V.
The main direction of our studies has been indicated in the precedinglectures to such an extent that from this point forward our customaryreview may be omitted. In examining the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus wehave found three particulars, in which not only Aeschylus, but hisentire contemporary time shows complete unconsciousness of the mostprecious and essential belongings of personality. These particularswere, (1), the absolute impossibility of growth, implicitly affirmedof the gods and explicitly affirmed of men in the passages which wereread; (2) the awkwardness of Jove's apparatus of power which includeda minister for every kind of act--as contrasted with the elasticityand much-in-little which each man must perceive in regarding theaction of his own mind; and (3) the gross and purely physicalcharacter of the punishments used by Jove to break the spirit ofPrometheus. It was contended, you remember, that if the audience ofAeschylus had acquired that direct way of looking phenomena in theface, which is one of the incidents of our modern personality, theywould have perceived such an inadequacy between the thunders andearthquakes of Jove, on the one hand, and the immortal spirit of aTitan and a god like Prometheus, on the other, that the play, insteadof being a religious and impressive spectacle to them, as it doubtlesswas, would have been simply a matter of ridicule, or at best one ofthose mere _dilettante_ entertainments where of our own free will weforgive the grossest violations of common sense and propriety for thesake of the music or the scenery with which they are associated, asfor example at the Italian opera, or the Christmas pantomime.
This last particular brings us directly upon Shelley's play of the_Prometheus Unbound_.
We have seen that Aeschylus had a fit audience for this fable, and wasworking upon emotions which are as deep as religion; but now, when wecome down 2300 years to a time from which the Aeschylean religiousbeliefs have long exhaled, and when the enormous growth of personalityhas quite rolled away the old lumpish terror that stood before thecave of the physical and darkened it, in such a time it would, ofcourse, be truly amazing if a man like Shelley should have elaboratedthis same old Prometheus fable into a lyrical drama in the expectationof shaking the souls of men with this same old machinery of thunder,whirlwind and earthquake.
Such a mistake--the mistake of tearing the old fable forcibly awayfrom its old surroundings, and of setting it in modern thoughts beforemodern men, would be much the same with that which Emerson has notedin his poem _Each and All_:
"I thought of the sparrow's note from heaven, Singing at dawn on the alder bough; I brought him home in his nest at even; He sings the song, but it pleases not now, For I did not bring home the river and sky-- He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye. The delicate shells lay on the shore; Bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave; And the bellowing of the savage sea Greeted their safe escape to me. I wiped away the weeds and foam I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun and the sand and the wild sea-shore."
Accordingly, it is instructive, as we look into Shelley's work, toobserve how this inability of his to bring home the river and the skyalong with the sparrow--this inability to bring a Greek-heartedaudience to listen to his Greek fable--operated to infuse a certaintang of insincerity, of dilettantism, whenever he attempts toreproduce upon us the old terrors of thunder and lightning whichAeschylus found so effective. We--we moderns--cannot for our lives helpseeing the man in his shirt-sleeves who is turning the crank of thethunder-mill behind the scenes; nay, we are inclined to ask with acertain proud indignation, How is it that you wish us to tremble atthis mere resinous lightning, when we have seen a man (not a Titan nora god), one of ourselves go forth into a thunder-storm and send hiskite up into the very bosom thereof, and fairly entice the lightningby his wit to come and perch upon his finger, and be the tame bird ofhim and his fellows thereafter and forever? But, secondly, it is stillmore conclusive upon our present point, of the different demands madeby the personality of our time from that of Aeschylus, to observe howShelley's own sense of this difference, his own modern instinct, hasled him to make most material alterations of the old fable, not onlyincreasing the old list of physical torments with a number that arepurely spiritual and modern, but also by dignifying at once thecharacter of Prometheus and the catastrophe of the play with thatenormous motive of forgiveness which seems to be the largest outcomeof the developed personality. Many of you are aware of the scholasticbelief that the _Prometheus Bound_ of Aeschylus was but the middle playof a trilogy, and that the last showed us a compromise effectedbetween Prometheus and Jove, according to which Prometheus reveals thefatal secret concerning Jove's marriage, and Jove makes a new leagueof amity with the Titan. We have a note of this change in treatment inthe very opening lines of Shelley's play--which I now beg to setbefore you in the briefest possible sketch. Scene I. of Act I. opensaccording to the stage direction--upon _A ravine of icy rocks in theIndian Caucasus: Prometheus is discovered bound to the precipice:Panthea and Ione are seated at his feet: time, night: during thescene, morning slowly breaks_. Prometheus begins to speak at once. Iread only here and there a line selected with special reference toshowing the change of treatment I have indicated as due to thatintenser instinct of personality which Shelley shared in common withhis contemporaries over Aeschylus and his contemporaries.
