This sketch of the first Act of Taylor's work is so typical of the
remainder that I need not add quotations from the second, or third, or
fourth Act: the explicit modernness of the treatment, the
spirituality, the personality, of it, everywhere forms the most
striking contrast to the treatment of Aeschylus; and I will close the
case as to _Prince Deukalion_ by quoting the subtle and wise words of
Prometheus which end the play. The time is the future: the coming man
and woman, Deukalion and Pyrrha, after long trial, and long
separation, are at last allowed to marry, and to begin their earthly
life. These are Prometheus' parting words to them. It would be
difficult to imagine one plane of thought farther removed from another
than is that of the time-spirit which here speaks through Taylor, from
the time-spirit which speaks through Aeschylus. Remembering the
relations between man and inexorable nature, between man and the
exterminating god which we saw revealed by the Prometheus of Aeschylus,
listen to these relations prophesied by the Prometheus of Taylor,--
"Retrieve perverted destiny!"
(In Aeschylus, when once "destiny" is about, all retrieval grows
absurd.)
'Tis this shall set your children free.
The forces of your race employ
To make sure heritage of joy;
Yet feed, with every earthly sense,
Its heavenly coincidence,--
That, as the garment of an hour,
This, as an everlasting power.
For Life, whose source not here began,
Must fill the utmost sphere of Man,
And so expanding, lifted be
Along the line of God's decree,
To find in endless growth all good;
In endless toil, beatitude.
Seek not to know Him; yet aspire
As atoms toward the central fire!
Not lord of race is He, afar,--
Of Man, or Earth, or any star,
But of the inconceivable All;
Whence nothing that there is can fall
Beyond Him, but may nearer rise,
Slow-circling through eternal skies.
His larger life ye cannot miss,
In gladly, nobly using this.
Now, as a child in April hours
Clasps tight its handful of first flowers,
Homeward, to meet His purpose, go!
These things are all ye need to know.
We have seen that Shelley thought of producing a history of "the
genuine elements of human society," taking Plato as his model, instead
of Aeschylus. Had he done so, how is it likely he would have fared? It
so happens that of all the monstrosities of thought which we find in
the whole Greek cultus, based upon the failure to conceive
personality, the most monstrous are those which originated with Plato.
And since you have now heard this word personality until your patience
must be severely taxed, I am glad to say that I can now close this
whole pending argument which I have announced as our first line of
research in a short and conclusive way by asking you to consider for a
moment the complete massacre and deliberate extermination of all those
sacred bases of personality upon which the fabric of our modern
society rests in that ideal society which Plato has embodied in his
_Republic_. Nothing is more irresistible than the conviction that the
being who planned Plato's _Republic_ could neither have had the least
actual sense of his own personality nor have recognized even
theoretically the least particle of its real significance. Fortunately
this examination can be made with great brevity by confining our
attention to the three quite conclusive matters of marriage, children,
and property as they are provided for in Book V. of Plato's
_Republic_.
At line 460 of that book we find Socrates inquiring: "And how can
marriages be made most beneficial" in our ideal republic? and
presently answering his own question in due form. I quote here and
there, to make the briefest possible showing of the plan. "Why the
principle has been already laid down, that the best of either sex
should be united with the best as often as possible; and that
inferiors should be prevented from marrying at all." "Now these goings
on must be a secret which the rulers only know, ... or there will be a
farther danger of our herd ... breaking into rebellion." To these ends
we had "better appoint certain festivals at which the brides and
bridegrooms" (whom the rulers have previously selected with care and
secrecy) "will be brought together, and sacrifices will be offered and
suitable hymeneal songs composed by our poets;" ... and we "invent
some ingenious kind of lots which the less worthy may draw." In short,
the provision for marriage is that the rulers shall determine each
year how many couples shall marry, and shall privately designate a
certain number of the healthiest couples for that purpose; at the
annual festival all marriageable couples assemble and draw lots, these
lots having previously been so arranged that all unhealthy or in any
way inferior couples shall draw blanks. Of course this is fraud; but
Plato defends it against Glaucon's objection thus: since "our rulers
will have to practice on the body corporate with medicines, our rulers
will find a considerable dose of these" (that is, of falsehood and
deceit) "necessary for the good of their subjects; ... and this lawful
use of them seems likely to be often needed in the regulations of
marriages." The couples thus married eat at a common table. A brave
youth, as a reward of valor, is allowed more than one wife.
Such are the marriage-arrangements of Plato's ideal republic, except
that I have omitted all the most monstrous provisions, giving only the
rosiest view of it. Reserving comment, let us see how the children are
provided for. Immediately after birth "The proper officers will take
the offspring of the good" or (healthy) "parents to" a certain common
"fold, and there ... deposit them with certain nurses; but the
offspring of the inferior, or of the better where they chance to be
deformed, will be put away in some mysterious unknown place, as
decency requires;" the mothers are afterwards allowed to come to the
fold to nourish the children, but the officers are to take the
greatest care that "no mother recognizes her own child:" of course
these children, when they grow up are to be also bridegrooms and
brides, and the problem of how to prevent unknown brothers and
sisters, and the like,--from marrying is duly attended to: but the
provisions for this purpose are at once so silly and so beastly--nay,
they out-beast the beasts--that surely no one can read them without
wishing to blot out the moment in which he did so.
