V.
The main direction of our studies has been indicated in the preceding lectures to such an extent that from this point forward our customary review may be omitted. In examining the Prometheus of Æschylus we have found three particulars, in which not only Æschylus, but his entire contemporary time shows complete unconsciousness of the most precious and essential belongings of personality. These particulars were, (1), the absolute impossibility of growth, implicitly affirmed of the gods and explicitly affirmed of men in the passages which were read; (2) the awkwardness of Jove's apparatus of power which included a minister for every kind of act—as contrasted with the elasticity and much-in-little which each man must perceive in regarding the action of his own mind; and (3) the gross and purely physical character of the punishments used by Jove to break the spirit of Prometheus. It was contended, you remember, that if the audience of Æschylus had acquired that direct way of looking phenomena in the face, which is one of the incidents of our modern personality, they would have perceived such an inadequacy between the thunders and earthquakes of Jove, on the one hand, and the immortal spirit of a Titan and a god like Prometheus, on the other, that the play, instead of being a religious and impressive spectacle to them, as it doubtless was, would have been simply a matter of ridicule, or at best one of those mere dilettante entertainments where of our own free will we forgive the grossest violations of common sense and propriety for the sake of the music or the scenery with which they are associated, as for 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 Æschylus had a fit audience for this fable, and was working upon emotions which are as deep as religion; but now, when we come down 2300 years to a time from which the Æschylean religious beliefs have long exhaled, and when the enormous growth of personality has quite rolled away the old lumpish terror that stood before the cave of the physical and darkened it, in such a time it would, of course, be truly amazing if a man like Shelley should have elaborated this same old Prometheus fable into a lyrical drama in the expectation of 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 away from its old surroundings, and of setting it in modern thoughts before modern men, would be much the same with that which Emerson has noted in 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, to observe how this inability of his to bring home the river and the sky along with the sparrow—this inability to bring a Greek-hearted audience to listen to his Greek fable—operated to infuse a certain tang of insincerity, of dilettantism, whenever he attempts to reproduce upon us the old terrors of thunder and lightning which Æschylus found so effective. We—we moderns—cannot for our lives help seeing the man in his shirt-sleeves who is turning the crank of the thunder-mill behind the scenes; nay, we are inclined to ask with a certain proud indignation, How is it that you wish us to tremble at this mere resinous lightning, when we have seen a man (not a Titan nor a god), one of ourselves go forth into a thunder-storm and send his kite up into the very bosom thereof, and fairly entice the lightning by his wit to come and perch upon his finger, and be the tame bird of him and his fellows thereafter and forever? But, secondly, it is still more conclusive upon our present point, of the different demands made by the personality of our time from that of Æschylus, to observe how Shelley's own sense of this difference, his own modern instinct, has led him to make most material alterations of the old fable, not only increasing the old list of physical torments with a number that are purely spiritual and modern, but also by dignifying at once the character of Prometheus and the catastrophe of the play with that enormous motive of forgiveness which seems to be the largest outcome of the developed personality. Many of you are aware of the scholastic belief that the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus was but the middle play of a trilogy, and that the last showed us a compromise effected between Prometheus and Jove, according to which Prometheus reveals the fatal secret concerning Jove's marriage, and Jove makes a new league of amity with the Titan. We have a note of this change in treatment in the very opening lines of Shelley's play—which I now beg to set before you in the briefest possible sketch. Scene I. of Act I. opens according to the stage direction—upon A ravine of icy rocks in the Indian Caucasus: Prometheus is discovered bound to the precipice: Panthea and Ione are seated at his feet: time, night: during the scene, morning slowly breaks. Prometheus begins to speak at once. I read only here and there a line selected with special reference to showing the change of treatment I have indicated as due to that intenser instinct of personality which Shelley shared in common with his contemporaries over Æschylus 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 and despair" set before us; though Shelley retains and even multiplies the physical torments of Æschylus. A few lines further on, in this same long 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 stir up 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 cunning outcrop of modernness in a direction which I have not yet mentioned but which we will have frequent occasion to notice when we come to read the modern novel together; and that is in the detail of the description Æschylus paints these conclusions with a big brush, and three sweeps of it; Shelley itemizes them.
It is worth while observing too, that the same spirit of detail in modern criticism forces us to convict Shelley here of an inconsistency in his scene; for how could this "snow-loaded cedar" of Ione exist with propriety in a scene which Prometheus himself has just described as "without herb, insect, or beast, or sound of life?"
The same instinct of modernness both in the spirituality of the torment and in the minuteness of its description displays itself a little farther on in the curse of Prometheus. Prometheus tells us in this same opening speech that long ago he uttered a certain awful curse against Jove which he now desires to recall; but it would seem that 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 ye all heard me speak." To this question we have page after page of replies from five voices—namely, the Voice of the Mountains, of the Springs, of the Air, of the Whirlwinds and of the Earth—embodying such a mass of falsetto sublimity that Shelley himself would surely have drawn his pen through the whole, if he had lived into the term of manhood.
Finally the whole awkward device for getting the curse of Prometheus before the reader is consummated by raising up the phantasm of Jupiter which repeats the curse, word for word.
In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essential immaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man: he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical: so that I call him the modern boy.
These considerations quite cover the remaining three acts of his Prometheus Unbound and render it unnecessary for me to quote from them in support of the passages already cited.
