[124] ALL true criticism of philosophic doctrine, as of every other
product of human mind, must begin with an historic estimate of the
conditions, antecedent and contemporary, which helped to make it
precisely what it was. But a complete criticism does not end there.
In the evolution of abstract doctrine as we find it written in the
history of philosophy, if there is always, on one side, the fatal,
irresistible, mechanic play of circumstance--the circumstances of a
particular age, which may be analysed and explained; there is always
also, as if acting from the opposite side, the comparatively
inexplicable force of a personality, resistant to, while it is moulded
by, them. It might even be said that the trial-task of criticism, in
regard to literature and art no less than to philosophy, begins exactly
where the estimate of general conditions, of the conditions common to
all the products of this or that particular age--of the "environment"--
leaves off, and we touch what is unique in the individual genius [125]
which contrived after all, by force of will, to have its own masterful
way with that environment. If in reading Plato, for instance, the
philosophic student has to re-construct for himself, as far as
possible, the general character of an age, he must also, so far as he
may, reproduce the portrait of a person. The Sophists, the Sophistical
world, around him; his master, Socrates; the Pre-Socratic philosophies;
the mechanic influence, that is to say, of past and present:--of course
we can know nothing at all of the Platonic doctrine except so far as we
see it in well-ascertained contact with all that; but there is also
Plato himself in it.
--A personality, we may notice at the outset, of a certain
complication. The great masters of philosophy have been for the most
part its noticeably single-minded servants. As if in emulation of
Aristotle's simplicity of character, his absorbing intellectualism--
impressive certainly, heroic enough, in its way--they have served
science, science in vacuo, as if nothing beside, faith, imagination,
love, the bodily sense, could detach them from it for an hour. It is
not merely that we know little of their lives (there was so little to
tell!) but that we know nothing at all of their temperaments; of which,
that one leading abstract or scientific force in them was in fact
strictly exclusive. Little more than intellectual abstractions
themselves, in them [126] philosophy was wholly faithful to its
colours, or its colourlessness; rendering not grey only, as Hegel said
of it, but all colours alike, in grey.
With Plato it was otherwise. In him, the passion for truth did but
bend, or take the bent of, certain ineradicable predispositions of his
nature, in themselves perhaps somewhat opposed to that. It is however
in the blending of diverse elements in the mental constitution of Plato
that the peculiar Platonic quality resides. Platonism is in one sense
an emphatic witness to the unseen, the transcendental, the non-
experienced, the beauty, for instance, which is not for the bodily eye.
Yet the author of this philosophy of the unseen was,--Who can doubt it
who has read but a page of him? this, in fact, is what has led and kept
to his pages many who have little or no turn for the sort of questions
Plato actually discusses:--The author of this philosophy of the unseen
was one, for whom, as was said of a very different French writer, "the
visible world really existed." Austere as he seems, and on well-
considered principle really is, his temperance or austerity,
aesthetically so winning, is attained only by the chastisement, the
control, of a variously interested, a richly sensuous nature. Yes, the
visible world, so pre-eminently worth eye-sight at Athens just then,
really existed for him: exists still--there's the point!--is active
still everywhere, when he seems to have turned away from it to
invisible things.
[127] To the somewhat sad-coloured school of Socrates, and its
discipline towards apathy or contempt in such matters, he had brought
capacities of bodily sense with the making in them of an Odyssey; or
(shall we say?) of a poet after the order of Sappho or Catullus; as
indeed also a practical intelligence, a popular management of his own
powers, a skill in philosophic yet mundane Greek prose, which might
have constituted him the most successful of Sophists. You cannot help
seeing that his mind is a storehouse of all the liveliest imageries of
men and things. Nothing, if it really arrests eye or ear at all, is
too trivial to note. Passing through the crowd of human beings, he
notes the sounds alike of their solemn hymns and of their pettiest
handicraft. A conventional philosopher might speak of "dumb matter,"
for instance; but Plato has lingered too long in braziers' workshops to
lapse into so stupid an epithet. And if the persistent hold of
sensible things upon him thus reveals itself in trifles, it is manifest
no less in the way in which he can tell a long story,--no one more
effectively! and again, in his graphic presentment of whole scenes from
actual life, like that with which The Republic opens. His Socrates,
like other people, is curious to witness a new religious function: how
they will do it. As in modern times, it would be a pleasant occasion
also for meeting the acquaintance one likes best-- Synesometha pollois
[128] tôn neôn autothi.+ "We shall meet a number of our youth there: we
shall have a dialogue: there will be a torchlight procession in honour
of the goddess, an equestrian procession: a novel feature!--What?
