to fall foul of the image so distorted. This the idlers and the mob
greatly admire. They deem it marvellous originality. And what can be
nearer to the origin of new things than to take man and nature always
in the last agonising stage of final decomposition?
"In my own dramas I did all that with a vengeance; so did Crates, my
revered colleague. What was a plot to us? What does a plot matter?
The other day when I sauntered through the Champs Elysées of Paris, I
overheard a conversation between little girls playing at ladies. By
Antisthenes, that was the real model of the plot and dialogue of all
Cynic dramas!
"Said one little girl to the other: 'How are you, madame?'
"'Thanks,' said the other, 'very well. I am watching my children.'
"'How many have you?'
"'Seventy-five, please.'
"'And how old are you?'
"'Twenty years, madame.'
"'And how is your husband?'
"'_Y pensez-vous?_ My husband? Fancy that! Why, I have none!'
"This is precisely the plot and dialogue in Shaw's _Candida_.
* * * * *
"I enjoyed _Candida_ so intensely; I could have kissed the author. How
entirely like my own dramas! How closely modelled on the dialogue of
the little girls!
"A husband of forty, vigorous, brave, honest, hard-working in a noble
cause, loving and loved, father of two children, befriends a boy of
eighteen, who is as wayward and conceited and inconsistent as only
boys of eighteen can be. That boy suddenly tells the husband that he,
the boy, loved Candida, the wife of the said husband. The boy, not
satisfied with this amenity, becomes intolerably impudent, and the
husband, acting on his immediate and just sentiment, wants to throw him
out of the house.
"But this is too much of what ninety-nine out of a hundred husbands
would do. So instead of kicking the impertinent lad into the street,
the husband--invites him to lunch.
"I was so afraid the husband would in the end bundle the youth out of
the room. To my intense delight the author did not forget the rules of
the Cynic drama, and the boy remained for lunch.
"Bravo! Bravo! I secretly hoped the husband would solemnly charge
the interesting youth to fit Candida with the latest corset. To my
amazement that did not take place. But yet there was some relief for me
in store: the husband invites the boy to pass the evening with his wife
alone.
"This is, of course, precisely what most husbands would do.
"This is what another disciple of mine in Paris (a man called Anatole,
and misnamed France), did do in an even worse case. In Anatole's story,
the husband arrives in the most inopportune moment that a forgetful
wife can dread. He looks at the scene with much self-control, takes up
the _Petit Parisien_ lying on the floor, and withdraws gracefully into
another room, there to make sundry reflections on the _Petit Parisien_
and on the 'Petite Parisienne.'
"How classically Cynical! How Bion, Metrocles, Menippus, and all the
rest of our sect would have enjoyed that! Here is a true comedy! Here
is something truly realistic, and realistically true. That's why
Anatole is so much admired by Englishmen. He too is, as we Cynics have
been called, a philosopher of the proletariate.
"Much, O Zeus, as I enjoy the honour and pleasure of being allowed
to crouch on one of the steps of your divine halls, I do also keenly
appreciate the pleasure of meeting my disciples of the hour. One of
these next days I will ask Momus to invite Tolstoy, Ibsen, Shaw,
Anatole, and a few others to a lunch, to meet me in a Swiss hotel.
Plato, you better come and listen behind a screen. You might perhaps
improve upon your _Gorgias_ in which dialogue you attempt to sketch
the superman and super-cynic. Ibsen will stammer and jerk his best
in deathly hatred of all Authority. Shaw will pinprick to death the
foundations of Marriage and Family. Anatole will try to upset, by
throwing little mud-pellets at them, ideal figures such as Joan of
Arc" (--Diogenes had barely uttered this name, when Zeus and all the
other gods rose from their seats, and bowed towards Pallas Athene, who
held Joan in her holy arms--). "Tolstoy, with a penny trumpet in his
toothless mouth, will bray against war; Oh, it will be glorious.
"Of course, by this time I know very well that the controlling
principle of all mundane and supramundane things is Authority. As we
here all bow to Zeus, so mortals must always bow to some authority.
Nothing more evident can be imagined nor shown. It is the broadest
result of all history, of all experience. Just because this is so, and
unmistakably so, my disciples must naturally say the reverse. They
do not look at facts by a microscope or a telescope; they telescope
train-loads of facts into a mass of pulverised debris.
