Those evils of Athens then, which were found in very deed somewhat later to be the infirmity of Greece as a whole, when, though its versatile gifts of intellect might constitute it the teacher of its eventual masters, it was found too incoherent politically to hold its own against Rome:—those evils of Athens, of Greece, came from an exaggerated assertion of the fluxional, flamboyant, centrifugal Ionian element in the Hellenic character. They could be cured only by a counter-assertion of the centripetal Dorian ideal, as actually seen best at Lacedaemon; by the way of simplification, of a rigorous limitation of all things, of art and life, of the souls, aye, and of the very bodies of men, as being the integral factors of all beside. It is in those simpler, corrected outlines of a reformed Athens that Plato finds the "eternal form" of the State, of a city as such, like a well-knit athlete, or one of those perfectly disciplined Spartan dancers. His actual purpose therefore is at once reforming and conservative. The drift of his charge is, in his own words, that no political constitution then existing is suitable to the philosophic, that is to [239] say, as he conceives it, to the aristocratic or kingly nature. How much that means we shall see by and bye, when he maintains that in the City of the Perfect the kings will be philosophers. It means that those called, like the gifted, lost Alcibiades, to be the saviours of the state, as a matter of fact become instead its destroyers. The proper soil in which alone that precious exotic seed, the kingly or aristocratic seed, will attain its proper qualities, in which alone it will not yield wine inferior to its best, or rather, instead of bearing any wine at all, become a deadly poison, is still to be laid down according to rules of art, the ethic or political art; but once provided must be jealously kept from innovation. Organic unity with one's self, body and soul, is the well-being, the rightness, or righteousness, or justice of the individual, of the microcosm; but is the ideal also, it supplies the true definition, of the well-being of the macrocosm, of the social organism, the state. On this Plato has to insist, to the disadvantage of what we actually see in Greece, in Athens, with all its intricacies of disunion, faction against faction, as displayed in the later books of Thucydides. Remember! the question Plato is asking throughout The Republic, with a touch perhaps of the narrowness, the fanaticism, or "fixed idea," of Machiavel himself, is, not how shall the state, the place we must live in, be gay or rich or populous, but strong—strong enough to remain [240] itself, to resist solvent influences within or from without, such as would deprive it not merely of the accidental notes of prosperity but of its own very being.

Now what hinders this strengthening macrocosmic unity, the oneness of the political organism with itself, is that the unit, the individual, the microcosm, fancies itself, or would fain be, a rival macrocosm, independent, many-sided, all-sufficient. To make him that, as you know, had been the conscious aim of the Athenian system in the education of its youth, as also in its later indirect education of the citizen by the way of political life. It was the ideal of one side of the Greek character in general, of much that was brilliant in it and seductive to others. In this sense, Pericles himself interprets the educational function of the city towards the citizen:—to take him as he is, and develope him to the utmost on all his various sides, with a variety in those parts however, as Plato thinks, by no means likely to promote the unity of the whole, of the state as such, which must move all together if it is to move at all, at least against its foes. With this at first sight quite limited purpose then, paradoxical as it might seem to those whose very ideal lay precisely in such manifold development, to Plato himself perhaps, manifold as his own genius and culture conspicuously were—paradoxical [241] as it might seem, Plato's demand is for the limitation, the simplifying, of those constituent parts or units; that the unit should be indeed no more than a part, it might be a very small part, in a community, which needs, if it is still to subsist, the wholeness of an army in motion, of the stars in their courses, of well-concerted music, if you prefer that figure, or, as the modern reader might perhaps object, of a machine. The design of Plato is to bring back the Athenian people, the Greeks, to thoughts of order, to disinterestedness in their functions, to that self-concentration of soul on one's own part, that loyal concession of their proper parts to others, on which such order depends, to a love of it, a sense of its extreme aesthetic beauty and fitness, according to that indefectible definition of Justice, of what is right, to hen prattein, to ta hautou prattein+, in opposition, as he thinks, to those so fascinating conditions of Injustice, poikilia, pleonexia, polypragmosyne,+ figuring away, as they do sometimes, so brilliantly.

For Plato would have us understand that men are in truth after all naturally much simpler, much more limited in character and capacity, than they seem. Such diversity of parts and function as is presupposed in his definition of Justice has been fixed by nature itself on human life. The individual, as such, humble as his proper function may be, is unique in fitness for, in a consequent "call" to, that function. We [242] know how much has been done to educate the world, under the supposition that man is a creature of very malleable substance, indifferent in himself, pretty much what influences may make of him. Plato, on the other hand, assures us that no one of us "is like another all in all."—Proton men phyetai hekastos ou pany homoios hekasto, alla diapheron ten physin, allos ep allou ergou praxin .—But for this, social Justice, according to its eternal form or definition, would in fact be nowhere applicable. Once for all he formulates clearly that important notion of the function, (ergon) of a thing, or of a person. It is that which he alone can do, or he better than any one else.

That Plato should exaggerate this definiteness in men's natural vocations, thus to be read as it were in "plain figures" upon each, is one of the necessities of his position. Effect of nature itself, such inequality between men, this differentiation of one from another, is to be further promoted by all the cunning of the political art. The counter-assertion of the natural indifference of men, their pliability to circumstance, while it is certainly truer to our modern experience, is also in itself more hopeful, more congruous with all the processes of education. But for Plato the natural inequality of men, if it is the natural ground of that versatility, (poikilia),+ of the wrongness or Injustice he must needs correct, will be the natural ground of Justice also, as essentially a unity or harmony enforced on disparate [243] elements, unity as of an army, or an order of monks, organic, mechanic, liturgical, whichever you please to call it; but a kind of music certainly, if the founder, the master, of the state, for his proper part, can but compose the scattered notes.

Just here then is the original basis of society—gignetai toinyn hos egomai polis epeide tunchanei hemon hekastos ouk autarkes +—at first in its humblest form; simply because one can dig and another spin; yet already with anticipations of The Republic, of the City of the Perfect, as developed by Plato, as indeed also, beyond it, of some still more distant system "of the services of angels and men in a wonderful order"; for the somewhat visionary towers of Plato's Republic blend of course with those of the Civitas Dei of Augustine. Only, though its top may one day "reach unto heaven," it by no means came down thence; but, as Plato conceives, arises out of the earth, out of the humblest natural wants. Grote was right.—There is a very shrewd matter-of-fact utilitarian among the dramatis personae which together make up the complex genius of Plato. Poiesei hos egomai ten polin hemetera chreia+.—Society is produced by our physical necessities, our inequality in regard to them:—an inequality in three broad divisions of unalterable, incommunicable type, of natural species, among men, with corresponding differentiation of political and social functions: three firmly outlined orders [244] in the state, like three primitive castes, propagating, reinforcing, their peculiarities of condition, as Plato will propose, by exclusive intermarriage, each within itself. As in the class of the artisans (hoi demiourgoi)+ some can make swords best, others pitchers, so, on the larger survey, there will be found those who can use those swords, or, again, think, teach, pray, or lead an army, a whole body of swordsmen, best, thus defining within impassable barriers three essential species of citizenship—the productive class, the military order, the governing class thirdly, or spiritual order.