Torches in their hands, passed on as they race? Aye, and an
illumination, through the entire night. It will be worth seeing!"--
that old midnight hour, as Carlyle says of another vivid scene,
"shining yet on us, ruddy-bright through the centuries." Put alongside
of that, and, for life-like charm, side by side with Murillo's Beggar-
boys (you catch them, if you look at his canvas on the sudden, actually
moving their mouths, to laugh and speak and munch their crusts, all at
once) the scene in the Lysis of the dice-players. There the boys are!
in full dress, to take part in a religious ceremony. It is scarcely
over; but they are already busy with the knuckle-bones, some just
outside the door, others in a corner. Though Plato never tells one
without due motive, yet he loves a story for its own sake, can make one
of fact or fancy at a moment's notice, or re-tell other people's
better: how those dear skinny grasshoppers of Attica, for instance, had
once been human creatures, who, when the Muses first came on earth,
were so absorbed by their music that they forgot even to eat and drink,
till they died of it. And then the story of Gyges in The Republic, and
the ring that can make its wearer invisible: [129] --it goes as easily,
as the ring itself round the finger.
Like all masters of literature, Plato has of course varied excellences;
but perhaps none of them has won for him a larger number of friendly
readers than this impress of visible reality. For him, truly (as he
supposed the highest sort of knowledge must of necessity be) all
knowledge was like knowing a person. The Dialogue itself, being, as it
is, the special creation of his literary art, becomes in his hands, and
by his masterly conduct of it, like a single living person; so
comprehensive a sense does he bring to bear upon it of the slowly-
developing physiognomy of the thing--its organic structure, its
symmetry and expression--combining all the various, disparate subjects
of The Republic, for example, into a manageable whole, so entirely
that, looking back, one fancies this long dialogue of at least three
hundred pages might have occupied, perhaps an afternoon.
And those who take part in it! If Plato did not create the "Socrates"
of his Dialogues, he has created other characters hardly less life-
like. The young Charmides, the incarnation of natural, as the aged
Cephalus of acquired, temperance; his Sophoclean amenity as he sits
there pontifically at the altar, in the court of his peaceful house;
the large company, of varied character and of every age, which moves in
those Dialogues, though still oftenest the young [130] in all their
youthful liveliness:--who that knows them at all can doubt Plato's hold
on persons, that of persons on him? Sometimes, even when they are not
formally introduced into his work, characters that had interested,
impressed, or touched him, inform and colour it, as if with their
personal influence, showing through what purports to be the wholly
abstract analysis of some wholly abstract moral situation. Thus, the
form of the dying Socrates himself is visible pathetically in the
description of the suffering righteous man, actually put into his own
mouth in the second book of The Republic; as the winning brilliancy of
the lost spirit of Alcibiades infuses those pages of the sixth, which
discuss the nature of one by birth and endowments an aristocrat, amid
the dangers to which it is exposed in the Athens of that day--the
qualities which must make him, if not the saviour, the destroyer, of a
society which cannot remain unaffected by his showy presence.
Corruptio optimi pessima! Yet even here, when Plato is dealing with
the inmost elements of personality, his eye is still on its object, on
character as seen in characteristics, through those details, which make
character a sensible fact, the changes of colour in the face as of tone
in the voice, the gestures, the really physiognomic value, or the mere
tricks, of gesture and glance and speech. What is visibly expressive
in, or upon, persons; those flashes of temper which check yet give
[131] renewed interest to the course of a conversation; the delicate
touches of intercourse, which convey to the very senses all the
subtleties of the heart or of the intelligence:--it is always more than
worth his while to make note of these.