The first act contains, indeed, nearly the substance of the whole drama. Act II contains no important motive except the visit of Asia and Panthea to Demogorgon under the earth. In the third act we have a view of Jove surrounded by his ministers; but in the midst of a short speech to them he is suddenly swept into hell for everlasting punishment. Here, of course, Shelley makes a complete departure from the old story of the compromise between Jove and Prometheus; Shelley makes Prometheus scornfully reject such a compromise and allow Jove to go down to his doom. Hercules then unbinds Prometheus who repairs to a certain exquisite interlunar cave and there dwells in tranquillity with his beloved Asia.
The rest of Act III. is filled with long descriptions of the change which comes upon the world with the dethronement of Jove. Act IV. is the most amazing piece of surplusage in literature; the catastrophe has been reached long ago in the third act. Jove is in eternal duress, Prometheus has been liberated and has gone with Asia and Panthea to his eternal paradise above the earth, and a final radiant picture of the reawakening of man and nature under the new régime has closed up the whole with the effect of a transformation-scene. Yet, upon all this, Shelley drags in Act IV. which is simply leaden in action and color alongside of Act III. and in which the voices of unseen spirits, the chorus of Hours, Jove, Panthea, Demogorgon, the Earth and the Moon pelt each other with endless sweetish speeches that rain like ineffectual comfits in a carnival of silliness. For example, a Voice of 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, sleepily reply:
"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 was already complete, seems an instructive fact to place before young writers in a time when many souls which might be poetic gardens if they would compact all their energies into growing two roses and a lily—three poems in all, for a lifetime—become instead mere wastes of profuse weeds that grow and are cut down and cast into the oven with each monthly magazine.
But it would not be fair to leave Shelley with this flat taste in our mouths, and I will therefore beg to finish our examination of the Prometheus Unbound by three quotations from these last acts, in which his modernness of detail and of subtlety,—being exercised upon matters capable of such treatment—has made for us some strong and beautiful poetry. Here for instance at the opening of Scene I. Act II. we have a charming specimen of the modern poetic treatment of nature and of landscape, full of spirituality and full of detail. The stage direction is "Morning; A Lovely Vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia, alone." Asia, who is the lovely bride of Prometheus, is awaiting Panthea who is to come with news of him. She begins with an invocation of 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 Æolian music of her sea-green plumes
Winnowing the crimson dawn?"
And here we find some details of underwater life which are modern. Two fauns are conversing: one inquires where live certain delicate spirits whom they hear talking about the woods, but never meet. We are here in an atmosphere very much like that of The Midsummer-Night's Dream. I scarcely know anything more compact of pellucid beauty: it seems quite worthy 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 as the other is dainty, and which is as modern as geology. Asia is describing a vision in which the successive deposits in the crust of the 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; quivers, 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 the Prometheus story. This dissatisfaction displays itself in a characteristic passage of his preface to the Prometheus, which happens very felicitously to introduce the only other set of antique considerations I shall offer you on this subject. "Let this opportunity," (he says in one place) "be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms 'a passion for reforming the world'.... But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life....
... Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstition flatter themselves that I should take Æschylus rather than Plato as my model."
In Shelley's poem we have found much of the modernness between the lines, or appearing as the result, merely, of that spirit of the time which every writer must share to a greater or less extent with his fellow-beings of the same period. But as we proceed now to examine Bayard Taylor's poem, Prince Deukalion, we find a man not only possessed with modernness, but consciously possessed; so that what was implicit in Shelley—and a great deal more—here becomes explicit and formulated.
As one opens the book, a powerful note of modernness in the drama, as opposed to the drama of Æschylus, strikes us at the outset in the number of the actors. One may imagine the amazement of old Æschylus as he read down this truly prodigious array of dramatos prosopa:
Eos, Goddess of the Dawn: Gæa, 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 of the Snow; Spirit of the Stream; Echoes; the Youth; the Artist; the Poet; the Shepherd; the Shepherdess; the Mediæval Chorus; Mediæval Anti-Chorus; Chorus of Builders; Four Messengers. With these materials Mr. Taylor's aim is to array before us the whole panorama of time, painted in symbols of the great creeds which have characterized each epoch. These epochs are four; and one act is devoted to each. In the first act we have the passing away of nymph and satyr and the whole antique Greek mythos; and we are shown the coming man and woman in the persons 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 mediæval faith, all of which is mysteriously beheld by these same shadowy personalities, Deukalion and Pyrrha. In Act III. the faith of the present is similarly treated. In Act IV. we have at last the coming man, or developed personality fairly installed as ruler of himself and of the world, and Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, the ideal man and the ideal woman, now for the first time united in deed as well as in inspiration, pace forth into the world to learn it and to enjoy it. Mr. Taylor, as I said, is so explicit upon the points of personality and modernness as compared with the Æschylean play, that few quotations would be needed from his work, and I will not attempt even such a sketch of it as that of Shelley's. For example, in Scene 1, Act I, of Prince Deukalion, Scene I being given in the stage direction as
"A plain sloping from high mountains towards the sea; at the base of the mountains lofty, vaulted entrances of caverns; a ruined temple on a rocky height; a shepherd asleep in the shadow of a clump of laurels; the flock scattered over the plain,"—a shepherd awakes and wonderingly describes his astonishment at certain changes which have occurred during his sleep. This shepherd, throughout the book, is a symbol of the mass of the common people, the great herd of men. Voices from various directions interrupt his ejaculations: and amongst other utterances of this sort, we have presently one from the nymphs—as representative of the Greek nature—myths—which is quite to our present 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, the last mouth of Hades left on the earth. Presently, the two emerge upon "a shadowy, colorless landscape," and are greeted by a chorus of ghosts, which very explicitly formulates that dreary impossibility of growth which I pointed out in the last lecture as incident to the old conception 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 place by the dark river, but are left to row themselves across, Charon pleading age and long-unused joints; and, after many adventures, find Prometheus, who very distinctly declares to Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha their mission.
