a father was the
father of a son or daughter; would you not?”--“Assuredly.”--“You would
define a mother in the same manner?”--“Without doubt.”--“Yet bear
with me, and answer a few more questions, for I would learn from you
that which I wish to know. If I should inquire, in addition, is not a
brother, through the very nature of his relation, the brother of some
one?”--“Certainly.”--“Of a brother or sister, is he not?”--“Without
question.”--“Try to explain to me then the nature of Love; Love is the
love of something or nothing?”--“Of something, certainly.”
“Observe and remember this concession. Tell me yet farther, whether
Love desires that of which it is the Love or not?”--“It desires it,
assuredly.”--“Whether possessing that which it desires and loves, or
not possessing it, does it desire and love?”--“Not possessing it, I
should imagine.”--“Observe now, whether it does not appear, that, of
necessity, desire desires that which it wants and does not possess,
and no longer desires that which it no longer wants: this appears
to me, Agathon, of necessity to be; how does it appear to you?”--“It
appears so to me also.”--“Would any one who was already illustrious,
desire to be illustrious; would any one already strong, desire to
be strong? From what has already been conceded, it follows that he
would not. If any one already strong, should desire to be strong; or
any one already swift, should desire to be swift; or any one already
healthy, should desire to be healthy, it must be concluded that they
still desired the advantages of which they already seemed possessed.
To destroy the foundation of this error, observe, Agathon, that each
of these persons must possess the several advantages in question, at
the moment present to our thoughts, whether he will or no. And, now, is
it possible that those advantages should be at that time the objects
of his desire? For, if any one should say, being in health, ‘I desire
to be in health;’ being rich, ‘I desire to be rich, and thus still
desire those things which I already possess;’ we might say to him,
‘You, my friend, possess health, and strength, and riches; you do not
desire to possess now, but to continue to possess them in future; for,
whether you will or no, they now belong to you. Consider then, whether,
when you say that you desire things present to you, and in your own
possession, you say anything else than that you desire the advantages
to be for the future also in your possession.’ What else could he
reply?”--“Nothing, indeed.”--“Is not Love, then, the love of that
which is not within its reach, and which cannot hold in security, for
the future, those things of which it obtains a present and transitory
possession?”--“Evidently.”--“Love, therefore, and everything else that
desires anything, desires that which is absent and beyond his reach,
that which it has not, that which is not itself, that which it wants;
such are the things of which there are desire and love?”--“Assuredly.”
“Come,” said Socrates, “let us review your concessions. Is Love
anything else than the love first of something; and, secondly, of
those things of which it has need?”--“Nothing.”--“Now, remember of
those things you said in your discourse, that Love was the love--if
you wish I will remind you. I think you said something of this kind,
that all the affairs of the gods were admirably disposed through the
love of the things which are beautiful; for, there was no love of
things deformed; did you not say so?”--“I confess that I did.”--“You
said what was most likely to be true, my friend; and if the matter be
so, the love of beauty must be one thing, and the love of deformity
another.”--“Certainly.”--“It is conceded, then, that Love loves that
which he wants but possesses not?”--“Yes, certainly.”--“But Love
wants and does not possess beauty?”--“Indeed it must necessarily
follow.”--“What, then! call you that beautiful which has need of beauty
and possesses not?”--“Assuredly no.”--“Do you still assert, then,
that Love is beautiful, if all that we have said be true?”--“Indeed,
Socrates,” said Agathon, “I am in danger of being convicted of
ignorance, with respect to all that I then spoke.”--“You spoke most
eloquently, my dear Agathon; but bear with my questions yet a moment.
You admit that things which are good are also beautiful?”--“No
doubt.”--“If Love, then, be in want of beautiful things, and things
which are good are beautiful, he must be in want of things which are
good?”--“I cannot refute your arguments, Socrates.”--“You cannot refute
truth, my dear Agathon: to refute Socrates is nothing difficult.
“But I will dismiss these questionings. At present let me endeavour,
to the best of my power, to repeat to you, on the basis of the points
which have been agreed upon between me and Agathon, a discourse
concerning Love, which I formerly heard from the prophetess Diotima,
who was profoundly skilled in this and many other doctrines, and who,
ten years before the pestilence, procured to the Athenians, through
their sacrifices, a delay of the disease; for it was she who taught me
the science of things relating to Love.
“As you well remarked, Agathon, we ought to declare who and what
is Love, and then his works. It is easiest to relate them in the
same order as the foreign prophetess observed when, questioning
me, she related them. For I said to her much the same things that
Agathon has just said to me--that Love was a great deity, and that
he was beautiful; and she refuted me with the same reasons as I
have employed to refute Agathon, compelling me to infer that he was
neither beautiful nor good, as I said.--‘What then,’ I objected, ‘O
Diotima, is Love ugly and evil?’--‘Good words, I entreat you,’ said
Diotima; ‘do you think that every thing which is not beautiful, must
of necessity be ugly?’--‘Certainly.’--‘And everything that is not
wise, ignorant? Do you not perceive that there is something between
ignorance and wisdom?’--‘What is that?’--‘To have a right opinion or
conjecture. Observe, that this kind of opinion, for which no reason can
be rendered, cannot be called knowledge; for how can that be called
knowledge, which is without evidence or reason? Nor ignorance, on the
other hand; for how can that be called ignorance which arrives at the
persuasion of that which it really is? A right opinion is something
between understanding and ignorance.’--I confessed that what she
alleged was true.--‘Do not then say,’ she continued, ‘that what is
not beautiful is of necessity deformed, nor what is not good is of
necessity evil; nor, since you have confessed that Love is neither
beautiful nor good, infer, therefore, that he is deformed or evil, but
rather something intermediate.’
“‘But,’ I said, ‘love is confessed by all to be a great God.’--‘Do
you mean, when you say all, all those who know, or those who know
not, what they say?’--‘All collectively.’--‘And how can that be,
Socrates?’ said she laughing; ‘how can he be acknowledged to be a great
God, by those who assert that he is not even a God at all?’--‘And who
are they?’ I said--‘You for one, and I for another.’--‘How can you
say that, Diotima?’--‘Easily,’ she replied, ‘and with truth; for tell
me, do you not own that all the Gods are beautiful and happy? or will
you presume to maintain that any God is otherwise?’--‘By Jupiter, not
I!’--‘Do you not call those alone happy who possess all things that
are beautiful and good?’--‘Certainly.’--‘You have confessed that Love,
through his desire for things beautiful and good, possesses not those
materials of happiness.’--‘Indeed such was my concession.’--‘But how
can we conceive a God to be without the possession of what is beautiful
and good?’--‘In no manner, I confess.’--‘Observe, then, that you do
not consider Love to be a God.’--‘What, then,’ I said, ‘is Love a
mortal?’--‘By no means.’--‘But what, then?’--‘Like those things which I
have before instanced, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but something
intermediate.’--‘What is that, O Diotima?’--‘A great dæmon, Socrates;
and everything dæmoniacal holds an intermediate place between what is
divine and what is mortal.’
“‘What is his power and nature?’ I inquired.--‘He interprets and makes
a communication between divine and human things, conveying the prayers
and sacrifices of men to the Gods, and communicating the commands
and directions concerning the mode of worship most pleasing to them,
from Gods to men. He fills up that intermediate space between these
two classes of beings, so as to bind together, by his own power, the
whole universe of things. Through him subsist all divination, and the
science of sacred things as it relates to sacrifices, and expiations,
and disenchantments, and prophecy, and magic. The divine nature cannot
immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse
and converse which is conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they
sleep and when they wake, subsists through the intervention of Love;
and he who is wise in the science of this intercourse is supremely
happy, and participates in the dæmoniacal nature; whilst he who is
wise in any other science or art, remains a mere ordinary slave. These
dæmons are, indeed, many and various, and one of them is Love.’
“‘Who are the parents of Love?’ I inquired.--‘The history of what you
ask,’ replied Diotima, ‘is somewhat long; nevertheless I will explain
it to you. On the birth of Venus the Gods celebrated a great feast,
and among them came Plenty, the son of Metis. After supper, Poverty,
observing the profusion, came to beg, and stood beside the door. Plenty
being drunk with nectar, for wine was not yet invented, went out into
Jupiter’s garden, and fell into a deep sleep. Poverty wishing to have
a child by Plenty, on account of her low estate, lay down by him, and
from his embraces conceived Love. Love is, therefore, the follower and
servant of Venus, because he was conceived at her birth, and because by
nature he is a lover of all that is beautiful, and Venus was beautiful.
And since Love is the child of Poverty and Plenty, his nature and
fortune participate in that of his parents. He is for ever poor, and
so far from being delicate and beautiful, as mankind imagine, he is
squalid and withered; he flies low along the ground, and is homeless
and unsandalled; he sleeps without covering before the doors, and in
the unsheltered streets; possessing thus far his mother’s nature, that
he is ever the companion of want. But, inasmuch as he participates in
that of his father, he is for ever scheming to obtain things which are
good and beautiful; he is fearless, vehement, and strong; a dreadful
hunter, for ever weaving some new contrivance; exceedingly cautious
and prudent, and full of resources; he is also, during his whole
existence, a philosopher, a powerful enchanter, a wizard, and a subtle
sophist. And, as his nature is neither mortal nor immortal, on the same
day when he is fortunate and successful, he will at one time flourish,
and then die away, and then, according to his father’s nature, again
revive. All that he acquires perpetually flows away from him, so that
Love is never either rich or poor, and holding for ever an intermediate
state between ignorance and wisdom. The case stands thus;--no God
philosophises or desires to become wise, for he is wise; nor, if there
exist any other being who is wise, does he philosophise. Nor do the
ignorant philosophise, for they desire not to become wise; for this
is the evil of ignorance, that he who has neither intelligence, nor
virtue, nor delicacy of sentiment, imagines that he possesses all
those things sufficiently. He seeks not, therefore, that possession,
of whose want he is not aware.’--‘Who, then, O Diotima,’ I inquired,
‘are philosophers, if they are neither the ignorant nor the wise?’--‘It
is evident, even to a child, that they are those intermediate persons,
among whom is Love. For Wisdom is one of the most beautiful of all
things; Love is that which thirsts for the beautiful, so that Love is
of necessity a philosopher, philosophy being an intermediate state
between ignorance and wisdom. His parentage accounts for his condition,
being the child of a wise and well provided father, and of a mother
both ignorant and poor.
“‘Such is the dæmoniacal nature, my dear Socrates; nor do I wonder at
your error concerning Love, for you thought, as I conjecture from what
you say, that Love was not the lover but the beloved, and thence, well
concluded that he must be supremely beautiful; for that which is the
object of Love must indeed be fair, and delicate, and perfect, and
most happy; but Love inherits, as I have declared, a totally opposite
nature.’--‘Your words have persuasion in them, O stranger,’ I said;
‘be it as you say. But this Love, what advantages does he afford to
men?’--‘I will proceed to explain it to you, Socrates. Love being such
and so produced as I have described, is, indeed, as you say, the love
of things which are beautiful. But if any one should ask us, saying:
O Socrates and Diotima, why is Love the love of beautiful things? Or,
in plainer words, what does the lover of that which is beautiful,
love in the object of his love, and seek from it?’--‘He seeks,’ I
said, interrupting her, ‘the property and possession of it.’--‘But
that,’ she replied, ‘might still be met with another question, What
has he, who possesses that which is beautiful?’--‘Indeed, I cannot
immediately reply.’--‘But, if changing the beautiful for good, any one
should inquire,--I ask, O Socrates, what is that which he who loves
that which is good, loves in the object of his love?’--‘To be in his
possession,’ I replied.--‘And what has he, who has the possession of
good?’--‘This question is of easier solution, he is happy.’--‘Those who
are happy, then, are happy through the possession; and it is useless
to inquire what he desires, who desires to be happy; the question
seems to have a complete reply. But do you think that this wish and
this love are common to all men, and that all desire that that which
is good should be for ever present to them?’--‘Certainly, common to
all.’--‘Why do we not say then, Socrates, that every one loves? if,
indeed, all love perpetually the same thing? But we say that some love,
and some do not.’--‘Indeed I wonder why it is so.’--‘Wonder not,’ said
Diotima, ‘for we select a particular species of love, and apply to it
distinctively, the appellation of that which is universal.’----
“‘Give me an example of such a select application.’--‘Poetry; which is
a general name signifying every cause whereby anything proceeds from
that which is not, into that which is; so that the exercise of every
inventive art is poetry, and all such artists poets. Yet they are
not called poets, but distinguished by other names; and one portion
or species of poetry, that which has relation to music and rhythm,
is divided from all others, and known by the name belonging to all.