We see, for instance, the sharp little pygmy bit of a soul that catches
sight of any little thing so keenly, and makes a very proper lawyer.
We see, as well as hear, the "rhapsodist," whose sensitive performance
of his part is nothing less than an "interpretation" of it, artist and
critic at once: the personal vanities of the various speakers in his
Dialogues, as though Plato had observed, or overheard them, alone; and
the inevitable prominence of youth wherever it is present at all,
notwithstanding the real sweetness of manner and modesty of soul he
records of it so affectionately. It is this he loves best to linger
by; to feel himself in contact with a condition of life, which
translates all it is, so immediately, into delightful colour, and
movement, and sound. The eighth and ninth books of The Republic are a
grave contribution, as you know, to abstract moral and political
theory, a generalisation of weighty changes of character in men and
states. But his observations on the concrete traits of individuals,
young or old, which enliven us on the way; the difference in sameness
of sons and fathers, for instance; the influence of servants on their
masters; how the minute ambiguities of rank, as a family becomes [132]
impoverished, tell on manners, on temper; all the play of moral colour
in the reflex of mere circumstance on what men really are:--the
characterisation of all this has with Plato a touch of the peculiar
fineness of Thackeray, one might say. Plato enjoys it for its own
sake, and would have been an excellent writer of fiction.
There is plenty of humour in him also of course, and something of
irony--salt, to keep the exceeding richness and sweetness of his
discourse from cloying the palate. The affectations of sophists, or
professors, their staginess or their inelegance, the harsh laugh, the
swaggering ways, of Thrasymachus, whose determination to make the
general company share in a private conversation, is significant of his
whole character, he notes with a finely-pointed pencil, with something
of the fineness of malice,--malin, as the French say. Once
Thrasymachus had been actually seen to blush. It is with a very
different sort of fineness Plato notes the blushes of the young; of
Hippocrates, for instance, in the Protagoras. The great Sophist was
said to be in Athens, at the house of Callicles, and the diligent young
scholar is up betimes, eager to hear him. He rouses Socrates before
daylight. As they linger in the court, the lad speaks of his own
intellectual aspirations; blushes at his confidence. It was just then
that the morning sun blushed with his first beam, as if to reveal the
lad's [133] blushing face.--Kai hos eipen erythriasas, êdê gar
hypephaine ti êmeras ôste kataphanê auton genesthai.+ He who noted that
so precisely had, surely, the delicacy of the artist, a fastidious eye
for the subtleties of colour as soul made visibly expressive. "Poor
creature as I am," says the Platonic Socrates, in the Lysis, concerning
another youthful blush, "Poor creature as I am, I have one talent: I
can recognise, at first sight, the lover and the beloved."
So it is with the audible world also. The exquisite monotony of the
voice of the great sophist, for example, "once set in motion, goes
ringing on like a brazen pot, which if you strike it continues to sound
till some one lays his hand upon it." And if the delicacy of eye and
ear, so also the keenness and constancy of his observation, are
manifest in those elaborately wrought images for which the careful
reader lies in wait: the mutiny of the sailors in the ship--ship of the
state, or of one's own soul: the echoes and beams and shadows of that
half-illuminated cavern, the human mind: the caged birds in the
Theatetus, which are like the flighty, half-contained notions of an
imperfectly educated understanding. Real notions are to be ingrained
by persistent thoroughness of the "dialectic" method, as if by
conscientious dyers. He makes us stay to watch such dyers busy with
their purple stuff, as he had done; adding as it were ethic colour to
what he sees with the eye, and [134] painting while he goes, as if on
the margin of his high philosophical discourse, himself scarcely aware;
as the monkish scribe set bird or flower, with so much truth of earth,
in the blank spaces of his heavenly meditation.