"Since thou adrìft,"
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 the old Promethean cyclus, and the story ran, that the drowned world was miraculously repeopled by him and Pyrrha. In the same speech Prometheus introduces to Deukalion as a future helper his brother Epimetheus—one of the most striking conceptions of the old fable, and one of the most effective characters in Mr. Taylor's presentation. We saw in the last lecture that Prometheus was called the Provident,—the pro-metheus being a looking forward. Precisely opposite is Epimetheus, that is, he who looks epi—upon or backward. Perhaps it is a fair contrast to regard Prometheus as a symbol of striving onward or progress; and Epimetheus as a symbol of the historic instinct,—the instinct which goes back and clears up the past as if it were the future; which with continual effort reconstructs it; which keeps the to-be in full view of what has been; which reconciles progress and conservation. Accordingly, the old story reports Epimetheus as oldest at 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 slumber, 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 is described in the stage-direction as "The highest verge of the rocky table-land of Hades, looking eastward." Eos is summoned by Prometheus, much high conversation ensues, and this, the sixth and last 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 of many 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 the remainder that I need not add quotations from the second, or third, or fourth Act: the explicit modernness of the treatment, the spirituality, the personality, of it, everywhere forms the most striking contrast to the treatment of Æschylus; and I will close the case as to Prince Deukalion by quoting the subtle and wise words of Prometheus which end the play. The time is the future: the coming man and woman, Deukalion and Pyrrha, after long trial, and long separation, are at last allowed to marry, and to begin their earthly life. These are Prometheus' parting words to them. It would be difficult to imagine one plane of thought farther removed from another than is that of the time-spirit which here speaks through Taylor, from the time-spirit which speaks through Æschylus. Remembering the relations between man and inexorable nature, between man and the exterminating god which we saw revealed by the Prometheus of Æschylus, listen to these relations prophesied by the Prometheus of Taylor,—
"Retrieve perverted destiny!"
(In Æschylus, when once "destiny" is about, all retrieval grows absurd.)
'Tis this shall set your children free.
The forces of your race employ
To make sure heritage of joy;
Yet feed, with every earthly sense,
Its heavenly coincidence,—
That, as the garment of an hour,
This, as an everlasting power.
For Life, whose source not here began,
Must fill the utmost sphere of Man,
And so expanding, lifted be
Along the line of God's decree,
To find in endless growth all good;
In endless toil, beatitude.
Seek not to know Him; yet aspire
As atoms toward the central fire!
Not lord of race is He, afar,—
Of Man, or Earth, or any star,
But of the inconceivable All;
Whence nothing that there is can fall
Beyond Him, but may nearer rise,
Slow-circling through eternal skies.
His larger life ye cannot miss,
In gladly, nobly using this.
Now, as a child in April hours
Clasps tight its handful of first flowers,
Homeward, to meet His purpose, go!
These things are all ye need to know.
We have seen that Shelley thought of producing a history of "the genuine elements of human society," taking Plato as his model, instead of Æschylus. Had he done so, how is it likely he would have fared? It so happens that of all the monstrosities of thought which we find in the whole Greek cultus, based upon the failure to conceive personality, the most monstrous are those which originated with Plato. And since you have now heard this word personality until your patience must be severely taxed, I am glad to say that I can now close this whole pending argument which I have announced as our first line of research in a short and conclusive way by asking you to consider for a moment the complete massacre and deliberate extermination of all those sacred bases of personality upon which the fabric of our modern society rests in that ideal society which Plato has embodied in his Republic. Nothing is more irresistible than the conviction that the being who planned Plato's Republic could neither have had the least actual sense of his own personality nor have recognized even theoretically the least particle of its real significance. Fortunately this examination can be made with great brevity by confining our attention to the three quite conclusive matters of marriage, children, and property as they are provided for in Book V. of Plato's Republic.
At line 460 of that book we find Socrates inquiring: "And how can marriages be made most beneficial" in our ideal republic? and presently answering his own question in due form. I quote here and there, to make the briefest possible showing of the plan. "Why the principle has been already laid down, that the best of either sex should be united with the best as often as possible; and that inferiors should be prevented from marrying at all." "Now these goings on must be a secret which the rulers only know, ... or there will be a farther danger of our herd ... breaking into rebellion." To these ends we had "better appoint certain festivals at which the brides and bridegrooms" (whom the rulers have previously selected with care and secrecy) "will be brought together, and sacrifices will be offered and suitable hymeneal songs composed by our poets;" ... and we "invent some ingenious kind of lots which the less worthy may draw." In short, the provision for marriage is that the rulers shall determine each year how many couples shall marry, and shall privately designate a certain number of the healthiest couples for that purpose; at the annual festival all marriageable couples assemble and draw lots, these lots having previously been so arranged that all unhealthy or in any way inferior couples shall draw blanks. Of course this is fraud; but Plato defends it against Glaucon's objection thus: since "our rulers will have to practice on the body corporate with medicines, our rulers will find a considerable dose of these" (that is, of falsehood and deceit) "necessary for the good of their subjects; ... and this lawful use of them seems likely to be often needed in the regulations of marriages." The couples thus married eat at a common table. A brave youth, as a reward of valor, is allowed more than one wife.