"Instead of saying that in England, through her social caste system,
there are many, too many, _parvenus_ or tactless upstarts, my disciples
must say: 'The greatness of England is owing to her tactlessness.' This
is the real merchandise which I sold at Corinth over two thousand years
ago.
"Tolstoy thunders against War. I wonder he does not thunder against
mothers' breasts feeding their babies. Why, War made everything that
is worth having. First of all, it made Peace. Without war there is no
peace; there is only stagnation. The greater the ideal, the greater the
price we have to pay for it. And since we always crave for the sublime
ideals of Liberty, Honour, Wealth, Power, Beauty, and Knowledge, we
must necessarily pay the highest price for it--ourselves, our lives
in war. There is no Dante without the terrible wars of the Guelfs and
the Ghibellines. There could have been no ideal superman like Raphael
without the counter-superman called Cesare Borgia. It is only your
abominable Philistine who squeaks: 'Oh, we might have many a nice slice
from the ham of Ideals without paying too dearly for it.' What do you
think of that, Hercules? Did you win Hebe by avoiding conflicts and
disasters?"
Hercules groaned deeply and looked first at his battered club and
then at charming Hebe. The gods laughed aloud and Apollo, taking up
his lyre, intoned a grand old Doric song in praise of the heroes of
war who, by their valour, had prepared the _palæstra_ for the heroes
of thought and beauty. He was soon joined by a thousand harmonious
voices from the temple of Isis, and from his own majestic sanctuary at
Pompeii. Vesuvius counterpointed the lithe song with his deep bass;
and, with Dionysus at the head of them, Pan and the nymphs came wafting
through the air, strewing buds of melodies on to the Olympian wreaths
of tones sung by Phoebus Apollo in praise of War.
* * * * *
When the song had subsided, Zeus, in a voice full of serenity and
benign music, addressed the gods and heroes as follows: "We are very
much beholden to Diogenes for his bright and amusing story of the
Cynical ants that at present run about the woods and cottages of men,
biting each other and their friends. Their epigrams and other eccentric
utterances can affect none of us here assembled. You very well know
that I have not allowed Apollo, or Reason to reign alone and unaided by
Unreason, or Dionysus. The Cynical critics of men want to bring about
the Age of Reason, or as these presumptuous half-knowers call it, the
Age of Science. This, I have long since laid down, shall never be.
"At the gate of the Future, at Delphi, Apollo is associated with
Dionysus, and so it has been ever since I came to rule this Universe.
Just as good music consists of tones and rhythms, and again of the
cessation of all sound, or of measured pauses; even so my Realm
consists of Reason, and of the cessation of all Reason, or of Unreason.
The Cynics who ignore the latter, misjudge the former. This, I take it,
is perfectly clear to all of us.
"But while we here may laugh at the bites of the Cynical ants below,
we do not mean to state that in their occupation there is no point, no
utility at all. These little ants may be, and undoubtedly are largely
sterile mockers. Yet even I have experienced it on myself that the
effects of their doings are not always sterile."
And leaning back on his chryselephantine chair, Zeus lowered his voice
and said almost in a whisper: "See, friends, why do we meet here in
lonely places, in a dead town, during the mysterious hours of night?
You know very well who and what has prevailed upon me to choose this
temporary darkening of our blissful life."
At this moment there came from the rushes near the sea a plaintive song
accompanied by a flute, and a voice of a human sobbed out the cry:
"Pan, the Great Pan is dead!"
A sudden silence fell over the divine Assembly. A cloud of deep sadness
seemed to hover over all.
The three Graces then betook themselves to dancing, and their beauteous
movements and poses so exhilarated the Assembly, that the former
serenity was soon re-established.