Prometheus exclaims:
"Monarch of gods and demons, and all spirits But one, who throng those bright and rolling worlds Which thou and I alone of living things Behold with sleepless eyes!... Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours, And moments aye divided by keen pangs Till they seemed years, torture and solitude, Scorn and despair,--these are mine empire, More glorious far than that which thou surveyest From thine unenvied throne!"
Here we have the purely spiritual torments of "solitude, scorn anddespair" set before us; though Shelley retains and even multiplies thephysical torments of Aeschylus. A few lines further on, in this samelong opening speech of Prometheus, we have them thus described:
"Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain, Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb, Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
... The earthquake fiends are charged To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds When the rocks split and close again behind; While from their wild abysses howling throng The genii of the storm, urging the rage Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail."
And presently, when after the repulse of Mercury Jove begins to stirup new terrors, we hear Ione exclaiming:
"O, sister, look! white fire Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar; How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!"
But even in Shelley's array of these terrors we perceive a cunningoutcrop of modernness in a direction which I have not yet mentionedbut which we will have frequent occasion to notice when we come toread the modern novel together; and that is in the detail of thedescription Aeschylus paints these conclusions with a big brush, andthree sweeps of it; Shelley itemizes them.
It is worth while observing too, that the same spirit of detail inmodern criticism forces us to convict Shelley here of an inconsistencyin his scene; for how could this "snow-loaded cedar" of Ione existwith propriety in a scene which Prometheus himself has just describedas "without herb, insect, or beast, or sound of life?"
The same instinct of modernness both in the spirituality of thetorment and in the minuteness of its description displays itself alittle farther on in the curse of Prometheus. Prometheus tells us inthis same opening speech that long ago he uttered a certain awfulcurse against Jove which he now desires to recall; but it would seemthat in order to recall it he wishes to hear the exact words of it."What was that curse?"--he exclaims at the end of the speech; "for yeall heard me speak." To
this question we have page after page ofreplies from five voices--namely, the Voice of the Mountains, of theSprings, of the Air, of the Whirlwinds and of the Earth--embodyingsuch a mass of falsetto sublimity that Shelley himself would surelyhave drawn his pen through the whole, if he had lived into the term ofmanhood.
Finally the whole awkward device for getting the curse of Prometheusbefore the reader is consummated by raising up the phantasm of Jupiterwhich repeats the curse, word for word.
In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essentialimmaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred yearshe would never have become a man: he was penetrated with modern ideas,but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with aconstant tendency to the extravagant and illogical: so that I call himthe modern boy.
These considerations quite cover the remaining three acts of his_Prometheus Unbound_ and render it unnecessary for me to quote fromthem in support of the passages already cited.
The first act contains, indeed, nearly the substance of the wholedrama. Act II contains no important motive except the visit of Asiaand Panthea to Demogorgon under the earth. In the third act we have aview of Jove surrounded by his ministers; but in the midst of a shortspeech to them he is suddenly swept into hell for everlastingpunishment. Here, of course, Shelley makes a complete departure fromthe old story of the compromise between Jove and Prometheus; Shelleymakes Prometheus scornfully reject such a compromise and allow Jove togo down to his doom. Hercules then unbinds Prometheus who repairs to acertain exquisite interlunar cave and there dwells in tranquillitywith his beloved Asia.
The rest of Act III. is filled with long descriptions of the changewhich comes upon the world with the dethronement of Jove. Act IV. isthe most amazing piece of surplusage in literature; the catastrophehas been reached long ago in the third act. Jove is in eternal duress,Prometheus has been liberated and has gone with Asia and Panthea tohis eternal paradise above the earth, and a final radiant picture ofthe reawakening of man and nature under the new regime has closed upthe whole with the effect of a transformation-scene. Yet, upon allthis, Shelley drags in Act IV. which is simply leaden in action andcolor alongside of Act III. and in which the voices of unseen spirits,the chorus of Hours, Jove, Panthea, Demogorgon, the Earth and the Moonpelt each other with endless sweetish speeches that rain likeineffectual comfits in a carnival of silliness. For example, a Voiceof Unseen Spirits cries:
"Bright clouds float in heaven, Dew-stars gleam on earth, Waves assemble on ocean: They are gathered and driven By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee! They shake with emotion, They dance in their mirth. But where are ye?
The pine boughs are singing Old songs with new gladness; The billows and fountains Fresh music are flinging Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea; The storms mock the mountains With the thunder of gladness. But where are ye?"