The social system is in fact like the constitution of a human being. There are those who have capacity, a vocation, to conceive thoughts, and rule their brethren by intellectual power. Collectively of course they are the mind or brain, the mental element, in the social organism. There are those secondly, who have by nature executive force, who will naturally wear arms, the sword in the sheath perhaps, but who will also on occasion most certainly draw it. Well, these are like the active passions and the ultimately decisive will in the bosom of man, most conspicuous as anger—anger, it may be, resentment, against known wrong in another or in one's self, the champion of conscience, flinging away the scabbard, setting the spear against the foe, like a soldier of spirit. They are in a word the conscience, the armed conscience, of the state, [245] nobly bred, sensitive for others and for themselves, informed by the light of reason in their natural kings. And then, thirdly, protected, controlled, by the thought, the will, above them, like those appetites in you and me, hunger, thirst, desire, which have been the motive, the actual creators, of the material order all around us, there will be the "productive" class, labouring perfectly in the cornfields, in the vineyards, or on the vessels which are to contain corn and wine, at a thousand handicrafts, every one still exquisitely differentiated, according to Plato's rule of right—eis hen kata physin +; as within the military class also there will be those who command and those who can but obey, and within the true princely class again those who know all things and others who have still much to learn; those also who can learn and teach one sort of knowledge better than another.

Plato however, in the first steps of the evolution of the State, had lighted quite naturally on what turns out to be a mistaken or inadequate ideal of it, in an idyll pretty enough, indeed, from "The Golden Age."—How sufficient it seems for a moment, that innocent world! is, nevertheless, actually but a false ideal of human society, allowing in fact no place at all for Justice; the very terms of which, precisely because they involve differentiation of life and its functions, are inapplicable to a society, if so it may be called, still essentially inorganic. In [246] a condition, so rudimentary as to possess no opposed parts at all, of course there will be no place for disturbance of parts, for proportion or disproportion of faculty and function. It is, in truth, to a city which has lost its first innocence (polis ede tryphosa)+ that we must look for the consciousness of Justice and Injustice; as some theologians or philosophers have held that it was by the "Fall" man first became a really moral being.

Now in such a city, in the polis ede tryphosa,+ there will be an increase of population:— kai he chora pou he tote hikane smikra ex hikanes estai.+ And in an age which perhaps had the military spirit in excess Plato's thoughts pass on immediately to wars of aggression:— oukoun tes ton plesion choras hemin apotmeteon?+ We must take something, if we can, from Megara or from Sparta; which doubtless in its turn would do the same by us. As a measure of relief however that was not necessarily the next step. The needs of an out-pushing population might have suggested to Plato what is perhaps the most brilliant and animating episode in the entire history of Greece, its early colonisation, with all the bright stories, full of the piety, the generosity of a youthful people, that had gathered about it. No, the next step in social development was not necessarily going to war. In either case however, aggressive action against our neighbours, or defence of our distant brethren beyond the seas [247] at Cyrene or Syracuse against rival adventurers, we shall require a new class of persons, men of the sword, to fight for us if need be. Ah! You hear the notes of the trumpet, and therewith already the stir of an enlarging human life, its passions, its manifold interests. Phylakes or epikouroi,+ watchmen or auxiliaries, our new servants comprehend at first our masters to be, whom a further act of differentiation will distinguish as philosophers and kings from the strictly military order. Plato nevertheless in his search for the true idea of Justice, of rightness in things, may be said now to have seen land. Organic relationship is come into the rude social elements and made of them a body, a society. Rudimentary though it may still be, the definition of Justice, as also of Injustice, is now applicable to its processes. There is a music in the affairs of men, in which one may take one's due part, which one may spoil.

Criticising mythology Plato speaks of certain fables, to be made by those who are apt at such things, under proper spiritual authority, so to term it, hos en pharmakou eidei ta pseude ta en deonti genomena,+ medicinable lies or fictions, with a provisional or economised truth in them, set forth under such terms as simple souls could best receive. Just here, at the end of the third book of The Republic he introduces such a fable: phoinikikon pseudos,+ he calls it, a miner's story, about copper and silver and gold, such as may really [248] have been current among the primitive inhabitants of the island from which metal and the art of working it had been introduced into Greece.—

And I shall try first of all to persuade the rulers themselves and our soldiers, and afterwards the rest of the community, as to the matter of the rearing and the education we gave them, that in fact it did but seem to happen with them, they seemed to experience all that, only as in dreams. They were then in very truth nourished and fashioned beneath the earth within, and the armour upon them and their equipment put together; and when they were perfectly wrought out the earth even their mother put them forth. Now, therefore, it is their duty to think concerning the land in which they are as of a mother, or foster-mother, and to protect it if any foe come against it, and to think of their fellow-citizens as being their brothers, born of the earth as they. All ye in the city, therefore, are brothers, we shall say to them proceeding with our story; but God, when he made you, mixed gold in the generation of those among you fit to be our kings, for which cause they are the most precious of all; and silver in those fit to be our guards; and in the husbandmen and all other handicraftsmen iron and brass. Forasmuch then as ye are all of one kindred, for the most part ye would beget offspring like to yourselves; but at times a silver child will come of one golden, and from the silver a child of gold, and so forth, interchangeably. To those who rule, then, first and above all God enjoins that of nothing shall they be so careful guardians, nothing shall they so earnestly regard, as the young children—what metal has been mixed to their hands in the souls of these. And if a child of their own be born with an alloy of iron or brass, they shall by no means have pity upon it, but, allotting unto it the value which befits its nature, they shall thrust it into the class of husbandmen or artisans. And if, again, of these a child be born with gold or silver in him, with due estimate they shall promote such to wardenship or to arms, inasmuch as an oracular saying declares that the city is perished already when it has iron or brass to guard it. Can you suggest a way of getting them to believe this mythus? Republic, 414.

[249] Its application certainly is on the surface: the Lacedaemonian details also—the military turn taken, the disinterestedness of the powerful, their monastic renunciation of what the world prizes most, above all the doctrine of a natural aristocracy with its "privileges and also its duties." Men are of simpler structure and capacities than you have fancied, Plato would assure us, and more decisively appointed to this rather than to that order of service. Nay, with the boldness proper to an idealist, he does not hesitate to represent them (that is the force of the mythus) as actually made of different stuff; and society, assuming a certain aristocratic humour in the nature of things, has for its business to sanction, safeguard, further promote it, by law.

The state therefore, if it is to be really a living creature, will have, like the individual soul, those sensuous appetites which call the productive powers into action, and its armed conscience, and its far- reaching intellectual light: its industrial class, that is to say, its soldiers, its kings—the last, a kind of military monks, as you might think, on a distant view, their minds full of a kind of heavenly effulgence, yet superintending the labours of a large body of work- people in the town and the fields about it. Of the industrial or productive class, the artists and artisans, Plato speaks only in outline, but is significant in what he says; and enough remains of the actual fruits [250] of Greek industry to enable us to complete his outline for ourselves, as we may also, by aid of Greek art, together with the words of Homer and Pindar, equip and realise the full character of the true Platonic "war-man" or knight; and again, through some later approximate instances, discern something of those extraordinary, half-divine, philosophic kings.

We must let industry then mean for Plato all it meant, would naturally mean, for a Greek, amid the busy spectacle of Athenian handicrafts. The "rule" of Plato, its precepts of temperance, proportion, economy, though designed primarily for its soldiers, and its kings or archons, for the military and spiritual orders, would probably have been incumbent also in relaxed degree upon those who work with their hands; and we have but to walk through the classical department of the Louvre or the British Museum to be reminded how those qualities of temperance and the like did but enhance, could not chill or impoverish, the artistic genius of Greek workmen. In proportion to what we know of the minor handicrafts of Greece we shall find ourselves able to fill up, as the condition of everyday life in the streets of Plato's City of the Perfect, a picture of happy protected labour, "skilled" to the utmost degree in all its applications. Those who prosecute it will be allowed, as we may gather, in larger proportion than those who "watch," in silent thought or sword in hand, such animal [251] liberties as seem natural and right, and are not really "illiberal," for those who labour all day with their bodies, though they too will have on them in their service some measure of the compulsion which shapes the action of our kings and soldiers to such effective music. With more or less of asceticism, of a "common life," among themselves, they will be the peculiar sphere of the virtue of temperance in the State, as being the entirely willing subjects of wholesome rule. They represent, as we saw, in the social organism, the bodily appetites of the individual, its converse with matter, in a perfect correspondence, if all be right there, with the conscience and with the reasonable soul in it. Labouring by system at the production of perfect swords, perfect lamps, perfect poems too, and a perfect coinage, such as we know, to enable them the more readily to exchange their produce (nomisma tes allages heneka)+ working perhaps in guilds and under rules to insure perfection in each specific craft, refining matter to the last degree, they would constitute the beautiful body of the State, in rightful service, like the copper and iron, the bronze and the steel, they manipulate so finely, to its beautiful soul—to its natural though hereditary aristocracy, its "golden" humanity, its kings, in whom Wisdom, the light, of a comprehensive Synopsis, indefectibly resides, and who, as being not merely its discursive or practical reason, but its faculty of contemplation likewise, will be also its priests, the [252] medium of its worship, of its intercourse with the gods.