Now Plato is one for whom the visible world thus "really exists"
because he is by nature and before all things, from first to last,
unalterably a lover. In that, precisely, lies the secret of the
susceptible and diligent eye, the so sensitive ear. The central
interest of his own youth--of his profoundly impressible youth--as
happens always with natures of real capacity, gives law and pattern to
all that succeeds it. Ta erôtika,+ as he says, the experience, the
discipline, of love, had been that for Plato; and, as love must of
necessity deal above all with visible persons, this discipline involved
an exquisite culture of the senses. It is "as lovers use," that he is
ever on the watch for those dainty messages, those finer intimations,
to eye and ear. If in the later development of his philosophy the
highest sort of knowledge comes to seem like the knowledge of a person,
the relation of the reason to truth like the commerce of one person
with another, the peculiarities of personal relationship thus moulding
his conception of the properly invisible world of ideas, this is partly
because, for a lover, the entire visible world, its hues and outline,
its attractiveness, its power and bloom, must have associated
themselves pre-eminently [135] with the power and bloom of visible
living persons. With these, as they made themselves known by word and
glance and touch, through the medium of the senses, lay the forces,
which, in that inexplicable tyranny of one person over another, shaped
the soul.
Just there, then, is the secret of Plato's intimate concern with, his
power over, the sensible world, the apprehensions of the sensuous
faculty: he is a lover, a great lover, somewhat after the manner of
Dante. For him, as for Dante, in the impassioned glow of his
conceptions, the material and the spiritual are blent and fused
together. While, in that fire and heat, what is spiritual attains the
definite visibility of a crystal, what is material, on the other hand,
will lose its earthiness and impurity. It is of the amorous temper,
therefore, you must think in connexion with Plato's youth--of this,
amid all the strength of the genius in which it is so large a
constituent,--indulging, developing, refining, the sensuous capacities,
the powers of eye and ear, of the fancy also which can re-fashion, of
the speech which can best respond to and reproduce, their liveliest
presentments. That is why when Plato speaks of visible things it is as
if you saw them. He who in the Symposium describes so vividly the
pathway, the ladder, of love, its joyful ascent towards a more perfect
beauty than we have ever yet actually seen, by way of a parallel to the
gradual elevation of mind towards perfect [136] knowledge, knew all
that, we may be sure--ta erôtika +--hêttôn tôn kalôn +--subject to the
influence of fair persons. A certain penitential colour amid that glow
of fancy and expression, hints that the final harmony of his nature had
been but gradually beaten out, and invests the temperance, actually so
conspicuous in his own nature, with the charms of a patiently
elaborated effect of art.
For we must remind ourselves just here, that, quite naturally also,
instinctively, and apart from the austere influences which claimed and
kept his allegiance later, Plato, with a kind of unimpassioned passion,
was a lover in particular of temperance; of temperance too, as it may
be seen, as a visible thing--seen in Charmides, say! in that subdued
and grey-eyed loveliness, "clad in sober grey"; or in those youthful
athletes which, in ancient marble, reproduce him and the like of him
with sound, firm outlines, such as temperance secures. Still, that
some more luxurious sense of physical beauty had at one time greatly
disturbed him, divided him against himself, we may judge from his own
words in a famous passage of the Phaedrus concerning the management,
the so difficult management, of [137] those winged steeds of the body,
which is the chariot of the soul.