Zeus now turned to Plato, calling upon him to give his opinion on the
Cynics. Zeus reminded Plato that hitherto the Cynics had been treated
by him merely incidentally, mostly by hidden allusions to Antisthenes,
or by witty remarks on Diogenes. At present Plato might help the gods
to pass agreeably the rest of the beautiful night by telling them in
connection and fulness what really the ultimate purport of these modern
Cynics, Shavian or other is going to be. Everybody turned his or her
face towards Plato, who rose from his seat, and bowing, with a smile,
towards Diogenes, thus addressed Zeus and the Assembly of gods and
heroes at Pompeii:
* * * * *
"It is quite true that in my writings I have not devoted any explicit
discussion to the views and tenets of the Cynics. They appeared to
me at that time far too grotesque to be worth more than a passing
consideration. Of their dramas I had, and still have a very poor
opinion. From what I hear from Diogenes, the modern imitators of Cynic
dramatists are not a whit better. In addition to all their wearying
eccentricities, they add the most unbearable eccentricity of all, to
wit, that their dramas and comedies represent a new departure within
dramatic literature.
"Shaw's dramas are no more dramas than his Swiss, in _Arms and the
Man_, is a soldier; or his clergyman in _Candida_ a husband, or a man.
His pieces are not dramatic in the least; they do not exhibit the most
elementary qualities of a comedy. For, whatever the definition of a
comedy may be, one central quality can never be missing in it: the
persons presented must be types of human beings.
"Shaw's persons are no humans whatever. They are _homunculi_ concocted
in a chemical laboratory of pseudo-science and false psychology. They
crack, from time to time, brave jokes; so do clowns in a circus. That
alone does not make a wax figure into a human.
"There may be very interesting comic scenes amongst bees, wasps, or
beavers; but we cannot appreciate them. We can only appreciate human
comicality, even when it is presented to us in the shape of dialogues
between animals, as Aristophanes, the fabulists, and so many other
writers have done.
"Who would care to sit through a comedy showing the comic aspects of
life in a Bedlam? If madmen have humour, as undoubtedly they have, we
do not want to see it on a public stage. The fact that it is a madman's
humour deprives it of all humour.
"Hedda Gabler can appeal to no sound taste. One never sees why she is
so fearfully unhappy. If she is not in love with her husband, let her
work in the house, in the kitchen, in the garden; let her try to be a
mother; let her adopt a child if the gods deny her one of her own. Let
her do something. Of course, idling all day long as she does, will in
the end demoralise a poker; and far from wondering that she ends badly
at the end of the last act, one only wonders that she did not do away
with herself before the first scene of the first act. By doing so she
would have done a great service to herself, her people, and to dramatic
literature.
"Of the same kind is Raina, in _Arms and the Man_. She is a doll, but
not a young girl. She has neither senses, nor sense. She is made of
cardboard, and fit only to appear in a Punch and Judy show. She is, in
common with most of the figures in the comedies of the modern Cynics,
a mere outline drawing of a human being from whose mouth hang various
slips of paper on which the author conveniently writes his _variorum_
jokes and bright sayings. All these so-called dramatic pieces will
be brushed away by the broom of Time, as happened to the dramas and
travesties of our Greek Cynics. Life eternal is given to things only
through Art, and in these writings of the Cynics, old or modern ones,
there is not the faintest trace either of one of the Graces, or of one
of the Muses.
* * * * *
"Having said this much about Shaw's and the other modern Cynics'
alleged dramatic writings, I hasten to add, that when we come to
consider the _effect_ these so-called dramas have, and possibly will
continue to have on the mind of the public, we are bound to speak in
quite a different manner.
"I have had plenty of time, since the days of my Academy at Athens,
to think out the vast difference between such works of the intellect
as aim at nothing but truth and beauty, or what we might call
_alethology_, on the one hand; and such works as aim at effect, or what
may be generally termed as _effectology_.
"It is from this all-important point of view that I say that Tolstoy,
Ibsen, Shaw and the others are, _effectologically_, just as remarkable
as they are _alethologically_ without much significance.
"As to the latter; as to their hitting off great or new truths; as to
their being philosophers; or to put it in my terms, as to their having
any _alethological_ value, Diogenes has already spoken with sufficient
clearness. Just consider this one point.
"Tolstoy, as well as Shaw, wants to reform the abuses of civilisation.
In order to do so they combat with all their might the most powerful
purifier and reformer of men,--War. Can anything be more ludicrous, and
unscientific?
"Who gave the modern Germans that incomparable dash and _élan_, thanks
to which they have in one generation quadrupled their commerce, doubled
their population, quintupled their wealth, and ensured their supremacy
on the Continent?
"Was it done by their thinkers and scholars? The greatest of these died
before 1870.