Between them, between that intellectual or spiritual order, those novel philosophic kings, and the productive class of the artists and artisans, moves the military order, as the sensitive armed conscience, the armed will, of the State, its executive power in the fullest sense of that term—a "standing army," as Plato supposes, recruited from a great hereditary caste born and bred to such functions, and certainly very different from the mere "militia" of actual Greek states, hastily summoned at need to military service from the fields and workshops. Remember that the veritable bravery also, as the philosopher sees it, is a form of that "knowledge," which in truth includes in itself all other virtues, all good things whatever; that it is a form of "right opinion," and has a kind of insight in it, a real apprehension of the occasion and its claims on one's courage, whether it is worth while to fight, and to what point. Platonic knighthood then will have in it something of the philosophy which resides in plenitude in the class above it, by which indeed this armed conscience of the State, the military order, is continuously enlightened, as we know the conscience of each one of us severally needs to be. And though Plato will not expect his fighting-men, like the Christian knight, like Saint Ranieri Gualberto, [253] to forgive their enemies, yet, moving one degree out of the narrower circle of Greek habits, he does require them, in conformity with a certain Pan-Hellenic, a now fully realised national sense, which fills himself, to love the whole Greek race, to spare the foe, if he be Greek, the last horrors of war, to think of the soil, of the dead, of the arms and armour taken from them, with certain scruples of a natural piety.

As the knights share the dignity of the regal order, are in fact ultimately distinguished from it by degree rather than in kind, so they will be sharers also in its self-denying "rule." In common with it, they will observe a singular precept which forbids them so much as to come under the same roof with vessels or other objects wrought of gold or silver—they "who are most worthy of it," precisely because while "many iniquities have come from the world's coinage, they have gold in them undefiled." Yet again we are not to suppose in Platonic Greece— how could we indeed anywhere within the range of Greek conceptions?— anything rude, uncomely, or unadorned. No one who reads carefully in this very book of The Republic those pages of criticism which concern art quite as much as poetry, a criticism which drives everywhere at a conscientious nicety of workmanship, will suppose that. If kings and knights never drink from vessels of silver or gold, their earthen cups and platters, we may be sure, would be what we can [254] still see; and the iron armour on their bodies exquisitely fitted to them, to its purpose, with that peculiar beauty which such fitness secures. See them, then, moving, in perfect "Justice" or "Rightness," to their Dorian music, their so expressive plain-song, under the guidance of their natural leaders, those who can see and fore-see—of those who know.

That they may be one!—If, like an individual soul, the state has attained its normal differentiation of parts, as with that also its vitality and effectiveness will be proportionate to the unity of those parts in their various single operations. The productive, the executive, the contemplative orders, respectively, like their psychological analogues, the senses, the will, and the intelligence, will be susceptible each of its own proper virtue or excellence, temperance, bravery, spiritual illumination. Only, let each work aright in its own order, and a fourth virtue will supervene upon their united perfections, the virtue or perfection of the organic whole as such. The Justice which Plato has been so long in search of will be manifest at last—that perfect oikeiopragia,+ which will be also perfect co-operation. Oneness, unity, community, an absolute community of interests among fellow-citizens, philadelphia, over against the selfish ambition of those naturally ascendant, like Alcibiades or Crito, in that competition for office, for wealth and honours, which has rent Athens into factions ever breeding [255] on themselves, the centripetal force versus all centrifugal forces:—on this situation, Plato, in the central books of The Republic, dwells untired, in all its variety of synonym and epithet, the conditions, the hazard and difficulty of its realisation, its analogies in art, in music, in practical life, like three strings of a lyre, or like one colossal person, the painted demos+ or civic genius on the walls of a Greek town-house, or, again, like the consummate athlete whose body, with no superfluities, is the precise, the perfectly finished, instrument of his will. Hence, at once cause and effect of such "seamless" unity, his paradoxical new law of property in the City of the Perfect—mandatum novum, a "new commandment," we might fairly call it—ta ton philon koina.+ "And no one said that aught of the things he possessed was his own but they had all things common." Ah, you see! Put yourself in Plato's company, and inevitably, from time to time, he will seem to pass with you beyond the utmost horizon actually opened to him.

Upon the aristocratic class therefore, in its two divisions, the army and the church or hierarchy, so to speak, the "rule" of Plato—poverty, obedience, contemplation, will be incumbent in its fullest rigour. "Like hired servants in their own house," they may not seem very enviable persons, on first thoughts. But remember again that Plato's charge against things as they are is partly in a theoretic interest— the philosopher, [256] the philosophic soul, loves unity, but finds it nowhere, neither in the State nor in its individual members: it is partly also practical, and of the hour. Divided Athens, divided Greece, like some big, lax, self-neglectful person would be an easy prey to any well-knit adversary really at unity in himself. It is by way of introducing a constringent principal into a mass of amorphic particles, that Plato proclaims that these friends will have all things in common; and, challenged by the questions of his companions in the dialogue to say how far he will be ready to go in the application of so paradoxical a rule, he braces himself to a surprising degree of consistency. How far then will Plato, a somewhat Machiavelian theorist, as you saw, and with something of "fixed" ideas about practical things, taking desperate means towards a somewhat exclusively conceived ideal of social well-being, be ready to go?

Now we have seen that the genuine citizens of his Perfect City will have much of monasticism, of the character of military monks, about them already, with their poverty, their obedience, their contemplative habit. And there is yet another indispensable condition of the monastic life. The great Pope Hildebrand, by the rule of celibacy, by making "regulars" to that extent of the secular clergy, succeeded, as many have thought, in his design of making them in very deed, soul and body, but parts of the corporate order they [257] belonged to; and what Plato is going to add to his rule of life, for the archontes,+ who are to be philopolides,+ to love the corporate body they belong to better than themselves, is in its actual effects something very like a law of celibacy. Difficult, paradoxical, as he admits it to be, he is pressed on by his hearers, and by the natural force of his argument, reluctantly to declare that the rule of communism will apply to a man's ownership of his wife and children.

Observe! Plato proposes this singular modification of married life as an elevation or expansion of the family, but, it may be rightly objected, is, in truth, only colouring with names exclusively appropriate to the family, arrangements which will be a suppression of all those sentiments that naturally pertain to it. The wisdom of Plato would certainly deprive mothers of that privacy of affection, regarding which the wisdom of Solomon beamed forth, by sending all infants soon after birth to be reared in a common nursery, where the facts of their actual parentage would be carefully obliterated. The result, as he supposes, will be a common and universal parentage, sonship, brotherhood; but surely with but a shadowy realisation of the affections, the claims, of these relationships. It will involve a loss of differentiation in life, and be, as such, a movement backward, to a barbarous or merely animal grade of existence.