The people thus inquired for, being the chorus of Hours, sleepilyreply:
"The voice of the spirits of air and of earth Has drawn back the figured curtain of sleep Which covered our being and darkened our birth In the deep."
A VOICE.
In the deep?
SEMI-CHORUS.
Oh, below the deep.
....
SEMI-CHORUS I.
We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep; We have known the voice of love in dreams, We have felt the wand of power come and leap--
SEMI-CHORUS II.
"As the billows leap in the morning beams,"
CHORUS.
"Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze, Pierce with song heaven's silent light, Enchant the day that too swiftly flees, To check its flight ere the cave of night.
Once the hungry Hours were hounds Which chased the day like a bleeding deer, And it limped and stumbled with many wounds Through the nightly dells of the desert year.
But now oh! weave the mystic measure Of music, and dance, and shapes of light; Let the Hours and the spirits of night and pleasure Like the clouds and sunbeams unite."
CHORUS OF SPIRITS.
"We join the throng Of the dance and the song, By the whirlwind of gladness borne along; As the flying-fish leap From the Indian deep And mix with the sea-birds half asleep."
This long lyric outburst, wholly unnecessary to an action which wasalready complete, seems an instructive fact to place before youngwriters in a time when many souls which might be poetic gardens ifthey would compact all their energies into growing two roses and alily--three poems in all, for a lifetime--become instead mere wastesof profuse weeds that grow and are cut down and cast into the ovenwith each monthly magazine.
But it would not be fair to leave Shelley with this flat taste in ourmouths, and I will therefore beg to finish our examination of the_Prometheus Unbound_ by three quotations from these last acts, inwhich his modernness of detail and of subtlety,--being exercised uponmatters capable of such treatment--has made for us some strong andbeautiful poetry. Here for instance at the opening of Scene I. Act II.we have a charming specimen of the modern poetic treatment of natureand of landscape, full of spirituality and full of detail. The stagedirection is "Morning; A Lovely Vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia,alone." Asia, who is the lovely bride of Prometheus, is awaitingPanthea who is to come with news of him. She begins with an invocationof the Spring.
ASIA.
"From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended! Yea, like a spirit, like a thought, which makes Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes, And beatings haunt the desolated heart Which should have learnt repose, thou hast descended Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring! O child of many winds! As suddenly Thou comest as the memory of a dream, Which now is sad because it hath been sweet! Like genius, or like joy which riseth up ... As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds The desert of our life. This is the season, this the day, the hour; At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine. Too long desired, too long delaying, come! How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl! The point of one white star is quivering still Deep in the orange light of widening morn Beyond the purple mountains: through a chasm Of wind-divided mist the darker lake Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again As the waves fade, and as the burning threads Of woven cloud unravel the pale air: 'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not The Aeolian music of her sea-green plumes Winnowing the crimson dawn?"
And here we find some details of underwater life which are modern. Twofauns are conversing: one inquires where live certain delicate spiritswhom they hear talking about the woods, but never meet. We are here inan atmosphere very much like that of _The Midsummer-Night's Dream_. Iscarcely know anything more compact of pellucid beauty: it seems quiteworthy of Shakspeare.
"SECOND FAUN.
'Tis hard to tell: I have heard those more skill'd in spirits say, The bubbles, which th' enchantment of the sun Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools, Are the pavilions where such dwell and float Under the green and golden atmosphere Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves; And when these burst, and the thin fiery air, The which they breathed within those lucent domes, Ascends to flow like meteors through the night, They ride in them, and rein their headlong speed, And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire Under the waters of the earth again."
Here again, in my third extract, we have poetry which is as strong asthe other is dainty, and which is as modern as geology. Asia isdescribing a vision in which the successive deposits in the crust ofthe earth are revealed to her. The whole treatment is detailed,modern, vivid, powerful.
"... The beams flash on And make appear the melancholy ruins Of cancell'd cycles: anchors, beaks of ships; Planks turn'd to marble; qu
ivers, helms, and spears; And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, Round which death laugh'd, sepulchred emblems Of dread destruction, ruin within ruin! Whose population which the earth grew over Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie, Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons, Their statues, domes, and fanes, prodigious shapes Huddled in gray annihilation, split, Jamm'd in the hard, black deep; and over these The anatomies of unknown winged things, And fishes which were isles of living scale, And serpents, bony chains, twisted around The iron crags, or within heaps of dust To which the torturous strength of their last pangs Had crushed the iron crags; and over these The jagged alligator, and the might Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores, And weed-overgrown continents of earth, Increased and multiplied like summer worms On an abandoned corpse till the blue globe Wrapt deluge round it like a cloak, and they Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God, Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried Be not! And like my words they were no more."