Puzzled, in some degree, Plato seems to remain, not merely in regard to
the higher love and the lower, Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemus,
as he distinguishes them in the Symposium; nor merely with the
difficulty of arbitrating between some inward beauty, and that which is
outward; with the odd mixture everywhere, save in its still
unapprehended but eternal essence, of the beautiful with what is
otherwise; but he is yet more harassed by the experience (it is in this
shape that the world-old puzzle of the existence of evil comes to him)
that even to the truest eyesight, to the best trained faculty of soul,
the beautiful would never come to seem strictly concentric with the
good. That seems to have taxed his understanding as gravely as it had
tried his will,--and he was glad when in the mere natural course of
years he was become at all events less ardent a lover. 'Tis he is the
authority for what Sophocles had said on the happy decay of the
passions as age advanced: it was "like being set free from service to a
band of madmen." His own distinguishing note is tranquil afterthought
upon this conflict, with a kind of envy of the almost disembodied old
age of Cephalus, who quotes that saying of Sophocles amid his placid
sacrificial doings. Connect with this quiet scene, and contrast with
the luxuriant power of the Phaedrus and the Symposium, what, [138] for
a certain touch of later mysticism in it, we might call Plato's evening
prayer, in the ninth book of The Republic.--
When any one, being healthfully and temperately disposed
towards himself, turns to sleep, having stirred the reasonable
part of him with a feast of fair thoughts and high problems,
being come to full consciousness, himself with himself; and
has, on the other hand, committed the element of desire neither
to appetite, nor to surfeiting, to the end that this may slumber
well, and, by its pain or pleasure, cause no trouble to that
part which is best in him, but may suffer it, alone by itself,
in its pure essence, to behold and aspire towards some object,
and apprehend what it knows not--some event, of the past, it may
be, or something that now is, or will be hereafter; and in like
manner has soothed hostile impulse, so that, falling to no angry
thoughts against any, he goes not to rest with a troubled spirit,
but with those two parts at peace within, and with that third
part, wherein reason is engendered, on the move:--you know, I
think, that in sleep of this sort he lays special hold on truth,
and then least of all is there lawlessness in the visions of his
dreams. Republic, 571.
For Plato, being then about twenty-eight years old, had listened to the
"Apology" of Socrates; had heard from them all that others had heard or
seen of his last hours; himself perhaps actually witnessed those last
hours. "Justice itself "--the "absolute" Justice--had then become
almost a visible object, and had greatly solemnised him. The rich
young man, rich also in intellectual gifts, who might have become (we
see this in the adroit management of his written work) the most
brilliant and effective of Sophists; who might have developed dialogues
into plays, tragedy, perhaps comedy, as he cared; [139] whose sensuous
or graphic capacity might have made him the poet of an Odyssey, a
Sappho, or a Catullus, or, say! just such a poet as, just because he
was so attractive, would have been disfranchised in the Perfect City;
was become the creature of an immense seriousness, of a fully adult
sense, unusual in Greek perhaps even more than in Roman writers, "of
the weightiness of the matters concerning which he has to discourse,
and of the frailty of man." He inherits, alien as they might be to
certain powerful influences in his own temper, alike the sympathies and
the antipathies of that strange, delightful teacher, who had given him
(most precious of gifts!) an inexhaustible interest in himself. It is
in this way he inherits a preference for those trying severities of
thought which are characteristic of the Eleatic school; an antagonism
to the successful Sophists of the day, in whom the old sceptical
"philosophy of motion" seemed to be renewed as a theory of morals; and
henceforth, in short, this master of visible things, this so ardent
lover, will be a lover of the invisible, with--Yes! there it is
constantly, in the Platonic dialogues, not to be explained away--with a
certain asceticism, amid all the varied opulence, of sense, of speech
and fancy, natural to Plato's genius.
The lover, who is become a lover of the invisible, but still a lover,
and therefore, literally, a seer, of it, carrying an elaborate
cultivation of the bodily senses, of eye and ear, their natural [140]
force and acquired fineness--gifts akin properly to ta erôtika,+ as he
says, to the discipline of sensuous love--into the world of
intellectual abstractions; seeing and hearing there too, associating
for ever all the imagery of things seen with the conditions of what
primarily exists only for the mind, filling that "hollow land" with
delightful colour and form, as if now at last the mind were veritably
dealing with living people there, living people who play upon us
through the affinities, the repulsion and attraction, of persons
towards one another, all the magnetism, as we call it, of actual human
friendship or love:--There, is the formula of Plato's genius, the
essential condition of the specially Platonic temper, of Platonism.