[258] Ta ton philon koina.+—With this soft phrase, then, Plato would take away all those precious differences that come of our having a little space in things to do what one will or can with. The Platonic state in fact, with its extraordinary common marriages, would be dealing precisely after the manner of those who breed birds or dogs. A strange forbidding experiment, it seems, or should seem, to us, looking back on it in the light of laws now irrevocably fixed on these subjects by the judgment of the Christian church. We must remember however, in fairness, that Plato in this matter of the relation of the sexes especially, found himself in a world very different from ours, regulated and refined, as it already is in some degree, by Christian ideas about women and children. A loose law of marriage, beyond it concubinage in some degree sanctioned by religion, beyond that again morbid vice: such was the condition of the Greek world. What Christian marriage, in harmonious action with man's true nature, has done to counteract this condition, that Plato tried to do by a somewhat forced legislation, which was altogether out of harmony with the facts of man's nature. Neither the church nor the world has endorsed his theories about it. Think, in contrast, of the place occupied in Christian art by the mother and her child. What that represents in life Plato wishes to take from us, though, as he would have us think, in our own behalf.

[259] And his views of the community of male and female education, and of the functions of men and women in the State, do but come of the relief of women in large measure from home-duties. Such duties becoming a carefully economised department of the State, the women will have leisure to share the work of men; and will need a corresponding education. The details of their common life in peace and war he certainly makes effective and bright. But if we think of his proposal as a reinstatement of the Amazon we have in effect condemned it. For the Amazon of mythology and art is but a survival from a half-animal world, which Theseus, the embodiment of adult reason, had long since overcome.

Plato himself divides this confessedly so difficult question into two: Is the thing good? and in the second place, Is it possible? Let us admit that at that particular crisis, or even generally, what he proposes is for the best. Thereupon the question which suggested itself in regard to the community of goods recurs with double force: Where may lie the secret of the magnanimity (that is the term to hold by) which will make wealth and office, with all their opportunities for puissant wills, no motive in life at all? Is it possible, and under what conditions—this disinterestedness on the part of those who might do what they will as with their own, this indifference, this surrender, not of one's goods and [260] time only, but of one's last resource, one's very home, for "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."— Those are almost the exact words of Plato. How shall those who might be egotists on the scale of an Alcibiades or an Alexander be kept to this strange "new mandate" of altruism? How shall a paradox so bold be brought within the range of possibilities? Well! by the realisation of another paradox,—if we make philosophers our kings or our kings philosophers. It is the last "wave of paradox," from the advancing crest of which Plato still shrinks back, oddly reluctant, as we may think, to utter his whole mind. But, concede his position, and all beside, in the strange, paradoxical new world he is constructing, its extraordinary reaches of philadelphia, will be found practicable.

Our kings must be philosophers. But not, we must carefully note, because, as people are apt to fancy, philosophers as such necessarily despise or are unable to feel what is fascinating in the world of action, are un-formed or withered on one side, and, as regards the allurements of the world of sense, are but "corpses." For Plato certainly they are no starvelings. The philosophic, or aristocratic, or kingly, nature, as he conceives it, will be the perfect flower of the whole compass of natural endowments, promoted to the utmost by the artificial influences of society—kalokagathos +—capable therefore in the extreme degree of success in a purely "self-regarding" policy, of an [261] exploitation, in their own interests, of all that men in general value most, to the surfeiting, if they cared, of their ambition, their vanity, their love of liberty or license.

Nor again must our kings be philosophers mainly because in such case the world will be very wisely, very knowingly, governed. Of course it would be well that wise men should rule. Even a Greek, still "a youth in the youth of the world," who indeed was not very far gone from an essentially youthful evaluation of things, was still apt to think with Croesus that the richest must of course be the happiest of men, and to have a head-ache when compelled to think, even he would have taken so much for granted. That it would be well that wise men should govern, wise after the Platonic standard, bringing, that is to say, particular details under coherent general rules, able to foresee and influence the future by their knowledge of the past:—there is no paradox in that: it belongs rather, you might complain, to the range of platitudes. But, remember! the hinge of Plato's whole political argument is, that the ruinous divisions of Athens, of Greece, of the entire social community, is the want of disinterestedness in its rulers; not that they are unfit to rule; rather, that they have often, it may be, a natural call to office—those exceptional high natures—but that they "abound" therein exclusively "in their own sense." And the precise point of paradox in philosophic kingship, [262] as Plato takes it, is this, that if we have philosophers for our kings, our archons, we shall be under a sort of rulers who as such have made sacrifice of themselves, and in coming to office at all must have taken upon them "the form of a servant."—

For thus it is.—If you can find out a life better than being a king, for those who shall be kings, a well-governed city will become possible, and not otherwise. For in that city alone will those be kings who are in very deed rich. But if poor men, hungering after their private good, proceed to public offices, it is not possible; for, the kingly office becoming an object of contention, the sort of battle which results, being at home and internal, destroys them, along with the common- wealth.—Most truly, he replied.—Have you then, I asked, any kind of life which can despise political offices, other than the life of true philosophers?—Certainly not.—Yet still it is necessary that those who come to office should not be lovers of it; otherwise the rival lovers will fight.—That must be so.—Whom then will you compel to proceed to the guardianship of the city save those, who, being wisest of all in regard to the conditions of her highest welfare, are themselves possessed of privileges of another order, and a life better than the politician's? Republic, 520.

More capable than others of an adroit application of all that power usually means in the way of personal advantage, your "legitimate," and really elect royalty or aristocracy must be secured from the love of it; you must insure their magnanimity in office by a counter-charm. But where is such a charm, or counter-charm, to be found? Throughout, as usual in so provident a writer as Plato, the answer to that leading [263] question has had its prelude, even in the first book.—

Therefore it was, for my part, friend Thrasymachus, I was saying just now that no one would be willing of his own motion to rule, and take in hand the ills of other people to set them right, but that he would ask a reward; because he who will do fairly by his art, or prosper by his art, never does what is best for himself, nor ordains that, in ordaining what is proper to his art, but what is best for the subject of his rule. By reason of which indeed, as it seems, there must needs be a reward for those who shall be willing to rule, either money, or honour, or a penalty unless he will rule.—How do you mean this Socrates? said Glaucon: for the two rewards I understand; but the penalty, of which you speak, and have named as in the place of a reward, I do not understand.—Then you do not understand, I said, the reward of the best, for the sake of which the most virtuous rule, when they are willing to rule. Or do you not know that the being fond of honours, fond of money, is said to be, and is, a disgrace?—For my part, Yes! he said.—On this ground then, neither for money are the good willing to rule, nor for honour; for they choose neither, in openly exacting hire as a return for their rule, to be called hirelings, nor, in taking secretly therefrom, thieves. Nor again is it for honour they will rule; for they are not ambitious. Therefore it is, that necessity must be on them, and a penalty, if they are to be willing to rule: whence perhaps it has come, that to proceed with ready will to the office of ruler, and not to await compulsion, is accounted indecent. As for the penalty,—the greatest penalty is to be ruled by one worse than oneself, unless one will rule. And it is through fear of that, the good seem to me to rule, when they rule: and then they proceed to the office of ruler, not as coming to some good thing, nor as to profit therein, but as to something unavoidable, and as having none better than themselves to whom to entrust it, nor even as good. Since it seems likely that if a city of good men came to be, not to rule would be the matter of contention, as nowadays to rule; and here it would become manifest that a ruler in very deed, in the nature of things, considers not what is profitable for himself, but for the subject of his rule. So [264] that every intelligent person would choose rather to be benefited by another, than by benefiting another to have trouble himself. Republic, 346.

Now if philosophy really is where Plato consistently puts it, and is all he claims for it, then, for those capable of it, who are capable also in the region of practice, it will be precisely "that better thing than being a king for those who must be our kings, our archons." You see that the various elements of Platonism are interdependent; that they really cohere.