Shelley appears not to have been completely satisfied with thePrometheus story. This dissatisfaction displays itself in acharacteristic passage of his preface to the Prometheus, which happensvery felicitously to introduce the only other set of antiqueconsiderations I shall offer you on this subject. "Let thisopportunity," (he says in one place) "be conceded to me ofacknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristicallyterms 'a passion for reforming the world'.... But it is a mistake tosuppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the directenforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree ascontaining a reasoned system on the theory of human life....
... Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce asystematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elementsof human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstitionflatter themselves that I should take Aeschylus rather than Plato as mymodel."
In Shelley's poem we have found much of the modernness between thelines, or appearing as the result, merely, of that spirit of the timewhich every writer must share to a greater or less extent with hisfellow-beings of the same period. But as we proceed now to examineBayard Taylor's poem, _Prince Deukalion_, we find a man not onlypossessed with modernness, but consciously possessed; so that what wasimplicit in Shelley--and a great deal more--here becomes explicit andformulated.
As one opens the book, a powerful note of modernness in the drama, asopposed to the drama of Aeschylus, strikes us at the outset in thenumber of the actors. One may imagine the amazement of old Aeschylus ashe read down this truly prodigious array of _dramatos prosopa_:
Eos, Goddess of the Dawn: Gaea, Goddess of the Earth; Eros; Prometheus;Epimetheus; Pandora; Prince Deukalion; Pyrrha; Agathon; Medusa;Calchas; Buddha; Spirits of Dawn; Nymphs; Chorus of Ghosts; Charon;Angels; Spirits; The Nine Muses; Urania; Spirit of the Wind; Spirit ofthe Snow; Spirit of the Stream; Echoes; the Youth; the Artist; thePoet; the Shepherd; the Shepherdess; the Mediaeval Chorus; MediaevalAnti-Chorus; Chorus of Builders; Four Messengers. With these materialsMr. Taylor's aim is to array before us the whole panorama of time,painted in symbols of the great creeds which have characterized eachepoch. These epochs are four; and one act is devoted to each. In thefirst act we have the passing away of nymph and satyr and the wholeantique Greek mythos; and we are shown the coming man and woman in thepersons of Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, his wife-to-be, whose figures,however, are as yet merely etched upon a mist of prophecy.
In Act II, we have the reign and fall of the mediaeval faith, all ofwhich is mysteriously beheld by these same shadowy personalities,Deukalion and Pyrrha. In Act III. the faith of the present issimilarly treated. In Act IV. we have at last the coming man, ordeveloped personality fairly installed as ruler of himself and of theworld, and Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, the ideal man and the idealwoman, now for the first time united in deed as well as ininspiration, pace forth into the world to learn it and to enjoy it.Mr. Taylor, as I said, is so explicit upon the points of personalityand modernness as compared with the Aeschylean play, that fewquotations would be needed from his work, and I will not attempt evensuch a sketch of it as that of Shelley's. For example, in Scene 1, ActI, of _Prince Deukalion_, Scene I being given in the stage directionas
"_A plain sloping from high mountains towards the sea; at the base ofthe mountains lofty, vaulted entrances of caverns; a ruined temple ona rocky height; a shepherd asleep in the shadow of a clump of laurels;the flock scattered over the plain_,"--a shepherd awakes andwonderingly describes his astonishment at certain changes which haveoccurred during his sleep. This shepherd, throughout the book, is asymbol of the mass of the common people, the great herd of men. Voicesfrom various directions interrupt his ejaculations: and amongst otherutterances of this sort, we have presently one from the nymphs--asrepresentative of the Greek nature--myths--which is quite to ourpresent purpose.
NYMPHS
(Who are to the shepherd voices, and nothing more):
"Our service hath ceased for you, shepherds! We fade from your days and your dreams, With the grace that was lithe as a leopard's, The joy that was swift as a stream's! To the musical reeds, and the grasses; To the forest, the copse, and the dell; To the mist and the rainbow that passes, The vine, and the goblet, farewell! Go, drink from the fountains that flow not! Our songs and our whispers are dumb:-- But the thing ye are doing ye know not, Nor dream of the thing that shall come."
In Scene IV., Deukalion, leading Pyrrha, passes into a cavern, thelast mouth of Hades left on the earth. Presently, the two emerge upon"a shadowy, colorless landscape," and are greeted by a chorus ofghosts, which very explicitly formulates that dreary impossibility ofgrowth which I pointed out in the last lecture as incident to the oldconception of personality.