For this is alone properly called poetry, and those who exercise the
art of this species of poetry, poets. So with respect to Love. Love
is indeed universally all that earnest desire for the possession of
happiness and that which is good; the greatest and the subtlest love,
and which inhabits the heart of every living being; but those who seek
this object through the acquirement of wealth, or the exercise of the
gymnastic arts, or philosophy, are not said to love, nor are called
lovers; one species alone is called love, and those alone are said to
be lovers, and to love, who seek the attainment of the universal desire
through one species of love, which is peculiarly distinguished by the
name belonging to the whole. It is asserted by some, that they love,
who are seeking the lost half of their divided being. But I assert,
that Love is neither the love of half nor of the whole, unless, my
friend, it meets with that which is good; since men willingly cut off
their own hands and feet, if they think that they are the cause of
evil to them. Nor do they cherish and embrace that which may belong
to themselves, merely because it is their own; unless, indeed, any
one should choose to say, that that which is good is attached to his
own nature and is his own, whilst that which is evil is foreign and
accidental; but love nothing but that which is good. Does it not appear
so to you?’--‘Assuredly.’--‘Can we then simply affirm that men love
that which is good?’--‘Without doubt.’--‘What, then, must we not add,
that, in addition to loving that which is good, they love that it
should be present to themselves?’--‘Indeed that must be added.’--‘And
not merely that it should be present, but that it should ever be
present?’--‘This also must be added.’
“‘Love, then, is collectively the desire in men that good should
be for ever present to them.’--‘Most true.’--‘Since this is the
general definition of Love, can you explain in what mode of attaining
its object, and in what species of actions, does Love peculiarly
consist?’--‘If I knew what you ask, O Diotima, I should not have so
much wondered at your wisdom, nor have sought you out for the purpose
of deriving improvement from your instructions.’--‘I will tell you,’
she replied: ‘Love is the desire of generation in the beautiful, both
with relation to the body and the soul.’--‘I must be a diviner to
comprehend what you say, for, being such as I am, I confess that I do
not understand it.’--‘But I will explain it more clearly. The bodies
and the souls of all human beings are alike pregnant with their future
progeny, and when we arrive at a certain age, our nature impels us to
bring forth and propagate. This nature is unable to produce in that
which is deformed, but it can produce in that which is beautiful.
The intercourse of the male and female in generation, a divine work,
through pregnancy and production, is, as it were, something immortal in
mortality. These things cannot take place in that which is incongruous;
for that which is deformed is incongruous, but that which is beautiful
is congruous with what is mortal and divine. Beauty is, therefore,
the fate, and the Juno Lucina to generation. Wherefore, whenever that
which is pregnant with the generative principle, approaches that which
is beautiful, it becomes transported with delight, and is poured forth
in overflowing pleasure, and propagates. But when it approaches that
which is deformed it is contracted by sadness, and being repelled and
checked, it does not produce, but retains unwillingly that with which
it is pregnant. Wherefore, to one pregnant, and, as it were, already
bursting with the load of his desire, the impulse towards that which
is beautiful is intense, on account of the great pain of retaining
that which he has conceived. Love, then, O Socrates, is not as you
imagine the love of the beautiful.’--‘What, then?’--‘Of generation and
production in the beautiful.’--‘Why then of generation?’--‘Generation
is something eternal and immortal in mortality. It necessarily, from
what has been confessed, follows, that we must desire immortality
together with what is good, since Love is the desire that good be
for ever present to us. Of necessity Love must also be the desire of
immortality.’
“Diotima taught me all this doctrine in the discourse we had together
concerning Love; and, in addition, she inquired, ‘What do you think,
Socrates, is the cause of this love and desire? Do you not perceive
how all animals, both those of the earth and of the air, are affected
when they desire the propagation of their species, affected even to
weakness and disease by the impulse of their love; first, longing
to be mixed with each other, and then seeking nourishment for their
offspring, so that the feeblest are ready to contend with the strongest
in obedience to this law, and to die for the sake of their young, or to
waste away with hunger, and do or suffer anything so that they may not
want nourishment. It might be said that human beings do these things
through reason, but can you explain why other animals are thus affected
through love?’--I confessed that I did not know.--‘Do you imagine
yourself,’ said she, ‘to be skilful in the science of Love, if you are
ignorant of these things?’--‘As I said before, O Diotima, I come to
you, well knowing how much I am in need of a teacher. But explain to
me, I entreat you, the cause of these things, and of the other things
relating to Love.’--‘If,’ said Diotima, ‘you believe that Love is of
the same nature as we have mutually agreed upon, wonder not that such
are its effects. For the mortal nature seeks, so far as it is able, to
become deathless and eternal. But it can only accomplish this desire
by generation, which for ever leaves another new in place of the old.
For, although each human being be severally said to live, and be the
same from youth to old age, yet, that which is called the same, never
contains within itself the same things, but always is becoming new by
the loss and change of that which it possessed before; both the hair
and the flesh, and the bones, and the entire body.
“‘And not only does this change take place in the body, but also with
respect to the soul. Manners, morals, opinions, desires, pleasures,
sorrows, fears; none of these ever remain unchanged in the same
persons; but some die away, and others are produced. And, what is yet
more strange is, that not only does some knowledge spring up, and
another decay, and that we are never the same with respect to our
knowledge, but that each several object of our thoughts suffers the
same revolution. That which is called meditation, or the exercise of
memory, is the science of the escape or departure of memory; for,
forgetfulness is the going out of knowledge; and meditation, calling
up a new memory in the place of that which has departed, preserves
knowledge; so that, though for ever displaced and restored, it seems to
be the same. In this manner every thing mortal is preserved: not that
it is constant and eternal, like that which is divine; but that in the
place of what has grown old and is departed, it leaves another new like
that which it was itself. By this contrivance, O Socrates, does what
is mortal, the body and all other things, partake of immortality; that
which is immortal, is immortal in another manner. Wonder not, then, if
every thing by nature cherishes that which was produced from itself,
for this earnest Love is a tendency towards eternity.’
“Having heard this discourse, I was astonished, and asked, ‘Can these
things be true, O wisest Diotima?’ And she, like an accomplished
sophist, said, ‘Know well, O Socrates, that if you only regard that
love of glory which inspires men, you will wonder at your own
unskilfulness in not having discovered all that I now declare. Observe
with how vehement a desire they are affected to become illustrious and
to prolong their glory into immortal time, to attain which object, far
more ardently than for the sake of their children, all men are ready to
engage in many dangers, and expend their fortunes, and submit to any
labours and incur any death. Do you believe that Alcestis would have
died in the place of Admetus, or Achilles for the revenge of Patroclus,
or Codrus for the kingdom of his posterity, if they had not believed
that the immortal memory of their actions, which we now cherish, would
have remained after their death? Far otherwise; all such deeds are done
for the sake of ever-living virtue, and this immortal glory which they
have obtained; and inasmuch as any one is of an excellent nature, so
much the more is he impelled to attain this reward. For they love what
is immortal.
“‘Those whose bodies alone are pregnant with this principle of
immortality are attracted by women, seeking through the production
of children what they imagine to be happiness and immortality and an
enduring remembrance; but they whose souls are far more pregnant than
their bodies, conceive and produce that which is more suitable to the
soul. What is suitable to the soul? Intelligence, and every other power
and excellence of the mind; of which all poets, and all other artists
who are creative and inventive, are the authors. The greatest and most
admirable wisdom is that which regulates the government of families
and states, and which is called moderation and justice. Whosoever,
therefore, from his youth feels his soul pregnant with the conception
of these excellences, is divine; and when due time arrives, desires to
bring forth; and wandering about, he seeks the beautiful in which he
may propagate what he has conceived; for there is no generation in
that which is deformed; he embraces those bodies which are beautiful
rather than those which are deformed, in obedience to the principle
which is within him, which is ever seeking to perpetuate itself. And
if he meets, in conjunction with loveliness of form, a beautiful,
generous, and gentle soul, he embraces both at once, and immediately
undertakes to educate this object of his love, and is inspired with an
overflowing persuasion to declare what is virtue, and what he ought to
be who would attain to its possession, and what are the duties which
it exacts. For, by the intercourse with, and as it were, the very
touch of that which is beautiful, he brings forth and produces what he
had formerly conceived; and nourishes and educates that which is thus
produced together with the object of his love, whose image, whether
absent or present, is never divided from his mind. So that those who
are thus united are linked by a nobler community and a firmer love,
as being the common parents of a lovelier and more endearing progeny
than the parents of other children. And every one who considers what
posterity Homer and Hesiod, and the other great poets, have left behind
them, the sources of their own immortal memory and renown, or what
children of his soul Lycurgus has appointed to be the guardians, not
only of Lacedæmon, but of all Greece; or what an illustrious progeny
of laws Solon has produced, and how many admirable achievements, both
among the Greeks and Barbarians, men have left as the pledges of that
love which subsisted between them and the beautiful, would choose
rather to be the parent of such children than those in a human shape.
For divine honours have often been rendered to them on account of such
children, but on account of those in human shape, never.
“‘Your own meditation, O Socrates, might perhaps have initiated you
in all these things which I have already taught you on the subject
of Love. But those perfect and sublime ends to which these are only
the means, I know not that you would have been competent to discover.
I will declare them, therefore, and will render them as intelligible
as possible: do you meanwhile strain all your attention to trace the
obscure depth of the subject. He who aspires to love rightly, ought
from his earliest youth to seek an intercourse with beautiful forms,
and first to make a single form the object of his love, and therein
to generate intellectual excellences. He ought, then, to consider
that beauty in whatever form it resides is the brother of that beauty
which subsists in another form; and if he ought to pursue that which
is beautiful in form, it would be absurd to imagine that beauty is not
one and the same thing in all forms, and would therefore remit much
of his ardent preference towards one, through his perception of the
multitude of claims upon his love. In addition, he would consider the
beauty which is in souls more excellent than that which is in form.
So that one endowed with an admirable soul, even though the flower of
the form were withered, would suffice him as the object of his love
and care, and the companion with whom he might seek and produce such
conclusions as tend to the improvement of youth; so that it might
be led to observe the beauty and the conformity which there is in
the observation of its duties and the laws, and to esteem little the
mere beauty of the outward form. He would then conduct his pupil to
science, so that he might look upon the loveliness of wisdom; and that
contemplating thus the universal beauty, no longer would he unworthily
and meanly enslave himself to the attractions of one form in love,
nor one subject of discipline or science, but would turn towards the
wide ocean of intellectual beauty, and from the sight of the lovely
and majestic forms which it contains, would abundantly bring forth his
conceptions in philosophy; until, strengthened and confirmed, he should
at length steadily contemplate one science, which is the science of
this universal beauty.
“‘Attempt, I entreat you, to mark what I say with as keen an
observation as you can. He who has been disciplined to this point
in Love, by contemplating beautiful objects gradually, and in their
order, now arriving at the end of all that concerns Love, on a sudden
beholds a beauty wonderful in its nature. This is it, O Socrates, for
the sake of which all the former labours were endured. It is eternal,
unproduced, indestructible; neither subject to increase nor decay:
not, like other things, partly beautiful and partly deformed; not at
one time beautiful and at another time not; not beautiful in relation
to one thing and deformed in relation to another; not here beautiful
and there deformed; not beautiful in the estimation of one person and
deformed in that of another; nor can this supreme beauty be figured
to the imagination like a beautiful face, or beautiful hands, or any
portion of the body, nor like any discourse, nor any science. Nor
does it subsist in any other that lives or is, either in earth, or
in heaven, or in any other place; but it is eternally uniform and
consistent, and monoeidic with itself. All other things are beautiful
through a participation of it, with this condition, that although they
are subject to production and decay, it never becomes more or less, or
endures any change. When any one, ascending from a correct system of
Love, begins to contemplate this supreme beauty, he already touches the
consummation of his labour. For such as discipline themselves upon this
system, or are conducted by another beginning to ascend through these
transitory objects which are beautiful, towards that which is beauty
itself, proceeding as on steps from the love of one form to that of
two, and from that of two, to that of all forms which are beautiful;
and from beautiful forms to beautiful habits and institutions, and
from institutions to beautiful doctrines; until, from the meditation
of many doctrines, they arrive at that which is nothing else than
the doctrine of the supreme beauty itself, in the knowledge and
contemplation of which at length they repose.