And his style, because it really is Plato's style, conforms to, and in
its turn promotes in others, that mental situation. He breaks as it
were visible colour into the very texture of his work: his vocabulary,
the very stuff he manipulates, has its delightful aesthetic qualities;
almost every word, one might say, its figurative value. And yet no one
perhaps has with equal power literally sounded the unseen depths of
thought, and, with what may be truly called "substantial" word and
phrase, given locality there to the mere adumbrations, the dim hints
and surmise, of the speculative mind. For him, all gifts of sense and
intelligence converge in one supreme faculty of theoretic vision,
theôria,+ the imaginative reason.
[141] To trace that thread of physical colour, entwined throughout, and
multiplied sometimes into large tapestried figures, is the business,
the enjoyment, of the student of the Dialogues, as he reads them. For
this or that special literary quality indeed we may go safely by
preference to this or that particular Dialogue; to the Gorgias, for
instance, for the readiest Attic wit, and a manly practical sense in
the handling of philosophy; to the Charmides, for something like the
effect of sculpture in modelling a person; to the Timaeus, for certain
brilliant chromatic effects. Yet who that reads the Theaetetus, or the
Phaedrus, or the seventh book of The Republic, can doubt Plato's gift
in precisely the opposite direction; that gift of sounding by words the
depths of thought, a plastic power literally, moulding to term and
phrase what might have seemed in its very nature too impalpable and
abstruse to lend itself, in any case, to language? He gives names to
the invisible acts, processes, creations, of abstract mind, as
masterly, as efficiently, as Adam himself to the visible living
creations of old. As Plato speaks of them, we might say, those
abstractions too become visible living creatures. We read the
speculative poetry of Wordsworth, or Tennyson; and we may observe that
a great metaphysical force has come into language which is by no means
purely technical or scholastic; what a help such language is to the
understanding, to a real hold over the things, the thoughts, the [142]
mental processes, those words denote; a vocabulary to which thought
freely commits itself, trained, stimulated, raised, thereby, towards a
high level of abstract conception, surely to the increase of our
general intellectual powers. That, of course, is largely due to
Plato's successor, to Aristotle's life-long labour of analysis and
definition, and to his successors the Schoolmen, with their systematic
culture of a precise instrument for the registration, by the analytic
intellect, of its own subtlest movements. But then, Aristotle, himself
the first of the Schoolmen, had succeeded Plato, and did but formulate,
as a terminology "of art," as technical language, what for Plato is
still vernacular, original, personal, the product in him of an
instinctive imaginative power--a sort of visual power, but causing
others also to see what is matter of original intuition for him.
From first to last our faculty of thinking is limited by our command of
speech. Now it is straight from Plato's lips, as if in natural
conversation, that the language came, in which the mind has ever since
been discoursing with itself concerning itself, in that inward
dialogue, which is the "active principle" of the dialectic method as an
instrument for the attainment of truth. For, the essential, or
dynamic, dialogue, is ever that dialogue of the mind with itself, which
any converse with Socrates or Plato does but promote. The very words
of Plato, then, [143] challenge us straightway to larger and finer
apprehension of the processes of our own minds; are themselves a
discovery in the sphere of mind. It was he made us freemen of those
solitary places, so trying yet so attractive: so remote and high, they
seem, yet are naturally so close to us: he peopled them with
intelligible forms. Nay more! By his peculiar gift of verbal
articulation he divined the mere hollow spaces which a knowledge, then
merely potential, and an experience still to come, would one day
occupy. And so, those who cannot admit his actual speculative results,
precisely his report on the invisible theoretic world, have been to the
point sometimes, in their objection, that by sheer effectiveness of
abstract language, he gave an illusive air of reality or substance to
the mere nonentities of metaphysic hypothesis--of a mind trying to feed
itself on its own emptiness.