"Was it done by getting into possession of the mouth of the Rhine, or
of the access to the Danish Sounds, which formerly debarred them from
the sea? They do not possess the mouth of the Rhine, nor Denmark to the
present day.
"Nothing has changed in the material or intellectual world making the
Germany of to-day more advantageous for commerce or power than it had
been formerly.
"Except the victorious wars of 1866 and of 1870.
"Can such an evident connection of fact be overlooked? And would Russia
have introduced the Duma without the battle of Mukden? It is waste of
time even for the immortals to press this point much longer.
"As in this case, so in nearly all the other cases, Cynics revile
abuses the sole remedies for which they violently combat. In their
negative attacks they brandish the keenest edges of the swords, daggers
and pins of Logic; in their positive advices they browbeat every person
in the household of logical thought.
"Yet, worthless, or very nearly so, as they may be as teachers of
truth, they are powerful as writers of pamphlets. For this is what
their literature comes to. They do not write dramas, nor novels.
They can do neither the one, nor the other. But they write effective
pamphlets in the apparent form of dramas and novels.
"They are pamphleteers, and not men of letters.
"In that lies their undeniably great force. They instinctively choose
as eccentric, as loud, and as striking forms and draperies of ideas as
possible, so as to rouse the apathetic Philistine to an interest in
what they say. They are full of absurdities; but which of us here can
now after centuries of experience venture to make light of the power of
the absurd?
"Error and Absurdity are so powerful, so necessary, so inevitable, that
Protagoras was perhaps not quite wrong in saying that Truth herself is
only a particular species of Error.
"Once, many years ago, I despised the Cynics, and my own master
Socrates made light of them. But at present I think differently. When
Socrates said, with subtle sarcasm, to Antisthenes: 'I see your vanity
peeping out through the holes of your shabby garment,' Antisthenes
might have retorted to him: 'And I, O Socrates, see through these very
holes how short-sighted you are.'
"For have we not lived to see that while all revere Socrates in words,
they follow the pupils of Antisthenes in deeds? The Cynics, fathered
by Antisthenes, begot the Stoics; and the Stoics were the main ferment
in the rise and spread of Christianity. Many of the sayings and
teachings and doings of the Cynics, which we at Athens made most fun
of, have long since become the sinews and fibres of Christian ideas
and institutions. There is greater similarity and mental propinquity
between Antisthenes or Diogenes and St Paul, than between Socrates and
St Augustine of Hippo.
"I pray thee, O Zeus, to let us for a moment see this town of Pompeii
as it was a day before its destruction, with all its life in the
streets and the Forum, so as to give us an ocular proof of the truth of
what I just now said about the Cynics and Eccentrics of Antiquity, and
what I am going to apply to the modern Cynics, literary or other."
* * * * *
Thereupon Zeus, by a wave of his hand, placed the whole Assembly in the
shadow as if encircled by a vast mantle of darkness, and shed a strange
and supramundane light on the town of Pompeii, which grew up at sight
from the ground, putting on life and movement and beauty on all its
houses, narrow streets, gardens, and squares. The ancient population
filled, in ceaseless movement, every part of the charming city. Richly
dressed ladies, carried in sedan-chairs by black slaves; patricians in
spotless togas, followed by crowds of clients; magistrates preceded by
lictors; soldiers recruited from all nations; tradesmen from every part
of the Roman Empire; all these and innumerable others, visitors from
the neighbouring cities, thronged the streets, and the whole population
seemed to breathe nothing but joy and a sense of exuberant life.
In one of the squares there was a hilarious crowd listening, with loud
derision and ironical applause, to a haggard, miserably clad, old
man who, addressing them in Ionian Greek, with the strong guttural
accent of the Asiatics, stood on one of the high jumping-stones of the
pavement, and spoke with fanatic fervour of the nameless sinfulness of
the people of Pompeii. With him were two or three other persons of the
same description, joining him from time to time in his imprecations
against the "doomed town."
The old man told them that their whole life was rotten through and
through, a permanent lie, a contradiction to itself, a sure way to
damnation. He thundered against the soldiers jeering at him in the
crowd, calling them cowards, butchers, wretches, and the sinners of all
sinners. He sneered at one of the priests of Isis present in the crowd,
telling the people that there was only one true belief, and no other.