“‘Such a life as this, my dear Socrates,’ exclaimed the stranger
Prophetess, ’spent in the contemplation of the beautiful, is the
life for men to live; which if you chance ever to experience, you
will esteem far beyond gold and rich garments, and even those lovely
persons whom you and many others now gaze on with astonishment, and are
prepared neither to eat nor drink so that you may behold and live for
ever with these objects of your love! What then shall we imagine to be
the aspect of the supreme beauty itself, simple, pure, uncontaminated
with the intermixture of human flesh and colours, and all other idle
and unreal shapes attendant on mortality; the divine, the original,
the supreme, the monoeidic beautiful itself? What must be the life of
him who dwells with and gazes on that which it becomes us all to seek?
Think you not that to him alone is accorded the prerogative of bringing
forth, not images and shadows of virtue, for he is in contact not
with a shadow but with reality; with virtue itself, in the production
and nourishment of which he becomes dear to the Gods, and if such a
privilege is conceded to any human being, himself immortal.’
“Such, O Phædrus, and my other friends, was what Diotima said.
And being persuaded by her words, I have since occupied myself in
attempting to persuade others, that it is not easy to find a better
assistant than Love in seeking to communicate immortality to our human
natures. Wherefore I exhort every one to honour Love; I hold him in
honour, and chiefly exercise myself in amatory matters, and exhort
others to do so; and now and ever do I praise the power and excellence
of Love, in the best manner that I can. Let this discourse, if it
pleases you, Phædrus, be considered as an encomium of Love; or call it
by what other name you will.”
The whole assembly praised his discourse, and Aristophanes was on the
point of making some remarks on the allusion made by Socrates to him
in a part of his discourse, when suddenly they heard a loud knocking
at the door of the vestibule, and a clamour as of revellers, attended
by a flute-player.--“Go, boys,” said Agathon, “and see who is there:
if they are any of our friends, call them in; if not, say that we have
already done drinking.”--A minute afterwards, they heard the voice of
Alcibiades in the vestibule excessively drunk and roaring out:--“Where
is Agathon? Lead me to Agathon!”--The flute-player, and some of his
companions then led him in, and placed him against the door-post,
crowned with a thick crown of ivy and violets, and having a quantity
of fillets on his head.--“My friends,” he cried out, “hail! I am
excessively drunk already, but I’ll drink with you, if you will. If
not, we will go away after having crowned Agathon, for which purpose I
came. I assure you that I could not come yesterday, but I am now here
with these fillets round my temples, that from my own head I may crown
his who, with your leave, is the most beautiful and wisest of men. Are
you laughing at me because I am drunk? Ay, I know what I say is true,
whether you laugh or not. But tell me at once whether I shall come in,
or no. Will you drink with me?”
Agathon and the whole party desired him to come in, and recline among
them; so he came in, led by his companions. He then unbound his fillets
that he might crown Agathon, and though Socrates was just before his
eyes, he did not see him, but sat down by Agathon, between Socrates and
him, for Socrates moved out of the way to make room for him. When he
sat down, he embraced Agathon and crowned him; and Agathon desired the
slaves to untie his sandals, that he might make a third, and recline
on the same couch. “By all means,” said Alcibiades, “but what third
companion have we here?” And at the same time turning round and seeing
Socrates, he leaped up and cried out:--“O Hercules! what have we here?
You, Socrates, lying in ambush for me wherever I go! and meeting me
just as you always do, when I least expected to see you! And, now, what
are you come here for? Why have you chosen to recline exactly in this
place, and not near Aristophanes, or any one else who is, or wishes
to be ridiculous, but have contrived to take your place beside the
most delightful person of the whole party?”--“Agathon,” said Socrates,
“see if you cannot defend me. I declare my friendship for this man is
a bad business: from the moment that I first began to know him I have
never been permitted to converse with, or so much as look upon any one
else. If I do, he is so jealous and suspicious that he does the most
extravagant things, and hardly refrains from beating me. I entreat you
to prevent him from doing anything of that kind at present. Procure
a reconciliation: or, if he perseveres in attempting any violence, I
entreat you to defend me.”--“Indeed,” said Alcibiades, “I will not be
reconciled to you; I shall find another opportunity to punish you for
this. But now,” said he, addressing Agathon, “lend me some of those
fillets, that I may crown the wonderful head of this fellow, lest I
incur the blame, that having crowned you, I neglected to crown him who
conquers all men with his discourses, not yesterday alone as you did,
but ever.”
Saying this he took the fillets, and having bound the head of
Socrates, and again having reclined, said: “Come, my friends, you
seem to be sober enough. You must not flinch, but drink, for that
was your agreement with me before I came in. I choose as president,
until you have drunk enough--myself. Come, Agathon, if you have got
a great goblet, fetch it out. But no matter, that wine-cooler will
do; bring it, boy!” And observing that it held more than eight cups,
he first drank it off, and then ordered it to be filled for Socrates,
and said:--“Observe, my friends, I cannot invent any scheme against
Socrates, for he will drink as much as any one desires him, and not
be in the least drunk.” Socrates, after the boy had filled up, drank
it off; and Eryximachus said:--“Shall we then have no conversation or
singing over our cups, but drink down stupidly, just as if we were
thirsty?” And Alcibiades said: “Ah, Eryximachus, I did not see you
before; hail, you excellent son of a wise and excellent father!”--“Hail
to you also,” replied Eryximachus, “but what shall we do?”--“Whatever
you command, for we ought to submit to your directions; a physician is
worth a hundred common men. Command us as you please.”--“Listen then,”
said Eryximachus, “before you came in, each of us had agreed to deliver
as eloquent a discourse as he could in praise of Love, beginning at
the right hand; all the rest of us have fulfilled our engagement; you
have not spoken, and yet have drunk with us: you ought to bear your
part in the discussion; and having done so, command what you please to
Socrates, who shall have the privilege of doing so to his right-hand
neighbour, and so on to the others.”--“Indeed, there appears some
justice in your proposal, Eryximachus, though it is rather unfair to
induce a drunken man to set his discourse in competition with that
of those who are sober. And, besides, did Socrates really persuade
you that what he just said about me was true, or do you not know that
matters are in fact exactly the reverse of his representation? For I
seriously believe that, should I praise in his presence, be he god or
man, any other beside himself, he would not keep his hands off me. But
I assure you, Socrates, I will praise no one beside yourself in your
presence.”
“Do so, then,” said Eryximachus, “praise Socrates if you
please.”--“What,” said Alcibiades, “shall I attack him, and punish
him before you all?”--“What have you got into your head now,” said
Socrates, “are you going to expose me to ridicule, and to misrepresent
me? Or what are you going to do?”--“I will only speak the truth; will
you permit me on this condition?”--“I not only permit, but exhort
you to say all the truth you know,” replied Socrates. “I obey you
willingly,” said Alcibiades, “and if I advance anything untrue, do you,
if you please, interrupt me, and convict me of misrepresentation, for
I would never willingly speak falsely. And bear with me if I do not
relate things in their order, but just as I remember them, for it is
not easy for a man in my present condition to enumerate systematically
all your singularities.
“I will begin the praise of Socrates by comparing him to a certain
statue. Perhaps he will think that this statue is introduced for
the sake of ridicule, but I assure you that it is necessary for the
illustration of truth. I assert, then, that Socrates is exactly like
those Silenuses that sit in the sculptors’ shops, and which are carved
holding flutes or pipes, but which, when divided in two, are found
to contain withinside the images of the gods. I assert that Socrates
is like the satyr Marsyas. That your form and appearance are like
these satyrs’, I think that even you will not venture to deny; and
how like you are to them in all other things, now hear. Are you not
scornful and petulant? If you deny this, I will bring witnesses. Are
you not a piper, and far more wonderful a one than he? For Marsyas,
and whoever now pipes the music that he taught, for that music which
is of heaven, and described as being taught by Marsyas, enchants men
through the power of the mouth. For if any musician, be he skilful or
not, awakens this music, it alone enables him to retain the minds of
men, and from the divinity of its nature makes evident those who are in
want of the gods and initiation. You differ only from Marsyas in this
circumstance, that you effect without instruments, by mere words, all
that he can do. For when we hear Pericles, or any other accomplished
orator, deliver a discourse, no one, as it were, cares any thing about
it. But when any one hears you, or even your words related by another,
though ever so rude and unskilful a speaker, be that person a woman,
man or child, we are struck and retained, as it were, by the discourse
clinging to our mind.
“If I was not afraid that I am a great deal too drunk, I would confirm
to you by an oath the strange effects which I assure you I have
suffered from his words, and suffer still; for when I hear him speak,
my heart leaps up far more than the hearts of those who celebrate
the Corybantic mysteries; my tears are poured out as he talks, a
thing I have seen happen to many others beside myself. I have heard
Pericles and other excellent orators, and have been pleased with their
discourses, but I suffered nothing of this kind; nor was my soul ever
on those occasions disturbed and filled with self-reproach, as if it
were slavishly laid prostrate. But this Marsyas here has often affected
me in the way I describe, until the life which I lead seemed hardly
worth living. Do not deny it, Socrates, for I well know that if even
now I chose to listen to you, I could not resist, but should again
suffer the same effects. For, my friends, he forces me to confess
that while I myself am still in want of many things, I neglect my own
necessities, and attend to those of the Athenians. I stop my ears,
therefore, as from the Syrens, and flee away as fast as possible, that
I may not sit down beside him and grow old in listening to his talk.
For this man has reduced me to feel the sentiment of shame, which I
imagine no one would readily believe was in me; he alone inspires me
with remorse and awe. For I feel in his presence my incapacity of
refuting what he says, or of refusing to do that which he directs;
but when I depart from him, the glory which the multitude confers
overwhelms me. I escape, therefore, and hide myself from him, and when
I see him I am overwhelmed with humiliation, because I have neglected
to do what I have confessed to him ought to be done; and often and
often have I wished that he were no longer to be seen among men. But if
that were to happen, I well know that I should suffer far greater pain;
so that where I can turn, or what I can do with this man, I know not.
All this have I and many others suffered from the pipings of this satyr.
“And observe, how like he is to what I said, and what a wonderful power
he possesses. Know that there is not one of you who is aware of the
real nature of Socrates; but since I have begun, I will make him plain
to you. You observe how passionately Socrates affects the intimacy of
those who are beautiful, and how ignorant he professes himself to be;
appearances in themselves excessively Silenic. This, my friends, is the
external form with which, like one of the sculptured Sileni, he has
clothed himself; for if you open him, you will find within admirable
temperance and wisdom. For he cares not for mere beauty, but despises
more than any one can imagine all external possessions, whether it be
beauty or wealth, or glory, or any other thing for which the multitude
felicitates the possessor. He esteems these things and us who honour
them, as nothing, and lives among men, making all the objects of their
admiration the playthings of his irony. But I know not if any one of
you have ever seen the divine images which are within, when he has been
opened and is serious. I have seen them, and they are so supremely
beautiful, so golden, so divine, and wonderful, that everything which
Socrates commands surely ought to be obeyed, even like the voice of a
God.
“At one time we were fellow-soldiers, and had our mess together in
the camp before Potidæa. Socrates there overcame not only me, but
every one beside, in endurance of toils: when, as often happens in a
campaign, we were reduced to few provisions, there were none who could
sustain hunger like Socrates; and when we had plenty, he alone seemed
to enjoy our military fare. He never drank much willingly, but when
he was compelled he conquered all even in that to which he was least
accustomed; and what is most astonishing, no person ever saw Socrates
drunk either then or at any other time. In the depth of winter (and the
winters there are excessively rigid,) he sustained calmly incredible
hardships; and amongst other things, whilst the frost was intolerably
severe, and no one went out of their tents, or if they went out, wrapt
themselves up carefully, and put fleeces under their feet, and bound
their legs with hairy skins, Socrates went out only with the same cloak
on that he usually wore, and walked barefoot upon the ice; more easily,
indeed, than those who had sandalled themselves so delicately: so that
the soldiers thought that he did it to mock their want of fortitude.
It would indeed be worth while to commemorate all that this brave man
did and endured in that expedition. In one instance he was seen early
in the morning, standing in one place wrapt in meditation; and as
he seemed not to be able to unravel the subject of his thoughts, he
still continued to stand as inquiring and discussing within himself,
and when noon came, the soldiers observed him, and said to one
another--‘Socrates has been standing there thinking, ever since the
morning.’ At last some Ionians came to the spot, and having supped, as
it was summer, bringing their blankets, they lay down to sleep in the
cool; they observed that Socrates continued to stand there the whole
night until morning, and that, when the sun rose, he saluted it with a
prayer and departed.