"CHORUS OF GHOSTS.
"Away! Ashes that once were fires, Darkness that once was day, Dead passions, dead desires, Alone can enter here! In rest there is no strife,
* * * * *
Like some forgotten star, What first we were, we are, The past is adamant: The future will not grant That, which in all its range We pray for--change."
In spite of these warnings, they push on, find Charon at his old placeby the dark river, but are left to row themselves across, Charonpleading age and long-unused joints; and, after many adventures, findPrometheus, who very distinctly declares to Prince Deukalion andPyrrha their mission.
"Since thou adrift,"
says Prometheus,
"And that immortal woman by thy side Floated above submerged barbarity To anchor, weary, on the cloven mount, Thou wast my representative."
Prince Deukalion--as perhaps many will remember--is the Noah of theold Promethean cyclus, and the story ran, that the drowned world wasmiraculously repeopled by him and Pyrrha. In the same speechPrometheus introduces to Deukalion as a future helper his brotherEpimetheus--one of the most striking conceptions of the old fable, andone of the most effective characters in Mr. Taylor's presentation. Wesaw in the last lecture that Prometheus was called the Provident,--the_pro-metheus_ being a looking forward. Precisely opposite isEpimetheus, that is, he who looks _epi_--upon or backward. Perhaps itis a fair contrast to regard Prometheus as a symbol of striving onwardor progress; and Epimetheus as a symbol of the historic instinct,--theinstinct which goes back and clears up the past as if it were thefuture; which with continual effort reconstructs it; which keeps theto-be in full view of what has been; which reconciles progress andconservation. Accordingly, the old story reports Epimetheus as oldestat his birth, and growing younger with the progress of the ages.
"Take one new comfort"
says Prometheus,
Epimetheus lives. Though here beneath the shadow of the crags. He seems to slumb
er, head on nerveless knees, His life increases; oldest at his birth, The ages heaped behind him shake the snow From hoary locks, and slowly give him youth, "Tis he shall be thy helper: Brother, rise!
EPIMETHEUS--(_coming forward_)
I did not sleep: I mused. Ha! comest thou, Deukalion?
PROMETHEUS.
Soon thy work shall come! Shame shall cease When midway on their paths our mighty schemes Meet, and complete each other! Yet my son, Deukalion--yet one other guide I give, Eos!"
And presently Prometheus leads Deukalion and Pyrrha to what isdescribed in the stage-direction as "_The highest verge of the rockytable-land of Hades, looking eastward_." Eos is summoned byPrometheus, much high conversation ensues, and this, the sixth andlast scene of the first Act ends thus:
EOS, (_addressing young Deukalion and Pyrrha_.)
Faith, when none believe; Truth, when all deceive; Freedom, when force restrained; Courage to sunder chains; Pride, when good is shame; Love, when love is blame,-- These shall call me in stars and flame! Thus if your souls have wrought, Ere ye approach me, I shine unsought."
But Eos proceeds to warn Deukalion and Pyrrha of long trial, and ofmany disappointments, closing thus:
"When darkness falls, And what may come is hard to see; When solid adamant walls Seem built against the Future that shall be; When Faith looks backward, Hope dies, Life appals, Think most of Morning and of me!
[The rosy glow in the sky fades away]
PROMETHEUS (to _Prince Deukalion_),
Go back to Earth, and wait!
PANDORA (to _Pyrrha_),
Go: and fulfil our fate!"
This sketch of the first Act of Taylor's work is so typical of theremainder that I need not add quotations from the second, or third, orfourth Act: the explicit modernness of the treatment, thespirituality, the personality, of it, everywhere forms the moststriking contrast to the treatment of Aeschylus; and I will close thecase as to _Prince Deukalion_ by quoting the subtle and wise words ofPrometheus which end the play. The time is the future: the coming manand woman, Deukalion and Pyrrha, after long trial, and longseparation, are at last allowed to marry, and to begin their earthlylife. These are Prometheus' parting words to them. It would bedifficult to imagine one plane of thought farther removed from anotherthan is that of the time-spirit which here speaks through Taylor, fromthe time-spirit which speaks through Aeschylus. Remembering therelations between man and inexorable nature, between man and theexterminating god which we saw revealed by the Prometheus of Aeschylus,listen to these relations prophesied by the Prometheus of Taylor,--
"Retrieve perverted destiny!"
(In Aeschylus, when once "destiny" is about, all retrieval growsabsurd.)