Just at this point then you must call to memory the greatness of the claim Plato makes for philosophy—a promise, you may perhaps think, larger than anything he has actually presented to his readers in the way of a philosophic revelation justifies. He seems, in fact, to promise all, or almost all, that in a later age natures great and high have certainly found in the Christian religion. If philosophy is only star-gazing, or only a condition of doubt, if what the sophist or the philistine says of it is all that can be said, it could hardly compete with the rewards which the vulgar world holds out to its servants. But for Plato, on the other hand, if philosophy is anything at all, it is nothing less than an "escape from the evils of the world," and homoiosis to theo,+ a being made like to God. It provides a satisfaction not for the intelligence only but for the whole nature of man, his imagination and faith, his affections, his capacity [265] for religious devotion, and for some still unimagined development of the capacities of sense.

How could anything which belongs to the world of mere phenomenal change seem great to him who is "the spectator of all time and all existence"? "For the excellency" of such knowledge as that, we might say, he must "count all things but loss." By fear of punishment in some roundabout way, he might indeed be compelled to descend into "the cave," "to take in hand the wrongs of other people to set them right"; but of course the part he will take in your sorry exhibition of passing shadows, and dreamy echoes concerning them, will not be for himself. You may think him, that philosophic archon or king, who in consenting to be your master has really taken upon himself "the form of a servant"—you may think him, in our late age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly chimerical being. Yet history records one instance in which such a figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain approach to the result Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole being was filled with philosophic vision, that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, that fond student of philosophy, of this very philosophy of Plato, served the Roman people so well in peace and war—with so much disinterestedness, because, in fact, so reluctantly. Look onward, and what is strange and inexplicable in his realisation of the Platonic scheme—strange, if we consider how cold and [266] feeble after all were the rays of light on which he waited so devoutly—becomes clear in the person of Saint Louis, who, again, precisely because his whole being was full of heavenly vision, in self-banishment from it for a while, led and ruled the French people so magnanimously alike in peace and war. The presence, then, the ascendancy amid actual things, of the royal or philosophic nature, as Plato thus conceives it—that, and nothing else, will be the generating force, the seed, of the City of the Perfect, as he conceives it: this place, in which the great things of existence, known or divined, really fill the soul. Only, he for one would not be surprised if no eyes actually see it. Like his master Socrates, as you know, he is something of a humorist; and if he sometimes surprises us with paradox or hazardous theory, will sometimes also give us to understand that he is after all not quite serious. So about this vision of the City of the Perfect, The Republic, Kallipolis,+ Uranopolis, Utopia, Civitas Dei, The Kingdom of Heaven—

Suffer me, he says, to entertain myself as men of listless minds are wont to do when they journey alone. Such persons, I fancy, before they have found out in what way ought of what they desire may come to be, pass that question by lest they grow weary in considering whether the thing be possible or no; and supposing what they wish already achieved, they proceed at once to arrange all the rest, pleasing themselves in the tracing out all they will do, when that shall have come to pass—making a mind already idle idler still. Republic, 144.

NOTES

236. +Transliteration: Peri Dikaiosynes. Pater's translation: "on the nature of justice."

236. +Transliteration: tod' en hos eoike prooimion. E-text editor's translation: "this was only by way of introduction." Plato, Republic 357a.

241. +Transliteration: to hen prattein, to ta hautou prattein. E-text editor's translation: "to do one thing [only], to do only things proper to oneself." Plato, Republic 369e.

241. +Transliteration: poikilia, pleonexia, polypragmosyne. Liddell and Scott definitions: "poikilia = metaph: cunning; pleonexia = a disposition to take more than one's share; polupragmosune = meddling."

242. +Transliteration: Proton men phyetai hekastos ou pany homoios hekasto, alla diapheron ten physin, allos ep allou ergou praxin. E- text editor's translation: "To begin with, each person is of a nature not the same as another's; rather, people differ in nature, and so one person will be best fitted for one task, and another for a different kind of work." Plato, Republic 370a-b.

242. +Transliteration: ergon. Liddell and Scott definition: "work . . . employment."

242. +Transliteration: poikilia. Liddell and Scott definition: "metaph: cunning."

243. +Transliteration: gignetai toinyn hos egomai polis epeide tunchanei hemon hekastos ouk autarkes. E-text editor's translation: "As I see it, the city will come into existence because it so happens that as individuals we are not sufficient to provide for ourselves." Plato, Republic 369b.

243. +Transliteration: Poiesei hos egomai ten polin hemetera chreia. E- text editor's translation: "As I see it, it will be our needs that create the city." Plato, Republic 369c.

244. +Transliteration: hoi demiourgoi. Liddell and Scott definition of demiourgos: "workman."

245. +Transliteration: eis hen kata physin. E-text editor's translation: "to one activity in accordance with [a given person's] nature." Plato, Republic 372e..

246. +Transliteration: polis ede tryphosa. E-text editor's translation: "a city already [grown] luxurious." The verb tryphao means "to live softly or delicately, fare sumptuously, live in luxury." (Liddell and Scott.) Plato, Republic 372e.

246. +Transliteration: polis ede tryphosa. E-text editor's translation: "a city already [grown] luxurious." The verb tryphao means "to live softly or delicately, fare sumptuously, live in luxury." (Liddell and Scott.) Plato, Republic 372e.

246. +Transliteration: kai he chora pou he tote hikane smikra ex hikanes estai. E-text editor's translation: "And the land that used to be sufficient will be insufficient." Plato, Republic 373d.

246. +Transliteration: oukoun tes ton plesion choras hemin apotmeteon. E-text editor's translation: "And so we will appropriate for ourselves some of our neighbor's land." Plato, Republic 373d.

247. +Transliteration: Phylakes . . . epikouroi. Pater's translation: "watchmen or auxiliaries."

247. +Transliteration: hos en pharmakou eidei ta pseude ta en deonti genomena. E-text editor's translation: "timely falsehoods that take the form of medicine." Plato, Republic 389b and 414b contain parts of the quotation.

247. +Transliteration: phoinikikon pseudos. E-text editor's translation: "Phoenician story." Plato, Republic 414c.

251. +Transliteration: nomisma tes allages heneka. E-text editor's translation: "a common currency for exchange." Plato, Republic 371b.

254. +Transliteration: oikeiopragia. E-text editor's translation: "functioning," from oikeios (proper to a thing, fitting) and pragos or, in everyday non-poetic speech, pragma(deed). Plato, Republic 434c.

255. +Transliteration: demos. Liddell and Scott definition: "the commons, common people, plebeians; in Attica, townships or hundreds."

255. +Transliteration: ta ton philon koina. E-text editor's translation: "the possessions of friends are held in common." Plato, Phaedrus 279c contains similar language.

257. +Transliteration: archontes. Liddell and Scott definition of archon: "ruler."

257. +Transliteration: philopolides. Liddell and Scott definition: "[those] loving [their] city, state, or country."

258. +Transliteration: Ta ton philon koina. E-text editor's translation: "the possessions of friends are held in common." Plato, Phaedrus 279c contains similar language.

260. +Transliteration: kalokagathos. Liddell and Scott definition: "beautiful and good, noble and good."

264. +Transliteration: homoiosis to theo. Pater's translation: "a [process or act of] being made like to God." Plato, Republic 454c.

266. +Transliteration: Kallipolis. Liddell and Scott definition: "beautiful city." Plato, Republic 527c.