“I ought not to omit what Socrates is in battle. For in that battle
after which the generals decreed to me the prize of courage, Socrates
alone of all men was the saviour of my life, standing by me when I had
fallen and was wounded, and preserving both myself and my arms from the
hands of the enemy. On that occasion I entreated the generals to decree
the prize, as it was most due, to him. And this, O Socrates, you cannot
deny, that the generals wishing to conciliate a person of my rank,
desired to give me the prize, you were far more earnestly desirous than
the generals that this glory should be attributed not to yourself, but
me.
“But to see Socrates when our army was defeated and scattered in flight
at Delius, was a spectacle worthy to behold. On that occasion I was
among the cavalry, and he on foot, heavily armed. After the total rout
of our troops, he and Laches retreated together; I came up by chance,
and seeing them, bade them be of good cheer, for that I would not leave
them. As I was on horseback, and therefore less occupied by a regard of
my own situation, I could better observe than at Potidæa the beautiful
spectacle exhibited by Socrates on this emergency. How superior was
he to Laches in presence of mind and courage! Your representation of
him on the stage, O Aristophanes, was not wholly unlike his real self
on this occasion, for he walked and darted his regards around with a
majestic composure, looking tranquilly both on his friends and enemies;
so that it was evident to every one, even from afar, that whoever
should venture to attack him would encounter a desperate resistance. He
and his companion thus departed in safety; for those who are scattered
in flight are pursued and killed, whilst men hesitate to touch those
who exhibit such a countenance as that of Socrates even in defeat.
“Many other and most wonderful qualities might well be praised in
Socrates; but such as these might singly be attributed to others. But
that which is unparalleled in Socrates, is, that he is unlike, and
above comparison, with all other men, whether those who have lived in
ancient times, or those who exist now. For it may be conjectured, that
Brasidas and many others are such as was Achilles. Pericles deserves
comparison with Nestor and Antenor; and other excellent persons of
various times may, with probability, be drawn into comparison with
each other. But to such a singular man as this, both himself and his
discourses are so uncommon, no one, should he seek, would find a
parallel among the present or the past generations of mankind; unless
they should say that he resembled those with whom I lately compared
him, for, assuredly, he and his discourses are like nothing but the
Silen and the Satyrs. At first I forgot to make you observe how like
his discourses are to those Satyrs when they are opened, for, if
any one will listen to the talk of Socrates, it will appear to him
at first extremely ridiculous; the phrases and expressions which he
employs, fold around his exterior the skin, as it were, of a rude
and wanton Satyr. He is always talking about great market-asses, and
brass-founders, and leather-cutters, and skin-dressers; and this is
his perpetual custom, so that any dull and unobservant person might
easily laugh at his discourse. But if any one should see it opened,
as it were, and get within the sense of his words, he would then find
that they alone of all that enters into the mind of man to utter, had
a profound and persuasive meaning, and that they were most divine; and
that they presented to the mind innumerable images of every excellence,
and that they tended towards objects of the highest moment, or rather
towards all that he who seeks the possession of what is supremely
beautiful and good need regard as essential to the accomplishment of
his ambition.
“These are the things, my friends, for which I praise Socrates.”
Alcibiades having said this, the whole party burst into a laugh at
his frankness, and Socrates said, “You seem to be sober enough,
Alcibiades, else you would not have made such a circuit of words, only
to hide the main design for which you made this long speech, and which,
as it were carelessly, you just throw in at the last; now, as if you
had not said all this for the mere purpose of dividing me and Agathon?
You think that I ought to be your friend, and to care for no one else.
I have found you out; it is evident enough for what design you invented
all this Satyrical and Silenic drama. But, my dear Agathon, do not let
his device succeed. I entreat you to permit no one to throw discord
between us.”--“No doubt,” said Agathon, “he sat down between us only
that he might divide us; but this shall not assist his scheme, for I
will come and sit near you.”--“Do so,” said Socrates, “come, there is
room for you by me.”--“Oh, Jupiter!” exclaimed Alcibiades, “what I
endure from that man! He thinks to subdue every way; but, at least, I
pray you, let Agathon remain between us.”--“Impossible,” said Socrates,
“you have just praised me; I ought to praise him sitting at my right
hand. If Agathon is placed beside you, will he not praise me before
I praise him? Now, my dear friend, allow the young man to receive
what praise I can give him. I have a great desire to pronounce his
encomium.”--“Quick, quick, Alcibiades,” said Agathon, “I cannot stay
here, I must change my place, or Socrates will not praise me.”--Agathon
then arose to take his place near Socrates.
He had no sooner reclined than there came in a number of revellers--for
some one who had gone out had left the door open--and took their places
on the vacant couches, and everything became full of confusion; and no
order being observed, every one was obliged to drink a great quantity
of wine. Eryximachus, and Phædrus, and some others, said Aristodemus,
went home to bed; that, for his part, he went to sleep on his couch,
and slept long and soundly--the nights were then long--until the cock
crew in the morning. When he awoke he found that some were still fast
asleep, and others had gone home, and that Aristophanes, Agathon, and
Socrates had alone stood it out, and were still drinking out of a
great goblet which they passed round and round. Socrates was disputing
between them. The beginning of their discussion Aristodemus said that
he did not recollect, because he was asleep; but it was terminated
by Socrates forcing them to confess, that the same person is able to
compose both tragedy and comedy, and that the foundations of the tragic
and comic arts were essentially the same. They, rather convicted than
convinced, went to sleep. Aristophanes first awoke, and then, it being
broad daylight, Agathon. Socrates, having put them to sleep, went away,
Aristodemus following him, and coming to the Lyceum he washed himself,
as he would have done anywhere else, and after having spent the day
there in his accustomed manner, went home in the evening.
[Decoration]
[Decoration]
ION;
OR, OF THE ILIAD.
Translated from Plato.
Socrates _and_ Ion.
_Socrates._ Hail to thee, O Ion! from whence returnest thou amongst us
now?--from thine own native Ephesus?
_Ion._ No, Socrates; I come from Epidaurus and the feasts in honour of
Æsculapius.
_Socrates._ Had the Epidaurians instituted a contest of rhapsody in
honour of the God?
_Ion._ And not in rhapsodies alone; there were contests in every
species of music.
_Socrates._ And in which did you contend? And what was the success of
your efforts?
_Ion._ I bore away the first prize at the games, O Socrates.
_Socrates._ Well done! You have now only to consider how you shall win
the Panathenæa.
_Ion._ That may also happen, God willing.
_Socrates._ Your profession, O Ion, has often appeared to me an
enviable one. For, together with the nicest care of your person, and
the most studied elegance of dress, it imposes upon you the necessity
of a familiar acquaintance with many and excellent poets, and
especially with Homer, the most admirable of them all. Nor is it merely
because you can repeat the verses of this great poet, that I envy you,
but because you fathom his inmost thoughts. For he is no rhapsodist
who does not understand the whole scope and intention of the poet, and
is not capable of interpreting it to his audience. This he cannot do
without a full comprehension of the meaning of the author he undertakes
to illustrate; and worthy, indeed, of envy are those who can fulfil
these conditions.
_Ion._ Thou speakest truth, O Socrates. And, indeed, I have expended
my study particularly on this part of my profession. I flatter myself
that no man living excels me in the interpretation of Homer; neither
Metrodorus of Lampsacus, nor Stesimbrotus the Thasian, nor Glauco, nor
any other rhapsodist of the present times can express so many various
and beautiful thoughts upon Homer as I can.
_Socrates._ I am persuaded of your eminent skill, O Ion. You will not,
I hope, refuse me a specimen of it?
_Ion._ And, indeed, it would be worth your while to hear me declaim
upon Homer. I deserve a golden crown from his admirers.
_Socrates._ And I will find leisure some day or other to request you
to favour me so far. At present, I will only trouble you with one
question. Do you excel in explaining Homer alone, or are you conscious
of a similar power with regard to Hesiod and Archilochus?
_Ion._ I possess this high degree of skill with regard to Homer alone,
and I consider that sufficient.
_Socrates._ Are there any subjects upon which Homer and Hesiod say the
same things?
_Ion._ Many, as it seems to me.
_Socrates._ Whether do you demonstrate these things better in Homer or
Hesiod?
_Ion._ In the same manner, doubtless; inasmuch as they say the same
words with regard to the same things.
_Socrates._ But with regard to those things in which they
differ;--Homer and Hesiod both treat of divination, do they not?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ Do you think that you or a diviner would make the best
exposition, respecting all that these poets say of divination, both as
they agree and as they differ?
_Ion._ A diviner probably.
_Socrates._ Suppose you were a diviner, do you not think that you
could explain the discrepancies of those poets on the subject of your
profession, if you understand their agreement?
_Ion._ Clearly so.
_Socrates._ How does it happen then that you are possessed of skill to
illustrate Homer, and not Hesiod, or any other poet in an equal degree?
Is the subject-matter of the poetry of Homer different from all other
poets’? Does he not principally treat of war and social intercourse,
and of the distinct functions and characters of the brave man and the
coward, the professional and private person, the mutual relations which
subsist between the Gods and men; together with the modes of their
intercourse, the phænomena of Heaven, the secrets of Hades, and the
origin of Gods and heroes? Are not these the materials from which Homer
wrought his poem?
_Ion._ Assuredly, O Socrates.
_Socrates._ And the other poets, do they not treat of the same matter?
_Ion._ Certainly: but not like Homer.
_Socrates._ How! Worse?
_Ion._ Oh! far worse.
_Socrates._ Then Homer treats of them better than they?
_Ion._ Oh! Jupiter!--how much better!
_Socrates._ Amongst a number of persons employed in solving a problem
of arithmetic, might not a person know, my dear Ion, which had given
the right answer?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ The same person who had been aware of the false one, or
some other?
_Ion._ The same, clearly.
_Socrates._ That is, some one who understood arithmetic?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ Among a number of persons giving their opinions on
the wholesomeness of different foods, whether would one person be
capable to pronounce upon the rectitude of the opinions of those who
judged rightly, and another on the erroneousness of those which were
incorrect, or would the same person be competent to decide respecting
them both?
_Ion._ The same, evidently.
_Socrates._ What would you call that person?
_Ion._ A physician.
_Socrates._ We may assert then, universally, that the same person who
is competent to determine the truth, is competent also to determine the
falsehood of whatever assertion is advanced on the same subject; and,
it is manifest, that he who cannot judge respecting the falsehood, or
unfitness of what is said upon a given subject, is equally incompetent
to determine upon its truth or beauty?
_Ion._ Assuredly.
_Socrates._ The same person would then be competent or incompetent for
both?
_Ion._ Yes.
_Socrates._ Do you not say that Homer and the other poets, and among
them Hesiod and Archilochus, speak of the same things, but unequally;
one better and the other worse?
_Ion._ And I speak truth.
_Socrates._ But if you can judge of what is well said by the one, you
must also be able to judge of what is ill said by another, inasmuch as
it expresses less correctly.
_Ion._ It should seem so.
_Socrates._ Then, my dear friend, we should not err if we asserted that
Ion possessed a like power of illustration respecting Homer and all
other poets; especially since he confesses that the same person must be
esteemed a competent judge of all those who speak on the same subjects;
inasmuch as those subjects are understood by him when spoken of by one,
and the subject-matter of almost all the poets is the same.
_Ion._ What can be the reason then, O Socrates, that when any other
poet is the subject of conversation I cannot compel my attention,
and I feel utterly unable to declaim anything worth talking of, and
positively go to sleep? But when any one makes mention of Homer, my
mind applies itself without effort to the subject; I awaken as if it
were from a trance, and a profusion of eloquent expressions suggest
themselves involuntarily?
_Socrates._ It is not difficult to suggest the cause of this, my dear
friend. You are evidently unable to declaim on Homer according to art
and knowledge; for did your art endow you with this faculty, you would
be equally capable of exerting it with regard to any other of the
poets. Is not poetry, as an art or a faculty, a thing entire and one?
_Ion._ Assuredly.
_Socrates._ The same mode of consideration must be admitted with
respect to all arts which are severally one and entire. Do you desire
to hear what I understand by this, O Ion?
_Ion._ Yes, by Jupiter, Socrates, I am delighted with listening to you
wise men.