'Tis this shall set your children free. The forces of your race employ To make sure heritage of joy; Yet feed, with every earthly sense, Its heavenly coincidence,-- That, as the garment of an hour, This, as an everlasting power. For Life, whose source not here began, Must fill the utmost sphere of Man, And so expanding, lifted be Along the line of God's decree, To find in endless growth all good; In endless toil, beatitude. Seek not to know Him; yet aspire As atoms toward the central fire! Not lord of race is He, afar,-- Of Man, or Earth, or any star, But of the inconceivable All; Whence nothing that there is can fall Beyond Him, but may nearer rise, Slow-circling through eternal skies. His larger life ye cannot miss, In gladly, nobly using this. Now, as a child in April hours Clasps tight its handful of first flowers, Homeward, to meet His purpose, go! These things are all ye need to know.
We have seen that Shelley thought of producing a history of "thegenuine elements of human society," taking Plato as his model, insteadof Aeschylus. Had he done so, how is it likely he would have fared? Itso happens that of all the monstrosities of thought which we find inthe whole Greek cultus, based upon the failure to conceivepersonality, the most monstrous are those which originated with Plato.And since you have now heard this word personality until your patiencemust be severely taxed, I am glad to say that I can now close thiswhole pending argument which I have announced as our first line ofresearch in a short and conclusive way by asking you to consider for amoment the complete massacre and deliberate extermination of all thosesacred bases of personality upon which the fabric of our modernsociety rests in that ideal society which Plato has embodied in his_Republic_. Nothing is more irresistible than the conviction that thebeing who planned Plato's _Republic_ could neither have had the leastactual sense of his own personality nor have recognized eventheoretically the least particle of its real significance. Fortunatelythis examination can be made with great brevity by confining ourattention to the three quite conclusive matters of marriage, children,and property as they are provided for in Book V. of Plato's_Republic_.
At line 460 of that book we find Socrates inquiring: "And how canmarriages be made most beneficial" in our ideal republic? andpresently answering his own question in due form. I quote here andthere, to make the briefest possible showing of the plan. "Why theprinciple has been already laid down, that the best of either sexshould be united with the best as often as possible; and thatinferiors should be prevented from marrying at all." "Now these goingson must be a secret which the rulers only know, ... or there will be afarther danger of our herd ... breaking into rebellion." To these endswe had "better appoint certain festivals at which the brides andbridegrooms" (whom the rulers have previously selected with care andsecrecy) "will be brought together, and sacrifices will be offered andsuitable hymeneal songs composed by our poets;" ... and we "inventsome ingenious kind of lots which the less worthy may draw." In short,the provision for marriage is that the rulers shall determine eachyear how many couples shall marry, and shall privately designate acertain number of the healthiest couples for that purpose; at theannual festival all marriageable couples assemble and draw lots, theselots having previously been so arranged that all unhealthy or in anyway inferior couples shall draw blanks. Of course this is fraud; butPlato defends it against Glaucon's objection thus: since "our rulerswill have to practice on the body corporate with medicines, our rulerswill find a considerable dose of these" (that is, of falsehood anddeceit) "necessary for the good of their subjects; ... and this lawfuluse of them seems likely to be often needed in the regulations ofmarriages." The couples thus married eat at a common table. A braveyouth, as a reward of valor, is allowed more than one wife.
Such are the marriage-arrangements of Plato's ideal republic, exceptthat I have omitted all the most monstrous provisions, giving only therosiest view of it. Reserving comment, let us see how the children areprovided for. Immediately after birth "The proper officers will takethe offspring of the good" or (healthy) "parents to" a certain common"fold, and there ... deposit them with certain nurses; but theoffspring of the inferior, or of the better where they chance to bedeformed, will be put away in some mysterious unknown place, asdecency requires;" the mothers are afterwards allowed to come to thefold to nourish the children, but the officers are to take thegreatest care that "no mother recognizes her own child:" of coursethese children, when they grow up are to be also bridegrooms andbrides, and the problem of how to prevent unknown brothers andsisters, and the like,--from marrying is duly attended to: but theprovisions for this purpose are at once so silly and so beastly--nay,they out-beast the beasts--that surely no one can read them withoutwishing to blot out the moment in which he did so.
And lastly property is thus disposed of. "Then" (line 482, Bk. V.Republic) "the community of wives and children is clearly the sourceof the greatest good to the State, ... and agrees with the otherprinciple that the guardians"--the guardians are the model citizens ofthis ideal republic--"are not to have houses or lands or any otherproperty; their pay is to be their food and they are to have noprivate expenses;... Both the community of property and the communityof families ... tend to make them more t
ruly guardians; they will nottear the city in pieces by differing about _meum_ and _tuum_; the onedragging any acquisition which he has made into a house of his own,where he has a separate wife and children ..., and another intoanother; ... but all will be affected as far as may be by the samepleasures and pains; ... and, as they have nothing but their personswhich they can call their own, suits and complaints will have noexistence among them."