CHAPTER 10: PLATO'S AESTHETICS

[267] WHEN we remember Plato as the great lover, what the visible world was to him, what a large place the idea of Beauty, with its almost adequate realisation in that visible world, holds in his most abstract speculations as the clearest instance of the relation of the human mind to reality and truth, we might think that art also, the fine arts, would have been much for him; that the aesthetic element would be a significant one in his theory of morals and education. Ta terpna en Helladi+ (to use Pindar's phrase) all the delightful things in Hellas:— Plato least of all could have been unaffected by their presence around him. And so it is. Think what perfection of handicraft, what a subtle enjoyment therein, is involved in that specially Platonic rule, to mind one's business (to ta hautou prattein)+ that he who, like Fra Damiano of Bergamo, has a gift for poikilia,+ intarsia or marqueterie, for example, should confine himself exclusively to that. Before him, [268] you know, there had been no theorising about the beautiful, its place in life, and the like; and as a matter of fact he is the earliest critic of the fine arts. He anticipates the modern notion that art as such has no end but its own perfection,—"art for art's sake." Ar' oun kai hekaste ton technon esti ti sympheron allo e hoti malista telean einai;+ We have seen again that not in theory only, by the large place he assigns to our experiences regarding visible beauty in the formation of his doctrine of ideas, but that in the practical sphere also, this great fact of experience, the reality of beauty, has its importance with him. The loveliness of virtue as a harmony, the winning aspect of those "images" of the absolute and unseen Temperance, Bravery, Justice, shed around us in the visible world for eyes that can see, the claim of the virtues as a visible representation by human persons and their acts of the eternal qualities of "the eternal," after all far out-weigh, as he thinks, the claim of their mere utility. And accordingly, in education, all will begin and end "in music," in the promotion of qualities to which no truer name can be given than symmetry, aesthetic fitness, tone. Philosophy itself indeed, as he conceives it, is but the sympathetic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things.

There have been Platonists without Plato, and a kind of traditional Platonism in the world, independent of, yet true in spirit to, the Platonism [269] of the Platonic Dialogues. Now such a piece of traditional Platonism we find in the hypothesis of some close connexion between what may be called the aesthetic qualities of the world about us and the formation of moral character, between aesthetics and ethics. Wherever people have been inclined to lay stress on the colouring, for instance, cheerful or otherwise, of the walls of the room where children learn to read, as though that had something to do with the colouring of their minds; on the possible moral effect of the beautiful ancient buildings of some of our own schools and colleges; on the building of character, in any way, through the eye and ear; there the spirit of Plato has been understood to be, and rightly, even by those who have perhaps never read Plato's Republic, in which however we do find the connexion between moral character and matters of poetry and art strongly asserted. This is to be observed especially in the third and tenth books of The Republic. The main interest of those books lies in the fact, that in them we read what Plato actually said on a subject concerning which people have been so ready to put themselves under his authority.

It is said with immediate reference to metre and its various forms in verse, as an element in the general treatment of style or manner (lexis)+ as opposed to the matter (logoi)+ in the imaginative literature, with which as in time past the [270] education of the citizens of the Perfect City will begin. It is however at his own express suggestion that we may apply what he says, in the first instance, about metre and verse, to all forms of art whatever, to music (mousike)+ generally, to all those matters over which the Muses of Greek mythology preside, to all productions in which the form counts equally with, or for more than, the matter. Assuming therefore that we have here, in outline and tendency at least, the mind of Plato in regard to the ethical influence of aesthetic qualities, let us try to distinguish clearly the central lines of that tendency, of Platonism in art, as it is really to be found in Plato.

"You have perceived have you not," observes the Platonic Socrates, "that acts of imitation, if they begin in early life, and continue, establish themselves in one's nature and habits, alike as to the body, the tones of one's voice, the ways of one's mind."

Yes, that might seem a matter of common observation; and what is strictly Platonic here and in what follows is but the emphasis of the statement. Let us set it however, for the sake of decisive effect, in immediate connexion with certain other points of Plato's aesthetic doctrine.

Imitation then, imitation through the eye and ear, is irresistible in its influence over human nature. And secondly, we, the founders, the people, of the Republic, of the city that shall be [271] perfect, have for our peculiar purpose the simplification of human nature: a purpose somewhat costly, for it follows, thirdly, that the only kind of music, of art and poetry, we shall permit ourselves, our citizens, will be of a very austere character, under a sort of "self-denying ordinance." We shall be a fervently aesthetic community, if you will; but therewith also very fervent "renunciants," or ascetics.

In the first place, men's souls are, according to Plato's view, the creatures of what men see and hear. What would probably be found in a limited number only of sensitive people, a constant susceptibility to the aspects and other sensible qualities of things and persons, to the element of expression or form in them and their movements, to phenomena as such—this susceptibility Plato supposes in men generally. It is not so much the matter of a work of art, what is conveyed in and by colour and form and sound, that tells upon us educationally—the subject, for instance, developed by the words and scenery of a play—as the form, and its qualities, concision, simplicity, rhythm, or, contrariwise, abundance, variety, discord. Such "aesthetic" qualities, by what we might call in logical phrase, metabasis eis allo genos,+ a derivation into another kind of matter, transform themselves, in the temper of the patient the hearer or spectator, into terms of ethics, into the sphere of the desires and the will, of the moral taste, engendering, nursing [272] there, strictly moral effects, such conditions of sentiment and the will as Plato requires in his City of the Perfect, or quite the opposite, but hardly in any case indifferent, conditions.

Imitation:—it enters into the very fastnesses of character; and we, our souls, ourselves, are for ever imitating what we see and hear, the forms, the sounds which haunt our memories, our imagination. We imitate not only if we play a part on the stage but when we sit as spectators, while our thoughts follow the acting of another, when we read Homer and put ourselves, lightly, fluently, into the place of those he describes: we imitate unconsciously the line and colour of the walls around us, the trees by the wayside, the animals we pet or make use of, the very dress we wear. Only, Hina me ek tes mimeseos tou einai apolausosin.+—Let us beware how men attain the very truth of what they imitate.

That then is the first principle of Plato's aesthetics, his first consideration regarding the art of the City of the Perfect. Men, children, are susceptible beings, in great measure conditioned by the mere look of their "medium." Like those insects, we might fancy, of which naturalists tell us, taking colour from the plants they lodge on, they will come to match with much servility the aspects of the world about them.

But the people of the Perfect City would not [273] be there at all except by way of a refuge, an experiment, or tour de force, in moral and social philosophy; and this circumstance determines the second constituent principle of Plato's aesthetic scheme. We, then, the founders, the citizens, of the Republic have a peculiar purpose. We are here to escape from, to resist, a certain vicious centrifugal tendency in life, in Greek and especially in Athenian life, which does but propagate a like vicious tendency in ourselves. We are to become— like little pieces in a machine! you may complain.—No, like performers rather, individually, it may be, of more or less importance, but each with a necessary and inalienable part, in a perfect musical exercise which is well worth while, or in some sacred liturgy; or like soldiers in an invincible army, invincible because it moves as one man. We are to find, or be put into, and keep, every one his natural place; to cultivate those qualities which will secure mastery over ourselves, the subordination of the parts to the whole, musical proportion. To this end, as we saw, Plato, a remorseless idealist, is ready even to suppress the differences of male and female character, to merge, to lose the family in the social aggregate.