_Socrates._ It is you who are wise, my dear Ion; you rhapsodists,
actors, and the authors of the poems you recite. I, like an
unprofessional and private man, can only speak the truth. Observe how
common, vulgar, and level to the comprehension of any one, is the
question which I now ask relative to the same consideration belonging
to one entire art. Is not painting an art whole and entire?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ Did you ever know a person competent to judge of the
paintings of Polygnotus, the son of Aglaophon, and incompetent to
judge of the production of any other painter; who, on the supposition
of the works of other painters being exhibited to him, was wholly at
a loss, and very much inclined to go to sleep, and lost all faculty
of reasoning on the subject; but when his opinion was required of
Polygnotus, or any one single painter you please, awoke, paid attention
to the subject, and discoursed on it with great eloquence and sagacity?
_Ion._ Never, by Jupiter!
_Socrates._ Did you ever know any one very skilful in determining
the merits of Dædalus, the son of Metion, Epius, the son of Panopus,
Theodorus the Samian, or any other great sculptor, who was immediately
at a loss, and felt sleepy the moment any other sculptor was mentioned?
_Ion._ I never met with such a person certainly.
_Socrates._ Nor, do I think, that you ever met with a man professing
himself a judge of poetry and rhapsody, and competent to criticise
either Olympus, Thamyris, Orpheus, or Phemius of Ithaca, the
rhapsodist, who, the moment he came to Ion the Ephesian, felt
himself quite at a loss, and utterly incompetent to judge whether he
rhapsodised well or ill.
_Ion._ I cannot refute you, Socrates, but of this I am conscious to
myself: that I excel all men in the copiousness and beauty of my
illustrations of Homer, as all who have heard me will confess, and with
respect to other poets, I am deserted of this power. It is for you to
consider what may be the cause of this distinction.
_Socrates._ I will tell you, O Ion, what appears to me to be the cause
of this inequality of power. It is that you are not master of any art
for the illustration of Homer, but it is a divine influence which moves
you, like that which resides in the stone called magnet by Euripides,
and Heraclea by the people. For not only does this stone possess the
power of attracting iron rings, but it can communicate to them the
power of attracting other rings; so that you may see sometimes a long
chain of rings, and other iron substances, attached and suspended
one to the other by this influence. And as the power of the stone
circulates through all the links of this series, and attaches each
to each, so the Muse, communicating through those whom she has first
inspired, to all others capable of sharing in the inspiration, the
influence of that first enthusiasm, creates a chain and a succession.
For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain
to excellence through the rules of any art, but they utter their
beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it
were, _possessed_ by a spirit not their own. Thus the composers of
lyrical poetry create those admired songs of theirs in a state of
divine insanity, like the Corybantes, who lose all control over
their reason in the enthusiasm of the sacred dance; and, during this
supernatural possession, are excited to the rhythm and harmony which
they communicate to men. Like the Bacchantes, who, when possessed by
the God, draw honey and milk from the rivers, in which, when they come
to their senses, they find nothing but simple water. For the souls of
the poets, as poets tell us, have this peculiar ministration in the
world. They tell us that these souls, flying like bees from flower
to flower, and wandering over the gardens and the meadows, and the
honey-flowing fountains of the Muses, return to us laden with the
sweetness of melody; and arrayed as they are in the plumes of rapid
imagination, they speak truth. For a Poet is indeed a thing ethereally
light, winged, and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling
poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad, or whilst any
reason remains in him. For whilst a man retains any portion of the
thing called reason, he is utterly incompetent to produce poetry or
to vaticinate. Thus, those who declaim various and beautiful poetry
upon any subject, as for instance upon Homer, are not enabled to do so
by art or study; but every rhapsodist or poet, whether dithyrambic,
encomiastic, choral, epic, or iambic, is excellent in proportion
to the extent of his participation in the divine influence, and
the degree in which the Muse itself has descended on him. In other
respects, poets may be sufficiently ignorant and incapable. For they
do not compose according to any art which they have acquired, but
from the impulse of the divinity within them; for did they know any
rules of criticism according to which they could compose beautiful
verses upon one subject, they would be able to exert the same faculty
with respect to all or any other. The God seems purposely to have
deprived all poets, prophets, and soothsayers of every particle of
reason and understanding, the better to adapt them to their employment
as his ministers and interpreters; and that we, their auditors, may
acknowledge that those who write so beautifully, are possessed,
and address us, inspired by the God. Tynnicus the Chalcidean, is a
manifest proof of this, for he never before composed any poem worthy
to be remembered; and yet, was the author of that Pæan which everybody
sings, and which excels almost every other hymn, and which he himself
acknowledges to have been inspired by the Muse. And, thus, it appears
to me that the God proves beyond a doubt, that these transcendent
poems are not human as the work of men, but divine as coming from
the God. Poets then are the interpreters of the divinities--each
being possessed by some one deity; and to make this apparent, the God
designedly inspires the worst poets with the sublimest verse. Does it
seem to you that I am in the right, O Ion?
_Ion._ Yes, by Jupiter! My mind is enlightened by your words, O
Socrates, and it appears to me that great poets interpret to us through
some divine election of the God.
_Socrates._ And do not you rhapsodists interpret poets?
_Ion._ We do.
_Socrates._ Thus you interpret the interpreters?
_Ion._ Evidently.
_Socrates._ Remember this, and tell me; and do not conceal that
which I ask. When you declaim well, and strike your audience with
admiration; whether you sing of Ulysses rushing upon the threshold of
his palace, discovering himself to the suitors, and pouring his shafts
out at his feet; or of Achilles assailing Hector; or those affecting
passages concerning Andromache, or Hecuba, or Priam, are you then
self-possessed? or, rather, are you not rapt and filled with such
enthusiasm by the deeds you recite, that you fancy yourself in Ithaca
or Troy, or wherever else the poem transports you?
_Ion._ You speak most truly, Socrates, nor will I deny it; for, when
I recite of sorrow my eyes fill with tears; and, when of fearful or
terrible deeds, my hair stands on end, and my heart beats fast.
_Socrates._ Tell me, Ion, can we call him in his senses, who weeps
while dressed in splendid garments, and crowned with a golden coronal,
not losing any of these things? and is filled with fear when surrounded
by ten thousand friendly persons, not one among whom desires to despoil
or injure him?
_Ion._ To say the truth, we could not.
_Socrates._ Do you often perceive your audience moved also?
_Ion._ Many among them, and frequently. I, standing on the rostrum,
see them weeping, with eyes fixed earnestly on me, and overcome by my
declamation. I have need so to agitate them; for if they weep, I laugh,
taking their money; if they should laugh, I must weep, going without it.
_Socrates._ Do you not perceive that your auditor is the last link of
that chain which I have described as held together through the power
of the magnet? You rhapsodists and actors are the middle links, of
which the poet is the first--and through all these the God influences
whichever mind he selects, as they conduct this power one to the
other; and thus, as rings from the stone, so hangs a long series of
chorus-dancers, teachers, and disciples from the Muse. Some poets are
influenced by one Muse, some by another; we call them possessed, and
this word really expresses the truth, for they are held. Others, who
are interpreters, are inspired by the first links, the poets, and are
filled with enthusiasm, some by one, some by another; some by Orpheus,
some by Musæus, but the greater number are possessed and inspired by
Homer. You, O Ion, are influenced by Homer. If you recite the works
of any other poet, you get drowsy, and are at a loss what to say; but
when you hear any of the compositions of that poet you are roused, your
thoughts are excited, and you grow eloquent;--for what you say of Homer
is not derived from any art or knowledge, but from divine inspiration
and possession. As the Corybantes feel acutely the melodies of him by
whom they are inspired, and abound with verse and gesture for his songs
alone, and care for no other; thus, you, O Ion, are eloquent when you
expound Homer, and are barren of words with regard to every other poet.
And this explains the question you asked, wherefore Homer, and no other
poet, inspires you with eloquence. It is that you are thus excellent in
your praise, not through science but from divine inspiration.
_Ion._ You say the truth, Socrates. Yet, I am surprised that you should
be able to persuade me that I am possessed and insane when I praise
Homer. I think I shall not appear such to you when you hear me.
_Socrates._ I desire to hear you, but not before you have answered me
this one question. What subject does Homer treat best? for, surely, he
does not treat all equally.
_Ion._ You are aware that he treats of every thing.
_Socrates._ Does Homer mention subjects on which you are ignorant?
_Ion._ What can those be?
_Socrates._ Does not Homer frequently dilate on various arts--on
chariot-driving, for instance? if I remember the verses I will repeat
them.
_Ion._ I will repeat them, for I remember them.
_Socrates._ Repeat what Nestor says to his son Antilochus, counselling
him to be cautious in turning, during the chariot-race at the funeral
games of Patroclus.
_Ion_ (_repeats_).
Αὐτὸς δὲ κλινθῆναι εϋπλέκτῳ ἐνὶ δίφρῳ
Ἧκ’ ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ τοῖιν ἀτὰρ τὸν δεξιὸν ἵππον
Κένσαι ὁμοκλήσας, εἶξαί τέ οἱ ἡνία χερσίν.
Ἐν νύσσῃ δέ τοι ἵππος ἀριστερὸς ἐγχριμφθήτω,
Ὡς ἄν τοι πλήμνη γε δοάσσεται ἄκρον ἱκέσθαι
Κύκλου ποιητοῖο· λίθου δ’ ἀλέασθαι ἐπαυρεῖν.
_Il._ ψ. 335.
_Socrates._ Enough. Now, O Ion, would a physician or a charioteer be
the better judge as to Homer’s sagacity on this subject?
_Ion._ Of course, a charioteer.
_Socrates._ Because he understands the art--or from what other reason?
_Ion._ From his knowledge of the art.
_Socrates._ For one science is not gifted with the power of judging of
another--a steersman, for instance, does not understand medicine?
_Ion._ Without doubt.
_Socrates._ Nor a physician, architecture?
_Ion._ Of course not.
_Socrates._ Is it not thus with every art? If we are adepts in one, we
are ignorant of another. But first, tell me, do not all arts differ one
from the other?
_Ion._ They do.
_Socrates._ For you, as well as I, can testify that when we say an art
is the knowledge of one thing, we do not mean that it is the knowledge
of another.
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ For, if each art contained the knowledge of all things,
why should we call them by different names? we do so that we may
distinguish them one from the other. Thus, you as well as I, know that
these are five fingers; and if I asked you whether we both meant the
same thing or another, when we speak of arithmetic--would you not say
the same?
_Ion._ Yes.
_Socrates._ And tell me, when we learn one art we must both learn the
same things with regard to it; and other things if we learn another?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ And he who is not versed in an art, is not a good judge of
what is said or done with respect to it?
_Ion._ Certainly not.
_Socrates._ To return to the verses which you just recited, do you
think that you or a charioteer would be better capable of deciding
whether Homer had spoken rightly or not?
_Ion._ Doubtless a charioteer.
_Socrates._ For you are a rhapsodist, and not a charioteer?
_Ion._ Yes.
_Socrates._ And the art of reciting verses is different from that of
driving chariots?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ And if it is different, it supposes a knowledge of
different things?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ And when Homer introduces Hecamede, the concubine of
Nestor, giving Machaon a posset to drink, and he speaks thus:--
Οἴνῳ πραμνείῳ, φησίν· ἐπὶ δ’ αἴγειον κνῆ τυρὸν
Κνήστι χαλκείῃ· παρὰ δὲ κρόμιον ποτῷ ὄψον.
_Il._ λʹ. 639.
does it belong to the medical or rhapsodical art, to determine whether
Homer speaks rightly on this subject?
_Ion._ The medical.
_Socrates._ And when he says--
Ἡ δὲ μολυβδαίνῃ ἰκέλη ἐς βυσσὸν ἵκανεν,
Ἥ τε κατ’ ἀγραύλοιο βοὸς κέρας ἐμμεμαυῖα
Ἔρχεται ὠμηστῇσι μετ’ ἰχθύσι πῆμα φέρουσα.
_Il._ ωʹ. 80.
does it belong to the rhapsodical or the piscatorial art, to determine
whether he speaks rightly or not?
_Ion._ Manifestly to the piscatorial art.
_Socrates._ Consider whether you are not inspired to make some such
demand as this to me:--Come, Socrates, since you have found in Homer
an accurate description of these arts, assist me also in the inquiry
as to his competence on the subject of soothsayers and divination; and
how far he speaks well or ill on such subjects; for he often treats of
them in the Odyssey, and especially when he introduces Theoclymenus the
Soothsayer of the Melampians, prophesying to the Suitors:--
Δαίμονι, τί κακὸν τόδε πάσχετε; νυκτὶ μὲν ὑμέων
Εἱλύαται κεφαλαί τε προσωπά τε νέρθε τε γυῖα,
Οἰμωγὴ δὲ δέδηε, δεδάκρυνται δὲ παρειαί.