Now, as soon as the ideal dispositions of Plato are propounded to amodern hearer, they send an instantaneous shock to the remotest endsof his nature; and what I will ask you to do at present is toformulate this shock in terms of personality. Taking for example thePlatonic provision with regard to marriage (how grotesquely, by theway, these provisions show alongside of what have gained greatcurrency as "Platonic attachments"): perhaps the two thousand yearssince Plato, have taught us nothing so clearly as that one of the mostmysterious and universal elements of personality, is that marvelousand absolutely inconsequential principle by which a given man findshimself determined to love a certain woman, or a given womandetermined to love a certain man; and if we look back we find that themost continuous travail of the ages has been to secure perfect freedomfor these determinations.
Does it not seem as if Time grinned at us in some horrible dream whenwe remind ourselves that here the divine Plato, as he has been called,and the unspeakable Zola (as some of us have learned to call him) haveabsolutely come cheek by jowl, and that the physiological marriage ofZola's is no more nor less than the ideal marriage of Plato?
Rejecting comment on the child-nursing arrangement of Plato it isinstructive to pass on and regard from a different point of view,though still from the general direction of personality, the Platoniccommunity of property. If men desire property says Plato, "one man'sdesire will contravene another's, and we shall have trouble. How shallwe remedy it? Crush out the desire; and to that end abolish property."
But no, cries modern personality to Plato, cannot you imagine such anextension of personality as to make each man see that on the whole theshortest way to carry out his desires for property is to respect everyother man's desire for property, and thus, in the regulations whichwill necessarily result from this mutual respect, to secure everythinghe acquires by spiritual considerations infinitely more effective thanspears and bars?
We had occasion to observe the other day how complete has been thesuccess of this doctrine here in the United States: we found that thereal government now going on is individual, personal,--not atWashington and that we have every proper desire,--of love in marriage,of having one woman to wife, of cherishing our own children, ofaccumulating property,--secured by external law apparently, andreally by respect for that law and the principles of personality itembodies.
It seems curious to me here to make two further points of contact,which taken with the Zola point just made, seem to tax the extremes ofthe heavens and the earth. Plato's organic principle appears to emergefrom some such consideration as this:--A boy ten years old is found topossess a wondrous manual deftness: he can do anything with hisfingers: word is brought to Plato: what shall the State do with thisboy? Why, says Plato, if he be manually so adroit, likely he will turnpickpocket: the plain course is to chop off his hands,--or to exposehim to die in one of those highly respectable places such as decencyrequires for generally unavailable children.
No, says the modern man: you are destroying his manifest gift, thevery deepest outcome of his personality: he might be a pickpocket,true, but then he might be a great violinist, he might be a greatworker in all manner of materials requiring deftness: instead ofcutting off his hands, let us put him at an industrial school, let usset him to playing the violin, let us cherish him, let us develop hispersonality. So, Plato takes the gift of acquiring property--for it isa real gift and blessing to man, if properly developed--and he willchop it off, that is, he will crush out the desire of property bydestroying the possibility of its exercise.
And what is this in its outcome but the Nirvana of the Buddhists? Mypassions keep me in fear and hope; therefore I will annihilate them:when I neither think nor desire, then I shall rest, then I shall enjoyNirvana. Plato institutes a Nirvana for the ills of marriage, ofoffspring, of property: and he realizes it by the slow death throughinanition of the desire for love, for children, for property.
And as we have found the Platonic Plato arguing himself into Zola, thedialectic Plato arguing himself into a dreaming Buddha, all for lackof the sense of personality, we now find the ideal Plato arguinghimself, for the same lack, into a brawny Whitman. Think of Plato'scommunity of property, and listen to Whitman's reverie, as he looks atsome cattle. It is curious to notice how you cannot escape a certainsense of _naivete_ in this, and how you are taken by it,--until amoment's thought shows you that the _naivete_ is due to a cunning andbold contradiction of every fact in the case.
"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd: I stand and look at them long and long.
Not one is dissatisfied--not one is demented with the mania of owning things: Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth."