And lastly property is thus disposed of. "Then" (line 482, Bk. V.
Republic) "the community of wives and children is clearly the source
of the greatest good to the State, ... and agrees with the other
principle that the guardians"--the guardians are the model citizens of
this ideal republic--"are not to have houses or lands or any other
property; their pay is to be their food and they are to have no
private expenses;... Both the community of property and the community
of families ... tend to make them more truly guardians; they will not
tear the city in pieces by differing about _meum_ and _tuum_; the one
dragging any acquisition which he has made into a house of his own,
where he has a separate wife and children ..., and another into
another; ... but all will be affected as far as may be by the same
pleasures and pains; ... and, as they have nothing but their persons
which they can call their own, suits and complaints will have no
existence among them."
Now, as soon as the ideal dispositions of Plato are propounded to a
modern hearer, they send an instantaneous shock to the remotest ends
of his nature; and what I will ask you to do at present is to
formulate this shock in terms of personality. Taking for example the
Platonic provision with regard to marriage (how grotesquely, by the
way, these provisions show alongside of what have gained great
currency as "Platonic attachments"): perhaps the two thousand years
since Plato, have taught us nothing so clearly as that one of the most
mysterious and universal elements of personality, is that marvelous
and absolutely inconsequential principle by which a given man finds
himself determined to love a certain woman, or a given woman
determined to love a certain man; and if we look back we find that the
most continuous travail of the ages has been to secure perfect freedom
for these determinations.
Does it not seem as if Time grinned at us in some horrible dream when
we remind ourselves that here the divine Plato, as he has been called,
and the unspeakable Zola (as some of us have learned to call him) have
absolutely come cheek by jowl, and that the physiological marriage of
Zola's is no more nor less than the ideal marriage of Plato?
Rejecting comment on the child-nursing arrangement of Plato it is
instructive to pass on and regard from a different point of view,
though still from the general direction of personality, the Platonic
community of property. If men desire property says Plato, "one man's
desire will contravene another's, and we shall have trouble. How shall
we remedy it? Crush out the desire; and to that end abolish property."
But no, cries modern personality to Plato, cannot you imagine such an
extension of personality as to make each man see that on the whole the
shortest way to carry out his desires for property is to respect every
other man's desire for property, and thus, in the regulations which
will necessarily result from this mutual respect, to secure everything
he acquires by spiritual considerations infinitely more effective than
spears and bars?
We had occasion to observe the other day how complete has been the
success of this doctrine here in the United States: we found that the
real government now going on is individual, personal,--not at
Washington and that we have every proper desire,--of love in marriage,
of having one woman to wife, of cherishing our own children, of
accumulating property,--secured by external law apparently, and
really by respect for that law and the principles of personality it
embodies.
It seems curious to me here to make two further points of contact,
which taken with the Zola point just made, seem to tax the extremes of
the heavens and the earth. Plato's organic principle appears to emerge
from some such consideration as this:--A boy ten years old is found to
possess a wondrous manual deftness: he can do anything with his
fingers: word is brought to Plato: what shall the State do with this
boy? Why, says Plato, if he be manually so adroit, likely he will turn
pickpocket: the plain course is to chop off his hands,--or to expose
him to die in one of those highly respectable places such as decency
requires for generally unavailable children.
No, says the modern man: you are destroying his manifest gift, the
very deepest outcome of his personality: he might be a pickpocket,
true, but then he might be a great violinist, he might be a great
worker in all manner of materials requiring deftness: instead of
cutting off his hands, let us put him at an industrial school, let us
set him to playing the violin, let us cherish him, let us develop his
personality. So, Plato takes the gift of acquiring property--for it is
a real gift and blessing to man, if properly developed--and he will
chop it off, that is, he will crush out the desire of property by
destroying the possibility of its exercise.
And what is this in its outcome but the Nirvana of the Buddhists? My
passions keep me in fear and hope; therefore I will annihilate them:
when I neither think nor desire, then I shall rest, then I shall enjoy
Nirvana. Plato institutes a Nirvana for the ills of marriage, of
offspring, of property: and he realizes it by the slow death through
inanition of the desire for love, for children, for property.
And as we have found the Platonic Plato arguing himself into Zola, the
dialectic Plato arguing himself into a dreaming Buddha, all for lack
of the sense of personality, we now find the ideal Plato arguing
himself, for the same lack, into a brawny Whitman. Think of Plato's
community of property, and listen to Whitman's reverie, as he looks at
some cattle. It is curious to notice how you cannot escape a certain
sense of _naivete_ in this, and how you are taken by it,--until a
moment's thought shows you that the _naivete_ is due to a cunning and
bold contradiction of every fact in the case.