Εἰδώλων τε πλέον πρόθυρον, πλείη δὲ καὶ αὐλὴ
Ἱεμένων ἕρεβόσδε ὑπὸ ζόφον· ἠέλιος δὲ
Οὐρανοῦ ἐξαπόλωλε, κακὴ δ’ ἐπδέδρομεν ἁχλύς.
_Odyss._ υ. 351.
Often too in the Iliad, as at the battle at the walls; for he there
says--
Ὄρνις γάρ σφιν ἐπῆλθε περησέμεναι μεμαῶσιν,
Αἰετὸς ὑψιπέτης, ἐπ’ ἀριστερὰ λαὸν ἐέργων,
Φοινήεντα δράκοντα φέρων ὀνύχεσσι πέλωρον,
Ζωὸν, ἔτ’ ἀσπαίροντα· καὶ οὔπω λήθετο χάρμης.
Κόψε γὰρ αὐτὸν ἔχοντα κατὰ στῆθος παρὰ δειρὴν,
Ἰδνωθεὶς ὀπίσω. ὁ δ’ ἀπὸ ἕθεν ἧκε χαμάζε
Ἀλγήσας ὀδύνῃσι, μέσῳ δ’ ἐγκάββαλ’ ὁμίλῳ·
Αὐτὸς δὲ κλάγξας ἕπετο πνοιῇς ἀνέμοιο.
_Il._ μʹ.
I assert, it belongs to a soothsayer both to observe and to judge
respecting such appearances as these.
_Ion._ And you assert the truth, O Socrates.
_Socrates._ And you also, my dear Ion. For we have in our turn recited
from the Odyssey and the Iliad, passages relating to vaticination, to
medicine and the piscatorial art; and as you are more skilled in Homer
than I can be, do you now make mention of whatever relates to the
rhapsodist and his art; for a rhapsodist is competent above all other
men to consider and pronounce on whatever has relation to his art.
_Ion._ Or with respect to everything else mentioned by Homer.
_Socrates._ Do not be so forgetful as to say everything. A good memory
is particularly necessary for a rhapsodist.
_Ion._ And what do I forget?
_Socrates._ Do you not remember that you admitted the art of reciting
verses was different from that of driving chariots?
_Ion._ I remember.
_Socrates._ And did you not admit that being different, the subjects of
its knowledge must also be different?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ You will not assert that the art of rhapsody is that of
universal knowledge; a rhapsodist may be ignorant of some things.
_Ion._ Except, perhaps, such things as we now discuss, O Socrates.
_Socrates._ What do you mean by _such_ subjects, besides those which
relate to other arts? And with which among them do you profess a
competent acquaintance, since not with all?
_Ion._ I imagine that the rhapsodist has a perfect knowledge of what
it is becoming for a man to speak--what for a woman; what for a slave,
what for a free man; what for the ruler, what for him who is governed.
_Socrates._ How! do you think that a rhapsodist knows better than a
pilot what the captain of a ship in a tempest ought to say?
_Ion._ In such a circumstance I allow that the pilot would know best.
_Socrates._ Has the rhapsodist or the physician the clearest knowledge
of what ought to be said to a sick man?
_Ion._ In that case the physician.
_Socrates._ But you assert that he knows what a slave ought to say?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ To take for example, in the driving of cattle; a rhapsodist
would know much better than the herdsman what ought to be said to a
slave engaged in bringing back a herd of oxen run wild?
_Ion._ No, indeed.
_Socrates._ But what a woman should say concerning spinning wool?
_Ion._ Of course not.
_Socrates._ He would know, however, what a man, who is a general,
should say when exhorting his troops?
_Ion._ Yes; a rhapsodist would know that.
_Socrates._ How! is rhapsody and strategy the same art?
_Ion._ I know what it is fitting for a general to say.
_Socrates._ Probably because you are learned in war, O Ion. For if you
are equally expert in horsemanship and playing on the harp, you would
know whether a man rode well or ill. But if I should ask you which
understands riding best, a horseman or a harper, what would you answer?
_Ion._ A horseman, of course.
_Socrates._ And if you knew a good player on the harp, you would in the
same way say that he understood harp-playing and not riding?
_Ion._ Certainly.
_Socrates._ Since you understand strategy, you can tell me which is the
most excellent, the art of war or rhapsody?
_Ion._ One does not appear to me to excel the other.
_Socrates._ One is not better than the other, say you? Do you say that
tactics and rhapsody are two arts or one?
_Ion._ They appear to me to be the same.
_Socrates._ Then a good rhapsodist is also a good general.
_Ion._ Of course.
_Socrates._ And a good general is a good rhapsodist?
_Ion._ I do not say that.
_Socrates._ You said that a good rhapsodist was also a good general.
_Ion._ I did.
_Socrates._ Are you not the best rhapsodist in Greece?
_Ion._ By far, O Socrates.
_Socrates._ And you are also the most excellent general among the
Greeks?
_Ion._ I am. I learned the art from Homer.
_Socrates._ How is it then, by Jupiter, that being both the best
general and the best rhapsodist among us, you continually go about
Greece rhapsodising, and never lead our armies? Does it seem to you
that the Greeks greatly need golden-crowned rhapsodists, and have no
want of generals?
_Ion._ My native town, O Socrates, is ruled by yours, and requires no
general for her wars;--and neither will your city nor the Lacedemonians
elect me to lead their armies--you think your own generals sufficient.
_Socrates._ My good Ion, are you acquainted with Apollodorus the
Cyzicenian?
_Ion._ Who do you mean?
_Socrates._ He whom, though a stranger, the Athenians often elected
general; and Phanosthenes the Andrian, and Heraclides the Clazomenian,
all foreigners, but whom this city has chosen, as being great men, to
lead its armies, and to fill other high offices. Would not, therefore,
Ion the Ephesian be elected and honoured if he were esteemed capable?
Were not the Ephesians originally from Athens, and is Ephesus the least
of cities? But if you spoke true, Ion, and praise Homer according to
art and knowledge, you have deceived me,--since you declared that
you were learned on the subject of Homer, and would communicate your
knowledge to me--but you have disappointed me, and are far from keeping
your word. For you will not explain in what you are so excessively
clever, though I greatly desire to learn; but, as various as Proteus,
you change from one thing to another, and to escape at last, you
disappear in the form of a general, without disclosing your Homeric
wisdom. If, therefore, you possess the learning which you promised to
expound on the subject of Homer, you deceive me and are false. But if
you are eloquent on the subject of this Poet, not through knowledge,
but by inspiration, being possessed by him, ignorant the while of the
wisdom and beauty you display, then I allow that you are no deceiver.
Choose then whether you will be considered false or inspired?
_Ion._ It is far better, O Socrates, to be thought inspired.
_Socrates._ It is better both for you and for us, O Ion, to say that
you are the inspired, and not the learned, eulogist of Homer.
[Decoration]
[Decoration]
MENEXENUS,
OR
THE FUNERAL ORATION.
A Fragment.
Socrates _and_ Menexenus.
_Socrates._ Whence comest thou, O Menexenus? from the forum?
_Menexenus._ Even so; and from the senate-house.
_Socrates._ What was thy business with the senate? Art thou persuaded
that thou hast attained to that perfection of discipline and
philosophy, from which thou mayest aspire to undertake greater matters?
Wouldst thou, at thine age, my wonderful friend, assume to thyself the
government of us who are thine elders, lest thy family should at any
time fail in affording us a protector?
_Menexenus._ Thou, O Socrates, shouldst permit and counsel me to enter
into public life. I would earnestly endeavour to fit myself for the
attempt. If otherwise, I would abstain. On the present occasion, I went
to the senate-house, merely from having heard that the senate was about
to elect one to speak concerning those who are dead. Thou knowest that
the celebration of their funeral approaches?
_Socrates._ Assuredly. But whom have they chosen?
_Menexenus._ The election is deferred until to-morrow; I imagine that
either Dion or Archinus will be chosen.
_Socrates._ In truth, Menexenus, the condition of him who dies in
battle is, in every respect, fortunate and glorious. If he is poor, he
is conducted to his tomb with a magnificent and honourable funeral,
amidst the praises of all; if even he were a coward, his name is
included in a panegyric pronounced by the most learned men; from which
all the vulgar expressions, which unpremeditated composition might
admit, have been excluded by the careful labour of leisure; who praise
so admirably, enlarging upon every topic remotely or immediately
connected with the subject, and blending so eloquent a variety of
expressions, that, praising in every manner the state of which we are
citizens, and those who have perished in battle, and the ancestors who
preceded our generation, and ourselves who yet live, they steal away
our spirits as with enchantment. Whilst I listen to their praises, O
Menexenus, I am penetrated with a very lofty conception of myself, and
overcome by their flatteries. I appear to myself immeasurably more
honourable and generous than before, and many of the strangers who
are accustomed to accompany me, regard me with additional veneration,
after having heard these relations; they seem to consider the whole
state, including me, much more worthy of admiration, after they have
been soothed into persuasion by the orator. The opinion thus inspired
of my own majesty will last me more than three days sometimes, and the
penetrating melody of the words descends through the ears into the
mind, and clings to it; so that it is often three or four days before I
come to my senses sufficiently to perceive in what part of the world I
am, or succeed in persuading myself that I do not inhabit one of the
islands of the blessed. So skilful are these orators of ours.
_Menexenus._ Thou always laughest at the orators, O Socrates. On the
present occasion, however, the unforeseen election will preclude the
person chosen from the advantages of a preconcerted speech: the speaker
will probably be reduced to the necessity of extemporising.
_Socrates._ How so, my good friend? Every one of the candidates has,
without doubt, his oration prepared; and if not, there were little
difficulty, on this occasion, of inventing an unpremeditated speech.
If, indeed, the question were of Athenians, who should speak in the
Peloponnesus; or of Peloponnesians, who should speak at Athens, an
orator who would persuade and be applauded, must employ all the
resources of his skill. But to the orator who contends for the
approbation of those whom he praises, success will be little difficult.
_Menexenus._ Is that thy opinion, O Socrates?
_Socrates._ In truth it is.
_Menexenus._ Shouldst thou consider thyself competent to pronounce this
oration, if thou shouldst be chosen by the senate?
_Socrates._ There would be nothing astonishing if I should consider
myself equal to such an undertaking. My mistress in oratory was perfect
in the science which she taught, and had formed many other excellent
orators, and one of the most eminent among the Greeks, Pericles, the
son of Xantippus.
_Menexenus._ Who is she? Assuredly thou meanest Aspasia.
_Socrates._ Aspasia, and Connus the son of Metrobius, the two
instructors. From the former of these I learned rhetoric, and from the
latter music. There would be nothing wonderful if a man so educated
should be capable of great energy of speech. A person who should have
been instructed in a manner totally different from me; who should have
learned rhetoric from Antiphon the son of Rhamnusius, and music from
Lampses, would be competent to succeed in such an attempt as praising
the Athenians to the Athenians.
_Menexenus._ And what shouldst thou have to say, if thou wert chosen to
pronounce the oration?
_Socrates._ Of my own, probably nothing. But yesterday I heard Aspasia
declaim a funeral oration over these same persons. She had heard, as
thou sayest, that the Athenians were about to choose an orator, and she
took the occasion of suggesting a series of topics proper for such an
orator to select; in part extemporaneously, and in part such as she had
already prepared. I think it probable that she composed the oration by
interweaving such fragments of oratory as Pericles might have left.
_Menexenus._ Rememberest thou what Aspasia said?
_Socrates._ Unless I am greatly mistaken. I learned it from her; and
she is so good a school-mistress, that I should have been beaten if I
had not been perfect in my lesson.
_Menexenus._ Why not repeat it to me?
_Socrates._ I fear lest my mistress be angry, should I publish her
discourse.
_Menexenus._ O, fear not. At least deliver a discourse; you will do
what is exceedingly delightful to me, whether it be of Aspasia or any
other. I entreat you to do me this pleasure.
_Socrates._ But you will laugh at me, who, being old, attempt to repeat
a pleasant discourse.
_Menexenus._ O no, Socrates; I entreat you to speak, however it may be.
_Socrates._ I see that I must do what you require. In a little while,
if you should ask me to strip naked and dance, I shall be unable to
refuse you, at least, if we are alone. Now, listen. She spoke thus, if
I recollect, beginning with the dead, in whose honour the oration is
supposed to have been delivered.