Such are the marriage-arrangements of Plato's ideal republic, except that I have omitted all the most monstrous provisions, giving only the rosiest view of it. Reserving comment, let us see how the children are provided for. Immediately after birth "The proper officers will take the offspring of the good" or (healthy) "parents to" a certain common "fold, and there ... deposit them with certain nurses; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better where they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious unknown place, as decency requires;" the mothers are afterwards allowed to come to the fold to nourish the children, but the officers are to take the greatest care that "no mother recognizes her own child:" of course these children, when they grow up are to be also bridegrooms and brides, and the problem of how to prevent unknown brothers and sisters, and the like,—from marrying is duly attended to: but the provisions for this purpose are at once so silly and so beastly—nay, they out-beast the beasts—that surely no one can read them without wishing to blot out the moment in which he did so.
And lastly property is thus disposed of. "Then" (line 482, Bk. V. Republic) "the community of wives and children is clearly the source of the greatest good to the State, ... and agrees with the other principle that the guardians"—the guardians are the model citizens of this ideal republic—"are not to have houses or lands or any other property; their pay is to be their food and they are to have no private expenses;... Both the community of property and the community of families ... tend to make them more truly guardians; they will not tear the city in pieces by differing about meum and tuum; the one dragging any acquisition which he has made into a house of his own, where he has a separate wife and children ..., and another into another; ... but all will be affected as far as may be by the same pleasures and pains; ... and, as they have nothing but their persons which they can call their own, suits and complaints will have no existence among them."
Now, as soon as the ideal dispositions of Plato are propounded to a modern hearer, they send an instantaneous shock to the remotest ends of his nature; and what I will ask you to do at present is to formulate this shock in terms of personality. Taking for example the Platonic provision with regard to marriage (how grotesquely, by the way, these provisions show alongside of what have gained great currency as "Platonic attachments"): perhaps the two thousand years since Plato, have taught us nothing so clearly as that one of the most mysterious and universal elements of personality, is that marvelous and absolutely inconsequential principle by which a given man finds himself determined to love a certain woman, or a given woman determined to love a certain man; and if we look back we find that the most continuous travail of the ages has been to secure perfect freedom for these determinations.
Does it not seem as if Time grinned at us in some horrible dream when we remind ourselves that here the divine Plato, as he has been called, and the unspeakable Zola (as some of us have learned to call him) have absolutely come cheek by jowl, and that the physiological marriage of Zola's is no more nor less than the ideal marriage of Plato?
Rejecting comment on the child-nursing arrangement of Plato it is instructive to pass on and regard from a different point of view, though still from the general direction of personality, the Platonic community of property. If men desire property says Plato, "one man's desire will contravene another's, and we shall have trouble. How shall we remedy it? Crush out the desire; and to that end abolish property."
But no, cries modern personality to Plato, cannot you imagine such an extension of personality as to make each man see that on the whole the shortest way to carry out his desires for property is to respect every other man's desire for property, and thus, in the regulations which will necessarily result from this mutual respect, to secure everything he acquires by spiritual considerations infinitely more effective than spears and bars?
We had occasion to observe the other day how complete has been the success of this doctrine here in the United States: we found that the real government now going on is individual, personal,—not at Washington and that we have every proper desire,—of love in marriage, of having one woman to wife, of cherishing our own children, of accumulating property,—secured by external law apparently, and really by respect for that law and the principles of personality it embodies.
It seems curious to me here to make two further points of contact, which taken with the Zola point just made, seem to tax the extremes of the heavens and the earth. Plato's organic principle appears to emerge from some such consideration as this:—A boy ten years old is found to possess a wondrous manual deftness: he can do anything with his fingers: word is brought to Plato: what shall the State do with this boy? Why, says Plato, if he be manually so adroit, likely he will turn pickpocket: the plain course is to chop off his hands,—or to expose him to die in one of those highly respectable places such as decency requires for generally unavailable children.
No, says the modern man: you are destroying his manifest gift, the very deepest outcome of his personality: he might be a pickpocket, true, but then he might be a great violinist, he might be a great worker in all manner of materials requiring deftness: instead of cutting off his hands, let us put him at an industrial school, let us set him to playing the violin, let us cherish him, let us develop his personality. So, Plato takes the gift of acquiring property—for it is a real gift and blessing to man, if properly developed—and he will chop it off, that is, he will crush out the desire of property by destroying the possibility of its exercise.
And what is this in its outcome but the Nirvana of the Buddhists? My passions keep me in fear and hope; therefore I will annihilate them: when I neither think nor desire, then I shall rest, then I shall enjoy Nirvana. Plato institutes a Nirvana for the ills of marriage, of offspring, of property: and he realizes it by the slow death through inanition of the desire for love, for children, for property.
And as we have found the Platonic Plato arguing himself into Zola, the dialectic Plato arguing himself into a dreaming Buddha, all for lack of the sense of personality, we now find the ideal Plato arguing himself, for the same lack, into a brawny Whitman. Think of Plato's community of property, and listen to Whitman's reverie, as he looks at some cattle. It is curious to notice how you cannot escape a certain sense of naïveté in this, and how you are taken by it,—until a moment's thought shows you that the naïveté is due to a cunning and bold contradiction of every fact in the case.
"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd:
I stand and look at them long and long.
Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things:
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth."