The Whitman method of reaching _naivete_ is here so queerlyillustrated that it seems worth while to stop a moment and point itout. Upon the least reflection, one must see that "animals" here mustmean cows, and well-fed cows; for they are about the only animals inthe world to whom these items would apply. For says Whitman, "not oneis dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things:"but suppose he were taking one of his favorite night-strolls in thewoods of Bengal rather than of New Jersey, is it not more thanprobable that the first animal he met would be some wicked tiger notonly dissatisfied, but perfectly demented with the mania of owningWhitman, the only kind of property the tiger knows? Seriously, when wereflect that property to the animal means no more than food or nestor lair, and that the whole wing-shaken air above us, theearth-surface about us, the earth-crust below us, the seas, and all,are alive day and night with the furious activity of animals quite asfairly demented with the mania of owning their property as men theirs;and that it is only the pampered beast who is not so demented,--thecow, for instance, who has her property duly brought to her so manytimes a day and has no more to do but to enjoy the cud thereof untilnext feed-time,--we have a very instructive model of methods by whichpoetry can make itself _naive_.
And finally, what a conclusive light is shed upon the principlessupporting Plato's community of property, when we bring forward thefact, daily growing more and more notable, that along with the modernpassion for acquiring property has grown the modern passion of givingaway property, that is, of charity? What ancient scheme ever dreamedof the multitudinous charitable organizations of some of our largecities? Charity has become organic and a part of the system of things:it has sometimes overflowed its bounds so that great social questionsnow pend as to how we shall direct the overflowing charitableinstincts of society so as really to help the needy and not pamper thelazy: its public manifestations are daily, its private ministrationsare endless.
Plato would have crushed the instinct of property; but the instinct,vital part of man's personality, as it is, has taken care of itself,has been cherished and encouraged by the modern cultus, and behold,instead of breeding a wild pandemonium of selfishness as Plato argued,it has in its orderly progress developed this wonderful new outgrowthof charity which fills every thoughtful man's heart with joy, becauseit covers such a multitude of the sins of the time.
I have been somewhat earnest--I fear tediously so--upon this matter,because I have seen what seem the greatest and most mischievous errorsconcerning it, receiving the stamp of men who usually think withclearness and who have acquired just authority in many premises.
It would not be fair to the very different matters which I have now totreat, to detail these errors; and I will only mention that if, withthese principles of personality fairly fixed in one's mind, one readsfor example the admirable Introduction of Professor Jowett to hist
ranslation of Plato's _Republic_, one has a perfect clew to many ofthe problems over which that translator labors with results which, Ithink, cannot be conclusive to his own mind.
Here, too, no one can be satisfied with the otherwise instructivechapter on Individuality in Professor Eucken's _Fundamental Conceptsof Modern Philosophic Thought_. Eucken's direct reference to Plato'sRepublic is evidently made upon only a very vague recollection ofPlato's doctrine, which is always dangerous. "The completesubordination and sacrifice of the individual expressed in Plato'sidea of a state arose from his opposition to a tendency of the timeswhich he considered pernicious, and so is characterized rather bymoral energy and intensity of feeling than by the quiet and simpleresignation to the objection which we find in the great men of thepreceding period." But a mere opposition to a tendency of the timescould never have bred this elaborate and sweeping annihilation ofindividuality; and it is forgotten that Plato is not here legislatingfor his times or with the least dream of the practical establishmentof his Republic: again and again he declares his doubts as to thepracticability of his plans for any time. No; he is building arepublic for all time, and is consistently building upon the ruins ofthat personality which he was not sensible of except in its badoutcome as selfishness.
I must add, too, that there was an explicit theory of what was calledIndividuality among the Greeks; the phenomenon of the unaccountabledifferences of men from birth early attracted those sharp eyes, andthe Stoics and others soon began to build in various directions fromthis basis. But just as the Greeks had a theory of harmony--thoughharmony was not developed until the last century--as Richter sayssomewhere that a man may contemplate the idea of death for twentyyears, and only in some moment of the twenty-first suddenly have therealization of death come upon him, and shake his soul; so theirtheory of individuality must have been wholly amateur, not a workingelement, and without practical result. Surely, we seem in condition tosay so with confidence if you run your minds back along this line ofdevelopment which now comes to an end. For what have we done? We haveinterrogated Aeschylus and Plato, whom we may surely call the twolargest and most typic spirits of the whole Greek cultus, upon themain fact of personality; we have verified the abstract with theconcrete by questioning them upon the most vital and well-knownelements of personality: what do you believe about spiritual growth,about spiritual compactness, about true love, marriage, children,property? and we have received answers which show us that they havenot yet caught a conception of what personality means, and that whenthey explicitly discuss individuality in their theories, it is adiscussion of blind men about colors.