[Decoration]
FRAGMENTS
FROM THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO.
I. But it would be almost impossible to build your city in such a
situation that it would need no imposts?--Impossible.--Other persons
would then be required, who might undertake to conduct from another
city those things of which they stood in need?--Certainly.--But the
merchant who should return to his own city, without any of those
articles which it needed, would return empty-handed. It will be
necessary, therefore, not only to produce a sufficient supply, but
such articles, both in quantity and in kind, as may be required to
remunerate those who conduct the imports. There will be needed then
more husbandmen, and other artificers, in our city. There will be
needed also other persons who will undertake the conveyance of the
imports and the exports, and these persons are called merchants. If the
commerce which these necessities produce is carried on by sea, other
persons will be required who are accustomed to nautical affairs. And,
in the city itself, how shall the products of each man’s labour be
transported from one to another; those products, for the sake of the
enjoyment and the ready distribution of which, they were first induced
to institute a civil society?--By selling and buying, surely.--A
market and money, as a symbol of exchange, arises out of this
necessity?--Evidently.--When the husbandman, or any other artificer,
brings the produce of his labours to the public place, and those who
desire to barter their produce for it do not happen to arrive exactly
at the same time, would he not lose his time, and the profit of it,
if he were to sit in the market waiting for them?--Assuredly.--But,
there are persons, who, perceiving this, will take upon themselves the
arrangement between the buyer and the seller. In constituted civil
societies, those who are employed on this service, ought to be the
infirm, and unable to perform any other; but, exchanging on one hand
for money, what any person comes to sell, and giving the articles thus
bought for a similar equivalent to those who might wish to buy.
II. Description of a frugal enjoyment of the goods of the world.
III. But with this system of life some are not contented. They must
have beds and tables, and other furniture. They must have scarce
ointments and perfumes, women, and a thousand superfluities of the same
character. The things which we mentioned as sufficient, houses, and
clothes, and food, are not enough. Painting and mosaic-work must be
cultivated, and works in gold and ivory. The society must be enlarged
in consequence. This city, which is of a healthy proportion, will not
suffice, but it must be replenished with a multitude of persons, whose
occupations are by no means indispensable. Huntsmen and mimics, persons
whose occupation it is to arrange forms and colours, persons whose
trade is the cultivation of the more delicate arts, poets and their
ministers, rhapsodists, actors, dancers, manufacturers of all kinds of
instruments and schemes of female dress, and an immense crowd of other
ministers to pleasure and necessity. Do you not think we should want
schoolmasters, tutors, nurses, hair-dressers, barbers, manufacturers
and cooks? Should we not want pig-drivers, which were not wanted
in our more modest city, in this one, and a multitude of others to
administer to other animals, which would then become necessary articles
of food,--or should we not?--Certainly we should.--Should we not want
physicians much more, living in this manner than before? The same tract
of country would no longer provide sustenance for the state. Must we
then not usurp from the territory of our neighbours, and then we should
make aggressions, and so we have discovered the origin of war; which is
the principal cause of the greatest public and private calamities.--C.
xi.
IV. And first, we must improve upon the composers of fabulous histories
in verse, to compose them according to the rules of moral beauty; and
those not composed according to the rules must be rejected; and we must
persuade mothers and nurses to teach those which we approve to their
children, and to form their minds by moral fables, far more than their
bodies by their hands.--Lib. ii.
V. ON THE DANGER OF THE STUDY OF ALLEGORICAL COMPOSITION
(IN A LARGE SENSE) FOR YOUNG PEOPLE.
For a young person is not competent to judge what portions of a
fabulous composition are allegorical and what literal; but the opinions
produced by a literal acceptation of that which has no meaning, or a
bad one, except in an allegorical sense, are often irradicable.--Lib ii.
VI.--God then, since he is good, cannot be, as is vulgarly supposed,
the cause of all things; he is the cause, indeed, of very few things.
Among the great variety of events which happen in the course of human
affairs, evil prodigiously overbalances good in everything which
regards men. Of all that is good there can be no other cause than God;
but some other cause ought to be discovered for evil, which should
never be imputed as an effect to God.--L. ii.
VII.--Plato’s doctrine of punishment, as laid down [here], is refuted
by his previous reasonings.
VIII.--THE UNCHANGEABLE NATURE OF GOD.
Do you think that God is like a vulgar conjuror, and that he is capable
for the sake of effect, of assuming, at one time, one form, and at
another time, another? Now, in his own character, converting his proper
form into a multitude of shapes, now deceiving us, and offering vain
images of himself to our imagination? Or do you think that God is
single and one, and least of all things capable of departing from his
permanent nature and appearance?
IX.--THE PERMANENCY OF WHAT IS EXCELLENT.
But everything, in proportion as it is excellent, either in art or
nature, or in both, is least susceptible of receiving change from any
external influence.
X.--AGAINST SUPERSTITIOUS TALES.
Nor should mothers terrify their children by these fables, that Gods go
about in the night-time, resembling strangers, in all sorts of forms:
at once blaspheming the Gods and rendering their children cowardly.
XI.--THE TRUE ESSENCE OF FALSEHOOD AND ITS ORIGIN.
Know you not that, that which is truly false, if it may be permitted me
so to speak, all, both gods and men detest?--How do you mean?--Thus:
No person is willing to falsify in matters of the highest concern to
himself concerning those matters, but fears, above all things, lest he
should accept falsehood.--Yet, I understand you not.--You think that
I mean something profound. I say that no person is willing in his own
mind to receive or to assert a falsehood, to be ignorant, to be in
error, to possess that which is not true. This is truly to be called
falsehood, this ignorance and error in the mind itself. What is usually
called falsehood, or deceit in words, is but a voluntary imitation of
what the mind itself suffers in the involuntary possession of that
falsehood, an image of later birth, and scarcely, in a strict and
complete sense, deserving the name of falsehood.--Lib. ii.
XII.--AGAINST A BELIEF IN HELL.
If they are to possess courage, are not those doctrines alone to be
taught, which render death least terrible? Or do you conceive that
any man can be brave who is subjected to a fear of death? that he who
believes the things that are related of hell, and thinks that they
are truth, will prefer in battle, death to slavery, or defeat?--Lib.
iii.--_Then follows a criticism on the poetical accounts of hell._
XIII.--ON GRIEF.
We must then abolish the custom of lamenting and commiserating the
deaths of illustrious men. Do we assert that an excellent man will
consider it anything dreadful that his intimate friend, who is also an
excellent man, should die?--By no means (_an excessive refinement_). He
will abstain then from lamenting over his loss, as if he had suffered
some great evil?--Surely.--May we not assert in addition, that such
a person as we have described suffices to himself for all purposes
of living well and happily, and in no manner needs the assistance
or society of another? that he would endure with resignation the
destitution of a son, or a brother, or possessions, or whatever
external adjuncts of life might have been attached to him? and that,
on the occurrence of such contingencies, he would support them with
moderation and mildness, by no means bursting into lamentations, or
resigning himself to despondence?--Lib. iii.
_Then he proceeds to allege passages of the poets in which opposite
examples were held up to approbation and imitation._
XIV.--THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY CONSTANT IMITATION.
Do you not apprehend that imitations, if they shall have been practised
and persevered in from early youth, become established in the habits
and nature, in the gestures of the body, and the tones of the voice,
and lastly, in the intellect itself?--C. iii.
XV.--ON THE EFFECT OF BAD TASTE IN ART.
Nor must we restrict the poets alone to an exhibition of the example
of virtuous manners in their compositions, but all other artists must
be forbidden, either in sculpture, or painting, or architecture, to
employ their skill upon forms of an immoral, unchastened, monstrous,
or illiberal type, either in the forms of living beings, or in
architectural arrangements. And the artist capable of this employment
of his art, must not be suffered in our community, lest those destined
to be guardians of the society, nourished upon images of deformity and
vice, like cattle upon bad grass, gradually gathering and depasturing
every day a little, may ignorantly establish one great evil composed of
these many evil things, in their minds.--C. iii.
_The monstrous figures called Arabesques, however in some of them is
to be found a mixture of a truer and simpler taste, which are found in
the ruined palaces of the Roman Emperors, bear, nevertheless, the same
relation to the brutal profligacy and killing luxury which required
them, as the majestic figures of Castor and Pollux, and the simple
beauty of the sculpture of the frieze of the Parthenon, bear to the
more beautiful and simple manners of the Greeks of that period. With
a liberal interpretation, a similar analogy might be extended into
literary composition._
XVI.--AGAINST THE LEARNED PROFESSIONS.
What better evidence can you require of a corrupt and pernicious
system of discipline in a state, than that not merely persons of base
habits and plebeian employments, but men who pretend to have received
a liberal education, require the assistance of lawyers and physicians,
and those too who have attained to a singular degree (so desperate are
these diseases of body and mind) of skill. Do you not consider it an
abject necessity, a proof of the deepest degradation, to need to be
instructed in what is just or what is needful, as by a master and a
judge, with regard to your personal knowledge and suffering?
_What would Plato have said to a priest, such as his office is in
modern times?_--C. iii.
XVII.--ON MEDICINE.
Do you not think it an abject thing to require the assistance of the
medicinal art, not for the cure of wounds, or such external diseases as
result from the accidents of the seasons (επητειην), but on account of
sloth and the superfluous indulgences which we have already condemned;
this being filled with wind and water, like holes in earth, and
compelling the elegant successors of Æsculapius to invent new names,
flatulences, and catarrhs, &c., for the new diseases which are the
progeny of your luxury and sloth?--L. iii.
XVIII.--THE EFFECT OF THE DIETETIC SYSTEM.
Herodicus being pædotribe (παιδοτρίβης, _Magister palæstræ_), and his
health becoming weak, united the gymnastic with the medical art, and
having condemned himself to a life of weariness, afterwards extended
the same pernicious system to others. He made his life a long death.
For humouring the disease, mortal in its own nature, to which he was
subject, without being able to cure it, he postponed all other purposes
to the care of medicating himself, and through his whole life was
subject to an access of his malady, if he departed in any degree from
his accustomed diet, and by the employment of this skill, dying by
degrees, he arrived at an old age.--L. iii.
Æsculapius never pursued these systems, nor Machaon or Podalirius. They
never undertook the treatment of those whose frames were inwardly and
thoroughly diseased, so to prolong a worthless existence, and bestow
on a man a long and wretched being, during which they might generate
children in every respect the inheritors of their infirmity.--L. iii.
XIX.--AGAINST WHAT IS FALSELY CALLED “KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD.”
A man ought not to be a good judge until he be old; because he
ought not have acquired a knowledge of what injustice is, until his
understanding has arrived at maturity: not apprehending its nature from
a consideration of its existence in himself; but having contemplated
it distinct from his own nature in that of others, for a long time,
until he shall perceive what an evil it is, not from his own experience
and its effects within himself, but from his observations of them as
resulting in others. Such a one were indeed an honourable judge, and
a good; for he who has a good mind, is good. But that judge who is
considered so wise, who having himself committed great injustice, is
supposed to be qualified for the detection of it in others, and who is
quick to suspect, appears keen, indeed, as long as he associates with
those who resemble him; because, deriving experience from the example
afforded by a consideration of his own conduct and character, he acts
with caution; but when he associates with men of universal experience
and real virtue, he exposes the defects resulting from such experience
as he possesses, by distrusting men unreasonably and mistaking true
virtue, having no example of it within himself with which to compare
the appearances manifested in others: yet, such a one finding more
associates who are virtuous than such as are wise, necessarily appears,
both to himself and others, rather to be wise than foolish.--But we
ought rather to search for a wise and good judge; one who has examples
within himself of that upon which he is to pronounce.--C. iii.
XX.--Those who use gymnastics unmingled with music become too savage,
whilst those who use music unmingled with gymnastics, become more
delicate than is befitting.
[Decoration]
ON A PASSAGE IN CRITO.