Imitation then, we may resume, imitation through the eye and ear, is irresistible in its influence on human nature. Secondly, the founders of the Republic are by its very purpose bound to the simplification of human nature: [274] and our practical conclusion follows in logical order. We shall make, and sternly keep, a "self-denying" ordinance in this matter, in the matter of art, of poetry, of taste in all its varieties; a rule, of which Plato's own words, applied by him in the first instance to rhythm or metre, but like all he says on that subject fairly applicable to the whole range of musical or aesthetic effects, will be the brief summary: Alternations will be few and far between:— how differently from the methods of the poetry, the art, the choruses, we most of us love so much, not necessarily because our senses are inapt or untrained:—Smikrai hai metabolai.+ We shall allow no musical innovations, no Aristophanic cries, no imitations however clever of "the sounds of the flute or the lyre," no free imitation by the human voice of bestial or mechanical sounds, no such artists as are "like a mirror turning all about." There were vulgarities of nature, you see, in the youth of ideal Athens even. Time, of course, as such, is itself a kind of artist, trimming pleasantly for us what survives of the rude world of the past. Now Plato's method would promote or anticipate the work of time in that matter of vulgarities of taste. Yes, when you read his precautionary rules, you become fully aware that even in Athens there were young men who affected what was least fortunate in the habits, the pleasures, the sordid business of the class below them. [275] But they would not be allowed quite their own way in the streets or elsewhere in a reformed world, to whose chosen imperial youth (Basilike phyle)+ it would not be permitted even to think of any of those things—oudeni prosechein ton voun.+ To them, what was illiberal, the illiberal crafts, would be (thanks to their well-trained power of intellectual abstraction!) as though it were not. And if art, like law, be, as Plato thinks, "a creation of mind, in accordance with right reason," we shall not wish our boys to sing like mere birds.

Yet what price would not the musical connoisseur pay to handle the instruments we may see in fancy passing out through the gates of the City of the Perfect, banished, not because there is no one within its walls who knows the use of, or would receive pleasure from, them (a delicate susceptibility in these matters Plato, as was said, presupposes) but precisely because they are so seductive, must be conveyed therefore to some other essentially less favoured neighbourhood, like poison, say! moral poison, for one's enemies' water-springs. A whole class of painters, sculptors, skilled workmen of various kinds go into like banishment—they and their very tools; not, observe again carefully, because they are bad artists, but very good ones.—Alla men, o Adeimante, hedys ge kai ho kekramenos.+ Art, as such, as Plato knows, has no purpose but itself, its own perfection. The proper art of the [276] Perfect City is in fact the art of discipline. Music (mousike)+ all the various forms of fine art, will be but the instruments of its one over-mastering social or political purpose, irresistibly conforming its so imitative subject units to type: they will be neither more nor less than so many variations, so to speak, of the trumpet-call.

Or suppose again that a poet finds his way to us, "able by his genius, as he chooses, or as his audience chooses, to become all things, or all persons, in turn, and able to transform us too into all things and persons in turn, as we listen or read, with a fluidity, a versatility of humour almost equal to his own, a poet myriad-minded, as we say, almost in Plato's precise words, as our finest touch of praise, of Shakespeare for instance, or of Homer, of whom he was thinking:—Well! we shall have been set on our guard. We have no room for him. Divine, delightful, being, "if he came to our city with his works, his poems, wishing to make an exhibition of them, we should certainly do him reverence as an object, sacred, wonderful, delightful, but we should not let him stay. We should tell him that there neither is, nor may be, any one like that among us, and so send him on his way to some other city, having anointed his head with myrrh and crowned him with a garland of wool, as something in himself half-divine, and for ourselves should make use of some more austere and less pleasing sort of poet, for his practical [277] uses." To austerotero kai aedestero poiete, ophelias heneka.+ Not, as I said, that the Republic any more than Lacedaemon will be an artless place. Plato's aesthetic scheme is actually based on a high degree of sensibility to such influences in the people he is dealing with.—

Right speech, then, and rightness of harmony and form and rhythm minister to goodness of nature; not that good-nature which we so call with a soft name, being really silliness, but the frame of mind which in very truth is rightly and fairly ordered in regard to the moral habit.—Most certainly he said.—Must not these qualities, then, be everywhere pursued by the young men if they are to do each his own business?—Pursued, certainly.—Now painting, I suppose, is full of them (those qualities which are partly ethical, partly aesthetic) and all handicraft such as that; the weaver's art is full of them, and the inlayer's art and the building of houses, and the working of all the other apparatus of life; moreover the nature of our own bodies, and of all other living things. For in all these, rightness or wrongness of form is inherent. And wrongness of form, and the lack of rhythm, the lack of harmony, are fraternal to faultiness of mind and charac- ter, and the opposite qualities to the opposite condition—the temperate and good character:—fraternal, aye! and copies of them.—Yes, entirely so: he said.—

Must our poets, then, alone be under control, and compelled to work the image of the good into their poetic works, or not to work among us at all; or must the other craftsmen too be controlled, and restrained from working this faultiness and intemperance and illiberality and formlessness of character whether into the images of living creatures, or the houses they build, or any other product of their craft whatever; or must he who is unable so to do be forbidden to practise his art among us, to the end that our guardians may not, nurtured in images of vice as in a vicious pasture, cropping and culling much every day little by little from many sources, composing together some one great evil in their own souls, go undetected? Must we not rather seek for those craftsmen who have the [278] power, by way of their own natural virtue, to track out the nature of the beautiful and seemly, to the end that, living as in some wholesome place, the young men may receive good from every side, whencesoever, from fair works of art, either upon sight or upon hearing anything may strike, as it were a breeze bearing health from kindly places, and from childhood straightway bring them unaware to likeness and friendship and harmony with fair reason?—Yes: he answered: in this way they would be by far best educated.—Well then, I said, Glaucon, on these grounds is not education in music of the greatest importance—because, more than anything else, rhythm and harmony make their way down into the inmost part of the soul, and take hold upon it with the utmost force, bringing with them rightness of form, and rendering its form right, if one be correctly trained; if not, the opposite? and again because he who has been trained in that department duly, would have the sharpest sense of oversights (ton paraleipomenon)+ and of things not fairly turned out, whether by art or nature (me kalos demiourgethenton e me kalos phynton)+ and disliking them, as he should, would commend things beautiful, and, by reason of his delight in these, receiving them into his soul, be nurtured of them, and become kalokagathos,+ while he blamed the base, as he should, and hated it, while still young, before he was able to apprehend a reason, and when reason comes would welcome it, recognising it by its kinship to himself—most of all one thus taught?—Yes: he answered: it seems to me that for reasons such as these their education should be in music. Republic, 400.

Understand, then, the poetry and music, the arts and crafts, of the City of the Perfect—what is left of them there, and remember how the Greeks themselves were used to say that "the half is more than the whole." Liken its music, if you will, to Gregorian music, and call to mind the kind of architecture, military or monastic again, that must be built to such music, and then the kind of colouring that will fill its [279] jealously allotted space upon the walls, the sort of carving that will venture to display itself on cornice or capital. The walls, the pillars, the streets—you see them in thought! nay, the very trees and animals, the attire of those who move along the streets, their looks and voices, their style—the hieratic Dorian architecture, to speak precisely, the Dorian manner everywhere, in possession of the whole of life. Compare it, for further vividness of effect, to Gothic building, to the Cistercian Gothic, if you will, when Saint Bernard had purged it of a still barbaric superfluity of ornament. It seems a long way from the Parthenon to Saint Ouen "of the aisles and arches," or Notre-Dame de Bourges; yet they illustrate almost equally the direction of the Platonic aesthetics. Those churches of the Middle Age have, as we all feel, their loveliness, yet of a stern sort, which fascinates while perhaps it repels us. We may try hard to like as well or better architecture of a more or less different kind, but coming back to them again find that the secret of final success is theirs. The rigid logic of their charm controls our taste, as logic proper binds the intelligence: we would have something of that quality, if we might, for ourselves, in what we do or make; feel, under its influence, very diffident of our own loose, or gaudy, or literally insignificant, decorations. "Stay then," says the Platonist, too sanguine perhaps,— "Abide," he says to youth, "in these [280] places, and the like of them, and mechanically, irresistibly, the soul of them will impregnate yours. With whatever beside is in congruity with them in the order of hearing and sight, they will tell (despite, it may be, of unkindly nature at your first making) upon your very countenance, your walk and gestures, in the course and concatenation of your inmost thoughts."