The Whitman method of reaching naïveté is here so queerly illustrated that it seems worth while to stop a moment and point it out. Upon the least reflection, one must see that "animals" here must mean cows, and well-fed cows; for they are about the only animals in the world to whom these items would apply. For says Whitman, "not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things:" but suppose he were taking one of his favorite night-strolls in the woods of Bengal rather than of New Jersey, is it not more than probable that the first animal he met would be some wicked tiger not only dissatisfied, but perfectly demented with the mania of owning Whitman, the only kind of property the tiger knows? Seriously, when we reflect that property to the animal means no more than food or nest or lair, and that the whole wing-shaken air above us, the earth-surface about us, the earth-crust below us, the seas, and all, are alive day and night with the furious activity of animals quite as fairly demented with the mania of owning their property as men theirs; and that it is only the pampered beast who is not so demented,—the cow, for instance, who has her property duly brought to her so many times a day and has no more to do but to enjoy the cud thereof until next feed-time,—we have a very instructive model of methods by which poetry can make itself naïve.
And finally, what a conclusive light is shed upon the principles supporting Plato's community of property, when we bring forward the fact, daily growing more and more notable, that along with the modern passion for acquiring property has grown the modern passion of giving away property, that is, of charity? What ancient scheme ever dreamed of the multitudinous charitable organizations of some of our large cities? Charity has become organic and a part of the system of things: it has sometimes overflowed its bounds so that great social questions now pend as to how we shall direct the overflowing charitable instincts of society so as really to help the needy and not pamper the lazy: its public manifestations are daily, its private ministrations are endless.
Plato would have crushed the instinct of property; but the instinct, vital part of man's personality, as it is, has taken care of itself, has been cherished and encouraged by the modern cultus, and behold, instead of breeding a wild pandemonium of selfishness as Plato argued, it has in its orderly progress developed this wonderful new outgrowth of charity which fills every thoughtful man's heart with joy, because it covers such a multitude of the sins of the time.
I have been somewhat earnest—I fear tediously so—upon this matter, because I have seen what seem the greatest and most mischievous errors concerning it, receiving the stamp of men who usually think with clearness and who have acquired just authority in many premises.
It would not be fair to the very different matters which I have now to treat, to detail these errors; and I will only mention that if, with these principles of personality fairly fixed in one's mind, one reads for example the admirable Introduction of Professor Jowett to his translation of Plato's Republic, one has a perfect clew to many of the problems over which that translator labors with results which, I think, cannot be conclusive to his own mind.
Here, too, no one can be satisfied with the otherwise instructive chapter on Individuality in Professor Eucken's Fundamental Concepts of Modern Philosophic Thought. Eucken's direct reference to Plato's Republic is evidently made upon only a very vague recollection of Plato's doctrine, which is always dangerous. "The complete subordination and sacrifice of the individual expressed in Plato's idea of a state arose from his opposition to a tendency of the times which he considered pernicious, and so is characterized rather by moral energy and intensity of feeling than by the quiet and simple resignation to the objection which we find in the great men of the preceding period." But a mere opposition to a tendency of the times could never have bred this elaborate and sweeping annihilation of individuality; and it is forgotten that Plato is not here legislating for his times or with the least dream of the practical establishment of his Republic: again and again he declares his doubts as to the practicability of his plans for any time. No; he is building a republic for all time, and is consistently building upon the ruins of that personality which he was not sensible of except in its bad outcome as selfishness.
I must add, too, that there was an explicit theory of what was called Individuality among the Greeks; the phenomenon of the unaccountable differences of men from birth early attracted those sharp eyes, and the Stoics and others soon began to build in various directions from this basis. But just as the Greeks had a theory of harmony—though harmony was not developed until the last century—as Richter says somewhere that a man may contemplate the idea of death for twenty years, and only in some moment of the twenty-first suddenly have the realization of death come upon him, and shake his soul; so their theory of individuality must have been wholly amateur, not a working element, and without practical result. Surely, we seem in condition to say so with confidence if you run your minds back along this line of development which now comes to an end. For what have we done? We have interrogated Æschylus and Plato, whom we may surely call the two largest and most typic spirits of the whole Greek cultus, upon the main fact of personality; we have verified the abstract with the concrete by questioning them upon the most vital and well-known elements of personality: what do you believe about spiritual growth, about spiritual compactness, about true love, marriage, children, property? and we have received answers which show us that they have not yet caught a conception of what personality means, and that when they explicitly discuss individuality in their theories, it is a discussion of blind men about colors.
VI.
We are now to enter upon the second of our four lines of study by concentrating our attention upon three historic details in the growth of this personality whose general advance has been so carefully illustrated in our first line. These details are found in the sudden rise of Physical Science, of Modern Music, and of the Modern Novel, at periods of time so little separated from each other, that we may consider these great fields of human activity as fairly opened simultaneously to the entrance of man about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Addressing ourselves first, then, to the idea of Science, let us place ourselves at a point of view from which we can measure with precision the actual height and nature of the step which man took in ascending from the plane of, say, Aristotle's "science" to that of Sir Isaac Newton's "science." And the only possible method of placing ourselves at this point of view is to pass far back and fix ourselves in the attitude which antiquity maintained towards physical nature, and in which succeeding ages comfortably dozed, scarcely disturbed even by Roger Bacon's feeble protest in the thirteenth century, until it was shocked out of all future possibility by Copernicus, Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton.