"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contain'd:
I stand and look at them long and long.
Not one is dissatisfied--not one is demented with the mania of owning
things:
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth."
The Whitman method of reaching _naivete_ is here so queerly
illustrated that it seems worth while to stop a moment and point it
out. Upon the least reflection, one must see that "animals" here must
mean cows, and well-fed cows; for they are about the only animals in
the world to whom these items would apply. For says Whitman, "not one
is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things:"
but suppose he were taking one of his favorite night-strolls in the
woods of Bengal rather than of New Jersey, is it not more than
probable that the first animal he met would be some wicked tiger not
only dissatisfied, but perfectly demented with the mania of owning
Whitman, the only kind of property the tiger knows? Seriously, when we
reflect that property to the animal means no more than food or nest
or lair, and that the whole wing-shaken air above us, the
earth-surface about us, the earth-crust below us, the seas, and all,
are alive day and night with the furious activity of animals quite as
fairly demented with the mania of owning their property as men theirs;
and that it is only the pampered beast who is not so demented,--the
cow, for instance, who has her property duly brought to her so many
times a day and has no more to do but to enjoy the cud thereof until
next feed-time,--we have a very instructive model of methods by which
poetry can make itself _naive_.
And finally, what a conclusive light is shed upon the principles
supporting Plato's community of property, when we bring forward the
fact, daily growing more and more notable, that along with the modern
passion for acquiring property has grown the modern passion of giving
away property, that is, of charity? What ancient scheme ever dreamed
of the multitudinous charitable organizations of some of our large
cities? Charity has become organic and a part of the system of things:
it has sometimes overflowed its bounds so that great social questions
now pend as to how we shall direct the overflowing charitable
instincts of society so as really to help the needy and not pamper the
lazy: its public manifestations are daily, its private ministrations
are endless.
Plato would have crushed the instinct of property; but the instinct,
vital part of man's personality, as it is, has taken care of itself,
has been cherished and encouraged by the modern cultus, and behold,
instead of breeding a wild pandemonium of selfishness as Plato argued,
it has in its orderly progress developed this wonderful new outgrowth
of charity which fills every thoughtful man's heart with joy, because
it covers such a multitude of the sins of the time.
I have been somewhat earnest--I fear tediously so--upon this matter,
because I have seen what seem the greatest and most mischievous errors
concerning it, receiving the stamp of men who usually think with
clearness and who have acquired just authority in many premises.
It would not be fair to the very different matters which I have now to
treat, to detail these errors; and I will only mention that if, with
these principles of personality fairly fixed in one's mind, one reads
for example the admirable Introduction of Professor Jowett to his
translation of Plato's _Republic_, one has a perfect clew to many of
the problems over which that translator labors with results which, I
think, cannot be conclusive to his own mind.
Here, too, no one can be satisfied with the otherwise instructive
chapter on Individuality in Professor Eucken's _Fundamental Concepts
of Modern Philosophic Thought_. Eucken's direct reference to Plato's
Republic is evidently made upon only a very vague recollection of
Plato's doctrine, which is always dangerous. "The complete
subordination and sacrifice of the individual expressed in Plato's
idea of a state arose from his opposition to a tendency of the times
which he considered pernicious, and so is characterized rather by
moral energy and intensity of feeling than by the quiet and simple
resignation to the objection which we find in the great men of the
preceding period." But a mere opposition to a tendency of the times
could never have bred this elaborate and sweeping annihilation of
individuality; and it is forgotten that Plato is not here legislating
for his times or with the least dream of the practical establishment
of his Republic: again and again he declares his doubts as to the
practicability of his plans for any time. No; he is building a
republic for all time, and is consistently building upon the ruins of
that personality which he was not sensible of except in its bad
outcome as selfishness.
I must add, too, that there was an explicit theory of what was called
Individuality among the Greeks; the phenomenon of the unaccountable
differences of men from birth early attracted those sharp eyes, and
the Stoics and others soon began to build in various directions from
this basis. But just as the Greeks had a theory of harmony--though
harmony was not developed until the last century--as Richter says
somewhere that a man may contemplate the idea of death for twenty
years, and only in some moment of the twenty-first suddenly have the
realization of death come upon him, and shake his soul; so their
theory of individuality must have been wholly amateur, not a working
element, and without practical result. Surely, we seem in condition to
say so with confidence if you run your minds back along this line of
development which now comes to an end. For what have we done? We have
interrogated Aeschylus and Plato, whom we may surely call the two
largest and most typic spirits of the whole Greek cultus, upon the
main fact of personality; we have verified the abstract with the
concrete by questioning them upon the most vital and well-known
elements of personality: what do you believe about spiritual growth,
about spiritual compactness, about true love, marriage, children,
property? and we have received answers which show us that they have
not yet caught a conception of what personality means, and that when
they explicitly discuss individuality in their theories, it is a
discussion of blind men about colors.