And equation being duly made of what is merely personal and temporary in Plato's view of the arts, it may be salutary to return from time to time to the Platonic aesthetics, to find ourselves under the more exclusive influence of those qualities in the Hellenic genius he has thus emphasised. What he would promote, then, is the art, the literature, of which among other things it may be said that it solicits a certain effort from the reader or spectator, who is promised a great expressiveness on the part of the writer, the artist, if he for his part will bring with him a great attentiveness. And how satisfying, how reassuring, how flattering to himself after all, such work really is—the work which deals with one as a scholar, formed, mature and manly. Bravery—andreia+ or manliness—manliness and temperance, as we know, were the two characteristic virtues of that old pagan world; and in art certainly they seem to be involved in one another. Manliness in art, what can it be, as distinct from that which in opposition to it [281] must be called the feminine quality there,—what but a full consciousness of what one does, of art itself in the work of art, tenacity of intuition and of consequent purpose, the spirit of construction as opposed to what is literally incoherent or ready to fall to pieces, and, in opposition to what is hysteric or works at random, the maintenance of a standard. Of such art ethos+ rather than pathos+ will be the predominant mood. To use Plato's own expression there will be here no paraleipomena,+ no "negligences," no feminine forgetfulness of one's self, nothing in the work of art unconformed to the leading intention of the artist, who will but increase his power by reserve. An artist of that kind will be apt, of course, to express more than he seems actually to say. He economises. He will not spoil good things by exaggeration. The rough, promiscuous wealth of nature he reduces to grace and order: reduces, it may be, lax verse to staid and temperate prose. With him, the rhythm, the music, the notes, will be felt to follow, or rather literally accompany as ministers, the sense,—akolouthein ton logon.+

We may fairly prefer the broad daylight of Veronese to the contrasted light and shade of Rembrandt even; and a painter will tell you that the former is actually more difficult to attain. Temperance, the temperance of the youthful Charmides, super-induced on a nature originally rich and impassioned,—Plato's own [282] native preference for that is only reinforced by the special needs of his time, and the very conditions of the ideal state. The diamond, we are told, if it be a fine one, may gain in value by what is cut away. It was after such fashion that the manly youth of Lacedaemon had been cut and carved. Lenten or monastic colours, brown and black, white and grey, give their utmost value for the eye (so much is obvious) to the scarlet flower, the lighted candle, the cloth of gold. And Platonic aesthetics, remember! as such, are ever in close connexion with Plato's ethics. It is life itself, action and character, he proposes to colour; to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic or impassioned acts.

Such Platonic quality you may trace of course not only in work of Doric, or, more largely, of Hellenic lineage, but at all times, as the very conscience of art, its saving salt, even in ages of decadence. You may analyse it, as a condition of literary style, in historic narrative, for instance; and then you have the stringent, shorthand art of Thucydides at his best, his masterly feeling for master-facts, and the half as so much more than the whole. Pindar is in a certain sense his analogue in verse. Think of the amount of attention he must have looked for, in those who were, not to read, but to sing him, or to listen while he was sung, and to understand. [283] With those fine, sharp-cut gems or chasings of his, so sparely set, how much he leaves for a well-drilled intelligence to supply in the way of connecting thought.

And you may look for the correlative of that in Greek clay, in Greek marble, as you walk through the British Museum. But observe it, above all, at work, checking yet reinforcing his naturally fluent and luxuriant genius, in Plato himself. His prose is a practical illustration of the value of that capacity for correction, of the effort, the intellectual astringency, which he demands of the poet also, the musician, of all true citizens of the ideal Republic, enhancing the sense of power in one's self, and its effect upon others, by a certain crafty reserve in its exercise, after the manner of a true expert. Chalepa ta kala+—he is faithful to the old Greek saying. Patience,—"infinite patience," may or may not be, as was said, of the very essence of genius; but is certainly, quite as much as fire, of the mood of all true lovers. Isos to legomenon alethes, hoti chalepa ta kala.+ Heraclitus had preferred the "dry soul," or the "dry light" in it, as Bacon after him the siccum lumen. And the dry beauty,—let Plato teach us, to love that also, duly.

1891-1892.

NOTES

267. +Transliteration: Ta terpna en Helladi. Pater's translation: "all the delightful things in Hellas." Pindar, though I have not located the poem to which Pater refers.

267. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. E-text editor's translation: "to do only things proper to oneself." Plato, Republic 369e.

267. +Transliteration: poikilia. Liddell and Scott definition: "metaph: cunning."

268. +Transliteration: Ar' oun kai hekaste ton technon esti ti sympheron allo e hoti malista telean einai. E-text editor's translation: "Does there belong to each of the arts any advantage other than perfection?" Plato, Republic 341d. Pater's reading is perhaps anachronistic in suggesting that Plato anticipated modern thinking about the autonomy of art.

269. +Transliteration: lexis. Liddell and Scott definition: "a speaking, speech . . . a way of speaking, diction, style."

269. +Transliteration: logoi. Pater's contextual translation: "matter."

270. +Transliteration: mousike. Liddell and Scott definition: "any art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung to music...."

271. +Transliteration: metabasis eis allo genos. Pater's translation: "a derivation into another kind of matter."

272. +Transliteration: Hina me ek tes mimeseos tou einai apolausosin. E-text editor's translation: "lest they draw the reality only from their imitation of it." Plato, Republic 395c.

274. +Transliteration: Smikrai hai metabolai. E-text editor's translation: "our senses are inapt or untrained." Plato, Republic 397c.

275. +Transliteration: Basilike phyle. E-text editor's translation: "royal tribe."

275. +Transliteration: oudeni prosechein ton voun. Pater's translation: "[they] would not be permitted even to think of any of those things." Plato, Republic 396b.

275. +Transliteration: Alla men, o Adeimante, hedys ge kai ho kekramenos. E-text editor's translation: "But indeed, Adeimantus, the mixed kind of art also is pleasant." Plato, Republic 397d.

276. +Transliteration: mousike. Liddell and Scott definition: "any art over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung to music...."

277. +Transliteration: To austerotero kai aedestero poiete, ophelias heneka. Pater's translation: "some more austere and less pleasing sort of poet, for his practical uses." Plato, Republic 398a.

278. +Transliteration: ton paraleipomenon. Pater's translation: "oversights." The verb paraleipo means, "to leave on one side . . . leave unnoticed." Plato, Republic 401e.

278. +Transliteration: me kalos demiourgethenton e me kalos phynton. Pater's translation: "not fairly turned out, whether by art or nature." Plato, Republic 401e.

278. +Transliteration: kalokagathos. Liddell and Scott definition: "beautiful and good, noble and good." Plato, Republic 401e.

280. +Transliteration: andreia. Pater's translation: "manliness."

281. +Transliteration: ethos. Liddell and Scott definition: "an accustomed place . . . custom, usage, habit."

281. +Transliteration: pathos. Liddell and Scott definition "1. anything that befalls one, a suffering, misfortune, calamity; 2. a passive condition: a passion, affection; 3. an incident."

281. +Transliteration: paraleipomena. Pater's translation: "oversights."

281. +Transliteration: akolouthein ton logon. Pater's translation: "follow the sense." Plato, Republic 398d.

283. +Transliteration: Chalepa ta kala. E-text editor's translation: "fine things are hard [to obtain or understand]." Plato, Republic 435c.

283. +Transliteration: Isos to legomenon alethes, hoti chalepa ta kala. E-text editor's translation: "Perhaps the saying is true—namely, that fine things are hard [to obtain or understand]." Plato, Republic 435c.

THE END