Accordingly, in pursuance of our custom of abandoning abstract propositions at the earliest moment, when we can embody them in terms of the concrete, let us spend a quiet hour in contemplating some of the specific absurdities of our ancestors in scientific thought and in generalizing them into the lack of personality. Let us go and sit with Socrates on his prison-bed, in the Phædo, and endeavor to see this matter of man's scientific relation to physical nature, with his sight. Hear Socrates talking to Simmias: he is discussing the method of acquiring true knowledge: it is well we are invisible as we sit by him, for we can not keep back a quiet smile,—we who come out of a beautiful and vast scientific acquirement all based upon looking at things with our eyes; we whose very intellectual atmosphere is distilled from the proverb, "seeing is believing"—when we hear these grave propositions of the wisest antique man. "But what of the acquisition of wisdom," says Socrates: ... "do the sight and hearing convey any certainty to mankind, or are they such as the poets incessantly report them, who say that we neither hear nor see anything as it is?... Do they not seem so to you?"
"They do, indeed," replied Simmias. "When, then," continued Socrates, "does the soul attain to the truth? For when it attempts to investigate anything along with the body, it is plain that the soul is led astray by the body.... Is it not by reasoning, if by anything, that reality is made manifest to the soul?"
"Certainly."
But now Socrates advances a step to show that not only are we misled when we attempt to get knowledge by seeing things, but that nothing worth attention is capable of being physically seen. I shall have occasion to recur in another connection to the curious fallacy involved in this part of Socrates' argument. He goes on to inquire of Simmias: "Do we assert that Justice is anything, or not?"
"We say that it is."
"And beauty and goodness, also?"
"Surely."
"Did you ever see anything of the kind with your eyes?"
"Never," replied Simmias.
... "Then," continues Socrates, "whoever amongst us prepares, with the greatest caution and accuracy, to reflect upon that particular thing by itself upon which he is inquiring" and ... "using reflection alone, endeavors to investigate every reality by itself, ... abstaining as much as possible from the use of the eyes ... is not such an one, if any, likely to arrive at what really exists?"
"You speak, Socrates," answered Simmias, "with amazing truth."
It is curious to note in how many particulars this process of acquiring knowledge is opposed to that of the modern scientific man. Observe specially that Socrates wishes to investigate every reality by itself, while we, on the contrary, fly from nothing with so much vehemence as from an isolated fact; it maddens us until we can put it into relation with other facts, and delights us in proportion to the number of facts with which we can relate it. In that book of multitudinous suggestions which Novalis (Friedrich Von Hardenberg) calls The Pupil at Sais, one of the most modern sentences is that where, after describing many studies of his wondrous pupil, Novalis adds that "erelong he saw nothing alone."
Surely, one of the earliest and most delightful sensations one has in spiritual growth, after one has acquired the true synthetic habit which converts knowledge into wisdom, is that delicious, universal impulse which accompanies every new acquisition as it runs along like a warp across the woof of our existing acquisition, making a pleasant tang of contact, as it were, with each related fibre.
But Plato speaks even more directly upon our present point, in advocating a similar attitude towards physical science. In Book VII. of the Republic, he puts these words into the mouth of Socrates: "And whether a man gapes at the heavens, or blinks on the ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he can learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of science."
Of course these, as the opinions of professed idealists, would not be representative of the Greek attitude towards physical science.
Yet when we turn to those who are pre-eminently physical philosophers, we find that the mental disposition, though the reverse of hostile, is nearly always such as to render the work of these philosophers unfruitful. When we find, for example, that Thales in the very beginning of Greek philosophy holds the principle, or beginning, ἡ ἀρχἡ of all things to be moisture, or water; that Anaximenes a little while after holds the beginning of things to be air; that Heraclitus holds the arche to be fire: this sounds physical, and we look for a great extension of men's knowledge in regard to water, air and fire, upon the idea that if these are really the organic principles of things, thousands of keen inquiring eyes would be at once leveled upon them, thousands of experiments would be at once set on foot, all going to reveal properties of water, air and fire.
But perhaps no more expressive summary of the real relation between man and nature, not only during the Greek period but for many centuries after it, could be given than the fact that these three so-called elements which begin the Greek physical philosophy remained themselves unknown for more than two thousand years after Thales and Anaximenes and Heraclitus, until the very last century when, with the discovery of oxygen, men are able to prove that they are not elements at all; but that what we call fire is merely an effect of the rapid union of oxygen with bodies, while water and air are compounds of it with other gases. It is perfectly true that in the years between Thales and the death of Aristotle, a considerable body of physical facts had been accumulated; that Pythagoras had observed a number of acoustic phenomena and mathematically formulated their relations; it is true that—without detaining you to specify intermediate inquirers—we have that wonderful summary of Aristotle—wonderful for one man—which is contained in his Physics, from which the name "meta-physics" originated, though the circumstance that he placed the other books after those on physics, calling them Τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσιχὰ βιβλἱα, the meta-physical, or over and above physical, books.
When we read the titles of these productions—here are "Eight Books of Physical Lectures," "Four Books of the Heavens," "Two Books of Production and Destruction," Treatises "On Animals," "On Plants," "On Colors," "On Sound"—we feel that we must be in a veritable realm of physical science. But if we examine these lectures and treatises, which probably contain the entire body of Greek physical learning, we find them hampered by a certain disability which seems to me characteristic not only of Greek thought, but of all man's early speculation, and which excludes the possibility of a fruitful and progressive physical science. I do not know how to characterize this disability otherwise than by calling it a lack of that sense of personal relation to fact which makes the thinker passionately and supremely solicitous about the truth, that is, the existence of his facts and the soundness of his logic; solicitous of these, not so much with reference to the value of his conclusions as because of an inward tender inexorable yearning for the truth and nothing but the truth.