Just there--in the situation of one, shaped, by combining nature and
circumstance, into a seer who has a sort of sensuous love of the
unseen--is the paradox of Plato's genius, and therefore, always, of
Platonism, of the Platonic temper. His aptitude for things visible,
with the gift of words, empowers him to express, as if for the eyes,
what except to the eye of the mind is strictly invisible, what an
acquired asceticism induces him to rank above, and sometimes, in terms
of harshest dualism, oppose to, the sensible world. Plato is to be
interpreted [144] not merely by his antecedents, by the influence upon
him of those who preceded him, but by his successors, by the temper,
the intellectual alliances, of those who directly or indirectly have
been sympathetic with him. Now it is noticeable that, at first sight
somewhat incongruously, a certain number of Manicheans have always been
of his company; people who held that matter was evil. Pointing
significantly to an unmistakable vein of Manichean, or Puritan
sentiment actually there in the Platonic Dialogues, these rude
companions or successors of his, carry us back to his great
predecessor, to Socrates, whose personal influence had so strongly
enforced on Plato the severities, moral and intellectual, alike of
Parmenides and of the Pythagoreans. The cold breath of a harshly
abstract, a too incorporeal philosophy, had blown, like an east wind,
on that last depressing day in the prison-cell of Socrates; and the
venerable commonplaces then put forth, in which an overstrained pagan
sensuality seems to be reacting, to be taking vengeance, on itself,
turned now sick and suicidal, will lose none of their weight with
Plato:--That "all who rightly touch philosophy, study nothing else than
to die, and to be dead,"--that "the soul reasons best, when, as much as
possible, it comes to be alone with itself, bidding good-bye to the
body, and, to the utmost of its power, rejecting communion with it,
with the very touch of it, aiming at what is."
[145] It was, in short, as if for the soul to have come into a human
body at all, had been the seed of disease in it, the beginning of its
own proper death.
As for any adornments or provision for this body, the master had
declared that a true philosopher as such would make as little of them
as possible. To those young hearers, the words of Socrates may well
have seemed to anticipate, not the visible world he had then delineated
in glowing colour as if for the bodily eye, but only the chilling
influence of the hemlock; and it was because Plato was only half
convinced of the Manichean or Puritan element in his master's doctrine,
or rather was in contact with it on one side only of his complex and
genial nature, that Platonism became possible, as a temper for which,
in strictness, the opposition of matter to spirit has no ultimate or
real existence. Not to be "pure" from the body, but to identify it, in
its utmost fairness, with the fair soul, by a gymnastic "fused in
music," became, from first to last, the aim of education as he
conceived it. That the body is but "a hindrance to the attainment of
philosophy, if one takes it along with one as a companion in one's
search" (a notion which Christianity, at least in its later though
wholly legitimate developments, will correct) can hardly have been the
last thought of Plato himself on quitting it. He opens his door indeed
to those austere monitors. They correct the sensuous richness of his
genius, but could [146] not suppress it. The sensuous lover becomes a
lover of the invisible, but still a lover, after his earlier pattern,
carrying into the world of intellectual vision, of theôria,+ all the
associations of the actual world of sight. Some of its invisible
realities he can all but see with the bodily eye: the absolute
Temperance, in the person of the youthful Charmides; the absolute
Righteousness, in the person of the dying Socrates. Yes, truly! all
true knowledge will be like the knowledge of a person, of living
persons, and truth, for Plato, in spite of his Socratic asceticism, to
the last, something to look at. The eyes which had noted physical
things, so finely, vividly, continuously, would be still at work; and,
Plato thus qualifying the Manichean or Puritan element in Socrates by
his own capacity for the world of sense, Platonism has contributed
largely, has been an immense encouragement towards, the redemption of
matter, of the world of sense, by art, by all right education, by the
creeds and worship of the Christian Church--towards the vindication of
the dignity of the body.