[_Prefatory note by Mrs. Shelley._]
It is well known that when Socrates was condemned to death,
his friends made arrangements for his escape from prison
and his after security; of which he refused to avail
himself, from the reason, that a good citizen ought to
obey the laws of his country. On this Shelley makes the
following remarks--
The reply is simple, Indeed, your city cannot subsist, because the
laws are no longer of avail. For how can the laws be said to exist,
when those who deserve to be nourished in the Prytanea at the public
expense, are condemned to suffer the penalties only due to the most
atrocious criminals; whilst those against, and to protect from whose
injustice, the laws were framed, live in honour and security? I neither
overthrow your state, nor infringe your laws. Although you have
inflicted an injustice on me, which is sufficient, according to the
opinions of the multitude, to authorise me to consider you and me as in
a state of warfare; yet, had I the power, so far from inflicting any
revenge, I would endeavour to overcome you by benefits. All that I do
at present is, that which the peaceful traveller would do, who, caught
by robbers in a forest, escapes from them whilst they are engaged in
the division of the spoil. And this I do, when it would not only be
indifferent, but delightful to me to die, surrounded by my friends,
secure of the inheritance of glory, and escaping, after such a life as
mine, from the decay of mind and body which must soon begin to be my
portion should I live. But I prefer the good, which I have it in my
power yet to perform.
Such are the arguments which overturn the sophism placed in the mouth
of Socrates by Plato. But there are others which prove that he did well
to die.
[Decoration]
[Decoration]
THE ASSASSINS.
A Fragment of a Romance.
CHAPTER I.
Jerusalem, goaded on to resistance by the incessant usurpations and
insolence of Rome, leagued together its discordant factions to rebel
against the common enemy and tyrant. Inferior to their foe in all but
the unconquerable hope of liberty, they surrounded their city with
fortifications of uncommon strength, and placed in array before the
temple a band rendered desperate by patriotism and religion. Even the
women preferred to die, rather than survive the ruin of their country.
When the Roman army approached the walls of the sacred city, its
preparations, its discipline, and its numbers, evinced the conviction
of its leader, that he had no common barbarians to subdue. At the
approach of the Roman army, the strangers withdrew from the city.
Among the multitudes which from every nation of the East had assembled
at Jerusalem, was a little congregation of Christians. They were
remarkable neither for their numbers nor their importance. They
contained among them neither philosophers nor poets. Acknowledging
no laws but those of God, they modelled their conduct towards their
fellow-men by the conclusions of their individual judgment on the
practical application of these laws. And it was apparent from the
simplicity and severity of their manners, that this contempt for
human institutions had produced among them a character superior in
singleness and sincere self-apprehension to the slavery of pagan
customs and the gross delusions of antiquated superstition. Many of
their opinions considerably resembled those of the sect afterwards
known by the name of Gnostics. They esteemed the human understanding
to be the paramount rule of human conduct; they maintained that the
obscurest religious truth required for its complete elucidation no more
than the strenuous application of the energies of mind. It appeared
impossible to them that any doctrine could be subversive of social
happiness which is not capable of being confuted by arguments derived
from the nature of existing things. With the devoutest submission to
the law of Christ, they united an intrepid spirit of inquiry as to
the correctest mode of acting in particular instances of conduct that
occur among men. Assuming the doctrines of the Messiah concerning
benevolence and justice for the regulation of their actions, they could
not be persuaded to acknowledge that there was apparent in the divine
code any prescribed rule whereby, for its own sake, one action rather
than another, as fulfilling the will of their great Master, should be
preferred.
The contempt with which the magistracy and priesthood regarded this
obscure community of speculators, had hitherto protected them from
persecution. But they had arrived at that precise degree of eminence
and prosperity which is peculiarly obnoxious to the hostility of the
rich and powerful. The moment of their departure from Jerusalem was the
crisis of their future destiny. Had they continued to seek a precarious
refuge in a city of the Roman empire, this persecution would not have
delayed to impress a new character on their opinions and their conduct;
narrow views, and the illiberality of sectarian patriotism, would not
have failed speedily to obliterate the magnificence and beauty of their
wild and wonderful condition.
Attached from principle to peace, despising and hating the pleasures
and the customs of the degenerate mass of mankind, this unostentatious
community of good and happy men fled to the solitudes of Lebanon. To
Arabians and enthusiasts the solemnity and grandeur of these desolate
recesses possessed peculiar attractions. It well accorded with the
justice of their conceptions on the relative duties of man towards his
fellow in society, that they should labour in unconstrained equality
to dispossess the wolf and the tiger of their empire, and establish on
its ruins the dominion of intelligence and virtue. No longer would the
worshippers of the God of Nature be indebted to a hundred hands for
the accommodation of their simple wants. No longer would the poison of
a diseased civilization embrue their very nutriment with pestilence.
They would no longer owe their very existence to the vices, the fears,
and the follies of mankind. Love, friendship, and philanthropy, would
now be the characteristic disposers of their industry. It is for his
mistress or his friend that the labourer consecrates his toil; others
are mindful, but he is forgetful, of himself. “God feeds the hungry
ravens, and clothes the lilies of the fields, and yet Solomon in all
his glory is not like to one of these.”
Rome was now the shadow of her former self. The light of her grandeur
and loveliness had passed away. The latest and the noblest of her
poets and historians had foretold in agony her approaching slavery and
degradation. The ruins of the human mind, more awful and portentous
than the desolation of the most solemn temples, threw a shade of
gloom upon her golden palaces which the brutal vulgar could not see,
but which the mighty felt with inward trepidation and despair. The
ruins of Jerusalem lay defenceless and uninhabited upon the burning
sands; none visited, but in the depth of solemn awe, this accursed and
solitary spot. Tradition says that there was seen to linger among the
scorched and shattered fragments of the temple, one being, whom he that
saw dared not to call man, with clasped hands, immoveable eyes, and a
visage horribly serene. Not on the will of the capricious multitude,
nor the constant fluctuations of the many and the weak, depends the
change of empires and religions. These are the mere insensible elements
from which a subtler intelligence moulds its enduring statuary. They
that direct the changes of this mortal scene breathe the decrees of
their dominion from a throne of darkness and of tempest. The power of
man is great.
After many days of wandering, the Assassins pitched their tents in
the valley of Bethzatanai. For ages had this fertile valley lain
concealed from the adventurous search of man, among mountains of
everlasting snow. The men of elder days had inhabited this spot.
Piles of monumental marble and fragments of columns that in their
integrity almost seemed the work of some intelligence more sportive
and fantastic than the gross conceptions of mortality, lay in heaps
beside the lake, and were visible beneath its transparent waves. The
flowering orange-tree, the balsam, and innumerable odoriferous shrubs,
grew wild in the desolated portals. The fountain tanks had overflowed,
and amid the luxuriant vegetation of their margin, the yellow snake
held its unmolested dwelling. Hither came the tiger and the bear to
contend for those once domestic animals who had forgotten the secure
servitude of their ancestors. No sound, when the famished beast of
prey had retreated in despair from the awful desolation of this place,
at whose completion he had assisted, but the shrill cry of the stork,
and the flapping of his heavy wings from the capital of the solitary
column, and the scream of the hungry vulture baffled of its only
victim. The lore of ancient wisdom was sculptured in mystic characters
on the rocks. The human spirit and the human hand had been busy here
to accomplish its profoundest miracles. It was a temple dedicated to
the god of knowledge and of truth. The palaces of the Caliphs and the
Cæsars might easily surpass these ruins in magnitude and sumptuousness:
but they were the design of tyrants and the work of slaves. Piercing
genius and consummate prudence had planned and executed Bethzatanai.
There was deep and important meaning in every lineament of its
fantastic sculpture. The unintelligible legend, once so beautiful and
perfect, so full of poetry and history, spoke, even in destruction,
volumes of mysterious import, and obscure significance.
But in the season of its utmost prosperity and magnificence, art
might not aspire to vie with nature in the valley of Bethzatanai. All
that was wonderful and lovely was collected in this deep seclusion.
The fluctuating elements seemed to have been rendered everlastingly
permanent in forms of wonder and delight. The mountains of Lebanon
had been divided to their base to form this happy valley; on every
side their icy summits darted their white pinnacles into the clear
blue sky, imaging, in their grotesque outline, minarets, and ruined
domes, and columns worn with time. Far below, the silver clouds rolled
their bright volumes in many beautiful shapes, and fed the eternal
springs, that, spanning the dark chasms like a thousand radiant
rainbows, leaped into the quiet vale, then, lingering in many a dark
glade among the groves of cypress and of palm, lost themselves in the
lake. The immensity of these precipitous mountains with their starry
pyramids of snow, excluded the sun, which overtopped not, even in its
meridian, their overhanging rocks. But a more heavenly and serener
light was reflected from their icy mirrors, which, piercing through
the many-tinted clouds, produced lights and colours of inexhaustible
variety. The herbage was perpetually verdant, and clothed the darkest
recesses of the caverns and the woods.
Nature, undisturbed, had become an enchantress in these solitudes; she
had collected here all that was wonderful and divine from the armoury
of her omnipotence. The very winds breathed health and renovation, and
the joyousness of youthful courage. Fountains of crystalline water
played perpetually among the aromatic flowers, and mingled a freshness
with their odour. The pine boughs became instruments of exquisite
contrivance, among which every varying breeze waked music of new and
more delightful melody. Meteoric shapes, more effulgent than the
moonlight, hung on the wandering clouds, and mixed in discordant dance
around the spiral fountains. Blue vapours assumed strange lineaments
under the rocks and among the ruins, lingering like ghosts with
slow and solemn step. Through a dark chasm to the east, in the long
perspective of a portal glittering with the unnumbered riches of the
subterranean world, shone the broad moon, pouring in one yellow and
unbroken stream her horizontal beams. Nearer the icy region, autumn and
spring held an alternate reign. The sere leaves fell and choked the
sluggish brooks; the chilling fogs hung diamonds on every spray; and in
the dark cold evening the howling winds made melancholy music in the
trees. Far above, shone the bright throne of winter, clear, cold, and
dazzling. Sometimes there was seen the snow-flakes to fall before the
sinking orb of the beamless sun, like a shower of fiery sulphur. The
cataracts, arrested in their course, seemed, with their transparent
columns, to support the dark-browed rocks. Sometimes the icy whirlwind
scooped the powdery snow aloft, to mingle with the hissing meteors, and
scatter spangles through the rare and rayless atmosphere.
Such strange scenes of chaotic confusion and harrowing sublimity,
surrounding and shutting in the vale, added to the delights of its
secure and voluptuous tranquillity. No spectator could have refused to
believe that some spirit of great intelligence and power had hallowed
these wild and beautiful solitudes to a deep and solemn mystery.
The immediate effect of such a scene, suddenly presented to the
contemplation of mortal eyes, is seldom the subject of authentic
record. The coldest slave of custom cannot fail to recollect some few
moments in which the breath of spring or the crowding clouds of sunset,
with the pale moon shining through their fleecy skirts, or the song of
some lonely bird perched on the only tree of an unfrequented heath,
has awakened the touch of nature. And they were Arabians who entered
the valley of Bethzatanai; men who idolized nature and the God of
nature; to whom love and lofty thoughts, and the apprehensions of an
uncorrupted spirit, were sustenance and life. Thus securely excluded
from an abhorred world, all thought of its judgment was cancelled by
the rapidity of their fervid imaginations. They ceased to acknowledge,
or deigned not to advert to, the distinctions with which the majority
of base and vulgar minds control the longings and struggles of the soul
towards its place of rest. A new and sacred fire was kindled in their
hearts and sparkled in their eyes. Every gesture, every feature, the
minutest action, was modelled to beneficence and beauty by the holy
inspiration that had descended on their searching spirits. The epidemic
transport communicated itself through every heart with the rapidity of
a blast from heaven. They were already disembodied spirits; they were
already the inhabitants of paradise. To live, to breathe, to move, was
itself a sensation of immeasurable transport. Every new contemplation
of the condition of his nature brought to the happy enthusiast an
added measure of delight, and impelled to every organ, where mind is
united with external things, a keener and more exquisite perception of
all that they contain of lovely and divine. To love, to be beloved,
suddenly became an insatiable famine of his nature, which the wide
circle of the universe, comprehending beings of such inexhaustible
variety and stupendous magnitude of excellence appeared too narrow and
confined to satiate.
Alas, that these visitings of the spirit of life should fluctuate and
pass away! That the moments when the human mind is commensurate with
all that it can conceive of excellent and powerful, should not endure
with its existence and survive its most momentous change! But the
beauty of a vernal sunset, with its overhanging curtains of empurpled
cloud, is rapidly dissolved, to return at some unexpected period, and
spread an alleviating melancholy over the dark vigils of despair.
It is true the enthusiasm of overwhelming transport which had inspired
every breast among the Assassins is no more. The necessity of daily
occupation and the ordinariness of that human life, the burthen of
which it is the destiny of every human being to bear, had smothered,
not extinguished, that divine and eternal fire. Not the less indelible
and permanent were the impressions communicated to all; not the more
unalterably were the features of their social character modelled and
determined by its influence.