In short, I find that early thought everywhere, whether dealing with physical facts or meta-physical problems, is lacking in what I may call the intellectual conscience—the conscience, for example, which makes Mr. Darwin spend long and patient years in investigating small facts before daring to reason upon them; and which makes him state the facts adverse to his theory with as much care as the facts which make for it.
Part of the philosophy of this personal relation between a man and a fact is very simple. For instance what do you know at present of the inner life of the Patagonians? Probably no more than your Mitchell's or Cornell's Geography told you at school. But if a government expedition is soon to carry you to the interior of that country, a personal relation arises which will probably set you to searching all the libraries at your command for such travels or treatises as may enlarge your knowledge of Patagonia.
It is easy to give a thousand illustrations of this lack of intellectual conscience in Greek thought, which continued indeed up to the time of the Renaissance. For example: it would seem that nothing less than a sort of amateur mental attitude towards nature, an attitude which does not bind the thinker to his facts with such iron conscientiousness that if one fact were out of due order, it would rack him, could account for Aristotle's grave exposition of the four elements. "We seek," he says "the principles of sensible things, that is of tangible bodies. We must take therefore not all the contrarieties of quality but those only which have reference to the touch.... Now the contrarieties of quality which refer to the touch are these: hot, cold; dry, wet; heavy, light; hard, soft; unctuous, meagre; rough, smooth; dense, rare." Aristotle then rejects the last three couplets on several grounds and proceeds: "Now in four things there are six combinations of two; but the combinations of two opposites, as hot and cold, must be rejected; we have therefore four elementary combinations which agree with the four apparently elementary bodies. Fire is hot and dry; air is hot and wet; water is cold and wet: earth is cold and dry." And thus we comfortably fare forward with fire, air, earth and water for the four elements of all things.
But Aristotle argues that there must be a fifth element: and our modern word quintessence is, by the way, a relic of this argument, this fifth element having been called by later writers quinta essentia or quintessence. The argument is as follows: "the simple elements must have simple motions, and thus fire and air have their natural motions upwards and water and earth have their natural motions downwards; but besides these motions there is motion in a circle which is unnatural to these elements, but which is a more perfect motion than the other, because a circle is a perfect line and a straight line is not; and there must be something to which this motion is natural. From this it is evident that there is some essence or body different from those of the four elements, ... and superior to them. If things which move in a circle move contrary to nature it is marvelous, or rather absurd that this, the unnatural motion should alone be continuous and eternal; for unnatural motions decay speedily. And so from all this we must collect that besides the four elements which we have here and about us, there is another removed far off and the more excellent in proportion as it is more distant from us."
Or take Aristotle's dealing with the heaviness and lightness of bodies.
After censuring former writers for considering these as merely relative, he declares that lightness is a positive or absolute property of bodies just as weight is; that earth is absolutely heavy, and therefore tends to take its place below the other three elements; that fire has the positive property of lightness, and hence tends to take its place above the other three elements; (the modern word empyrean is a relic of this idea from the pyr or fire, thus collected in the upper regions), and so on; and concludes that bodies which have the heavy property tend to the centre, while those with the light property tend to the exterior, of the earth, because "Exterior is opposite to Centre, as heavy is to light."
This conception, or rather misconception, of opposites appears most curiously in two of the proofs which Socrates offers for the immortality of the soul, and I do not know how I can better illustrate the infirmity of antique thought which I have just been describing than by citing the arguments of Socrates in that connection according to the Phædo. Socrates introduced it with special solemnity. "I do not imagine," he says, "that any one, not even if he were a comic poet, would now say that I am trifling.... Let us examine it in this point of view, whether the souls of the dead survive or not.
"Let us consider this, whether it is absolutely necessary in the case of as many things as have a contrary, that this contrary should arise from no other source than from a contrary to itself. For instance, where anything becomes greater, must it not follow that from being previously less it subsequently became greater?
"Yes."
"So, too, if anything becomes less, shall it become so subsequently to its being previously greater?"
"Such is the case," said Cebes.
"And weaker from stronger, swifter from slower, ... worse from better, juster from more unjust?"
"Surely."
"We are then sufficiently assured of this, that all things are so produced, contraries from contraries?"
"Sufficiently so."
... "Do you now tell me likewise in regard to life and death. Do you not say that death is the contrary of life?"
"I say so."
"And that they are produced from each other?"
"Yes."
"What then is that which is produced from life?"
"Death," said Cebes.
"And that which is produced from death?"
"I must allow," said Cebes, "to be life."
"Therefore, our souls exist after death."
This is one formal argument of Socrates.
He now goes on speaking to his friends during that fatal day at great length, setting forth other arguments in favor of the immortality of the soul. Finally he comes to the argument which he applies to the soul, that magnitude cannot admit its contrary, but that one retires when the other approaches. At this point he is interrupted by one who remembers his former position. Plato relates:
Then some one of those present (but who he was I do not clearly recollect) when he heard this, said, "In the name of the gods, was not the very contrary of what is now asserted laid down in the previous part of the discussion, that the greater is produced from the less and the less from the greater, and this positively was the mode of generating contraries from contraries?" Upon which Socrates said ... "... 'Then it was argued that a contrary thing was produced from a contrary; but now, that contrary itself can never become its own contrary'.... But observe further if you will agree with me in this. Is there anything you call heat and cold?"
"Certainly."
"The same as snow and fire?"
"Assuredly not."
"Is heat, then, something different from fire, and cold something different from snow?"
"Yes."
"But this I think is evident to you, that snow while it is snow can never, having admitted heat, continue to be what it was, snow and hot; but on the approach of heat will either give way to it or be destroyed."