It was doubtless because Plato was an excellent scholar that he did not
begin to teach others till he was more than forty years old--one of the
great scholars of the world, with Virgil and Milton: by which is
implied that, possessed of the inborn genius, of those natural powers,
[147] which sometimes bring with them a certain defiance of rule, of
the intellectual habits of others, he acquires, by way of habit and
rule, all that can be taught and learned; and what is thus derived from
others by docility and discipline, what is rangé, comes to have in him,
and in his work, an equivalent weight with what is unique, impulsive,
underivable. Raphael--Raphael, as you see him in the Blenheim Madonna,
is a supreme example of such scholarship in the sphere of art. Born of
a romantically ancient family, understood to be the descendant of Solon
himself, Plato had been in early youth a writer of verse. That he
turned to a more vigorous, though pedestrian mode of writing, was
perhaps an effect of his corrective intercourse with Socrates, through
some of the most important years of his life,--from twenty to twenty-
eight.
He belonged to what was just then the discontented class, and might
well have taken refuge from active political life in political ideals,
or in a kind of self-imposed exile. A traveller, adventurous for that
age, he certainly became. After the Lehr-jahre, the Wander-jahre!--all
round the Mediterranean coasts as far west as Sicily. Think of what
all that must have meant just then, for eyes which could see. If those
journeys had begun in angry flight from home, it was for purposes of
self-improvement they were continued: the delightful fruit of them is
evident in what he writes; and finding him [148] in friendly
intercourse with Dionysius the elder, with Dio, and Dionysius the
younger, at the polished court of Syracuse, we may understand that they
were a search also for "the philosophic king," perhaps for the
opportune moment of realising "the ideal state." In that case, his
quarrels with those capricious tyrants show that he was disappointed.
For the future he sought no more to pass beyond the charmed theoretic
circle, "speaking wisdom," as was said of Pythagoras, only "among the
perfect." He returns finally to Athens; and there, in the quiet
precincts of the Acadêmus, which has left a somewhat dubious name to
places where people come to be taught or to teach, founds, not a state,
nor even a brotherhood, but only the first college, with something of a
common life, of communism on that small scale, with Aristotle for one
of its scholars, with its chapel, its gardens, its library with the
authentic text of his Dialogues upon the shelves: we may just discern
the sort of place through the scantiest notices. His reign was after
all to be in his writings. Plato himself does nothing in them to
retard the effacement which mere time brings to persons and their
abodes; and there had been that, moreover, in his own temper, which
promotes self-effacement. Yet as he left it, the place remained for
centuries, according to his will, to its original use. What he taught
through the remaining forty years of his life, the method of that
teaching, whether it [149] was less or more esoteric than the teaching
of the extant Dialogues, is but matter of surmise. Writers, who in
their day might still have said much we should have liked to hear, give
us little but old, quasi-supernatural stories, told as if they had been
new ones, about him. The year of his birth fell, according to some, in
the very year of the death of Pericles (a significant date!) but is not
precisely ascertainable: nor is the year of his death, nor its manner.
Scribens est mortuus, says Cicero:--after the manner of a true scholar,
"he died pen in hand."
NOTES
127-28. +Transliteration: Synesometha pollois tôn neôn autothi. Pater's
translation: "We shall meet a number of our youth there." Plato,
Republic 328a.
133. +Transliteration: Kai hos eipen erythriasas, êdê gar hypephaine ti
êmeras ôste kataphanê auton genesthai. E-text editor's translation:
"And he blushed as he spoke, for presently the day began to break, so
as to make him visible." Plato, Protagoras 312a.
134. +Transliteration: Ta erôtika. Pater's translation: "the discipline
of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining
to love." Plato, Symposium 177d.
136. +Transliteration: ta erôtika. Pater's translation: "the discipline
of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining
to love." Plato, Symposium 177d.
136. +Transliteration: hêttôn tôn kalôn. Pater's translation: "subject
to the influence of fair persons;" more literally, "yielding to
beauty." Plato, Meno 76c.
140. +Transliteration: ta erôtika. Pater's translation: "the discipline
of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining
to love." Plato, Symposium 177d.
140. +Transliteration: theôria. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection."
Plato, Republic 486a.
146. +Transliteration: theôria. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection."
Plato, Republic 486a.