The more the old man talked, the more the crowd laughed at him; and
when a Greek philosopher, who happened to be there, interpellated and
elegantly refuted the old man in a manner approved by the rules of the
prevalent school of rhetoric and dialectics, the crowd cheered the
philosopher, and the more accomplished amongst the bystanders said to
one another: "This old man is a mere charlatan, or an impostor; it's
waste of time to take him seriously."
One man alone, in the whole crowd, a shy and retiring disciple of
Apollonius of Tyana, waited until the crowd had dispersed, and then
walking up to the old man, asked him what sect of Cynics he belonged to.
The old man said: "I am no Cynic; I am a Christian."
Thereupon the disciple of Apollonius took the old man's hand, pressed
it with emotion, kissed him, and turning away from him, walked off,
plunged in deep thought.
A minute later the supramundane light over Pompeii disappeared, and the
Assembly of the gods and heroes was again in the mild rays of Selene.
* * * * *
"Can anyone here," continued Plato, "deny that that crowd together
with the philosopher was quite mistaken in their appreciation of the
eccentric old man, and that the silent pupil of Apollonius alone was
right?
"Cynics and Eccentrics have at all times been the forerunners of vast
popular movements. The flagellants, the Beguins and Lollards, and
countless other Cynics in the latter half of the Middle Ages preceded
the Reformation.
"And was not the French Revolution, or the vastest effort at realising
Ideals ever made by the little ones down here, preceded by a Cynic and
his pamphlets, by Jean Jacques Rousseau?
"No Greek town would have endured within its walls a youth so
completely shattered in all his moral build, as was Rousseau. He was
thoroughly and hopelessly demoralised in character, _décousu_ and
eccentric in thought, and badly tutored in point of knowledge. The
clever woman that was his protectress, mistress, and guide, and who
displayed a marvellous capacity for devising jobs and an inexhaustible
resourcefulness in turning things and persons to practical use, could
yet never discover any usefulness in Jean Jacques.
"He wrote, later on, novels, political treatises, botanical ones,
musical ones. In truth he never wrote a novel; he wrote nothing but
pamphlets; stirring, wild, eccentric, enchanting pamphlets. He was
not, like Beaumarchais, a pamphleteer and yet a writer of a real, and
immortal comedy, itself a political pamphlet. Rousseau was a writing
stump-orator doing anticipative yeoman's work for the Revolution.
"So are all the Cynics. So are Ibsen, Tolstoy; so is Shaw. Their
dramas may be, say _are_ no dramas at all; their novels may be, say
_are_ no novels at all; their serious treatises are neither serious nor
treatises; and yet they are, and always will be great _effectological_
centres. They attack the whole fabric of the extant civilisation;
by this one move they rally round them both the silent and the loud
enemies of WHAT IS, and the eager friends of what OUGHT TO BE. Of these
malcontents there always is a great number; especially in times of
prolonged peace.
"A war, a real, good national war would immediately sweep away all
these social malcontents.
"That's why the leaders of the Cynics, and more especially Tolstoy and
Shaw, hate war. It is their mar-feast, their kill-joy; their microbes
do not prosper in times of war.
"Without the fatal and all but universal peace of the period from 50
A.D. to 190 A.D., Christianity could never have made any headway in the
Roman Empire; just as we got rid of our Cynics by the second Athenian
Empire and its great wars.
"This, then, is in my opinion the true perspective of our modern
Cynics. As literature or truth, they exhibit little of value, except
that Shaw appears to me (--if a Greek may be allowed to pass judgment
on such a matter--) to be the only one amongst living writers in
England who has real literary splendour in his style. As men, however,
exercising an effect on a possible social Revolution, these writers are
of the utmost importance.
"Or to repeat it in my terms: _alethologically_ nil or nearly so,
_effectologically_ very important or interesting; this is the true
perspective of writers like Tolstoy, Shaw, and other modern Cynics.
"Their influence is not on Thought, nor on Art, but on Action.
"They may eventually, if Mars will continue trifling with wood-nymphs
and other well-intended cordials, become a great power. They may beget
Neo-Stoics, who may beget Neo-Christians. They themselves may then
appear only as the tiny drum-pages running in front or beside the
real fighters in battle. Yet their importance will be little impaired
thereby.