"Certainly so."
"And fire, on the other hand, on the approach of cold, must either give way to it or be destroyed; nor can it ever endure, having admitted cold, to continue to be what it was, fire and cold.... Such I assert to be the case with the number 3 and many other numbers. Shall we not insist that the number 3 shall perish first ... before it would endure while it was yet 3 to become even?... What then? what do we now call that which does not admit the idea of the even?"
"Odd," replied he.
"And that which does not admit the just, nor the graceful?"
"The one, ungraceful, and the other, unjust."
"Be it so. But by what name do we call that which does not admit death?"
"Immortal."
"Does the soul, then, not admit death?" (Socrates has already suggested that whatever the soul occupies it brings life to.)
"No."
"Is the soul, therefore, immortal?"
"Immortal."
Socrates' argument drawn from the number 3 brings before us a great host of these older absurdities of scientific thought, embracing many grave conclusions drawn from fanciful considerations of number, everywhere occurring. For briefest example: Aristotle in his book "On the Heavens" proves that the world is perfect by the following complete argument: "The bodies of which the world is composed ... have three dimensions; now 3 is the most perfect number ... for of 1 we do not speak as a number; of 2 we say both; but 3 is the first number of which we say all; moreover, it has a beginning, a middle and an end." You may instructively compare with this the marvelous matters which the school of Pythagoras educed out of their perfect number which was 4, or the tetractys; and Plato's number of the Republic which commentators to this day have not settled.
These illustrations seem sufficient to show a mental attitude towards facts which is certainly like that one has towards a far-off country which one does not expect to visit. The illustration I have used is curiously borne out by a passage in Lactantius, writing so far down as the fourth century, in which we have a picture of mediæval relations towards nature and of customary discussions.
"To search," says he, "for the causes of natural things; to inquire whether the sun be as large as he seems, whether the moon is convex or concave, whether the stars are fixed in the sky or float freely in the air; of what size and what material are the heavens; whether they be at rest or in motion; what is the magnitude of the earth; on what foundations it is suspended and balanced;—to dispute and conjecture on such matters is just as if we chose to discuss what we think of a city in a remote country of which we never heard but the name."
Perhaps this defect of thought, this lack of personality towards facts, is most strikingly perceived in the slowness with which most primary ideas of the form and motion of the earth made their way among men. Although astronomy is the oldest of sciences, and the only one progressive science of antiquity; and although the idea that the earth was a sphere, was one of the earliest in Greek philosophy; yet this same Lactantius in the 4th century is vehemently arguing as follows: "Is it possible that men can be so absurd as to believe that the crops and trees on the other side of the earth hang downwards, and that men there have their feet higher than their heads? If you ask of them how they defend these monstrosities—how things do not fall away from the earth on that side? they reply that the nature of things is such that heavy bodies tend towards the centre, like the spokes of a wheel, while light bodies, as clouds, smoke, fire, tend from the earth towards the heavens on all sides. Now I am really at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once gone wrong, steadily persevere in their folly and defend one absurd opinion by another."
And coming on down to the eighth century, the anecdote is well known of honest Bishop Virgil of Salisbury, who shocked some of his contemporaries by his belief in the real existence of the antipodes, to such an extent that many thought he should be censured by the Pope for an opinion which involved the existence of a whole "world of human beings out of reach of the conditions of salvation."
And finally we all know the tribulations of Columbus on this point far down in the fifteenth century, at the very beginning of the Renaissance.
Now this infirmity of mind is as I said, not distinctive of the Greek. To me it seems simply a natural incident of the youth of reason, of the childhood of personality. At any rate, for a dozen centuries and more after Aristotle's death, to study science, means to study Aristotle; in vain do we hear Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century—that prophet philosopher who first announces the two rallying cries of modern science, mathematics and experiment—in vain do we hear Roger Bacon crying: "If I had power over the works of Aristotle I would have them all burnt; for it is only a loss of time, a course of error, and a multiplication of ignorance beyond expression, to study them."
Various attempts have been made to account for the complete failure of Greek physical science by assigning this and that specific tendency to the Greek mind: but it seems a perfect confirmation of the view I have here presented—to wit that the organic error was not Greek but simply a part of the general human lack of personality—to reflect that 1,500 years after Aristotle, things are little better, and that when we do come to a time when physical science begins to be pursued upon progressive principles, we find it to be also a time when all other departments of activity begin to be similarly pursued, so that we are obliged to recognize not the correction of any specific error in Greek ratiocination, but a general advance of the spirit of man along the whole line.
And perhaps we have now sufficiently prepared ourselves, as was proposed at the outset of this sketch of Greek science, to measure precisely the height of the new plane which begins with Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo in the 16th century, over the old plane which ended with Aristotle and his commentators. Perhaps the true point up to which we should lay our line in making this measurement is not to be found until we pass nearly through the 17th century and arrive fairly at Sir Isaac Newton. For while each one of the great men who preceded him had made his contribution weighty enough, as such, yet each brings with him some old darkness out of the antique period.
When we come to examine Copernicus, we find that though the root of the matter is there, a palpable environment of the old cycle and epicycle still hampers it; Galileo disappoints us at various emergencies. Kepler puts forth his sublime laws amid a cluster of startling absurdities; Francis Bacon is on the whole unfaithful; Descartes will have his vortices or eddies as the true principles of motion of the heavenly bodies; and so it is not until we reach Sir Isaac Newton at the end of the 17th century that we find a large, quiet, wholesome thinker, de-Aristotleized, de-Ptolemized, de-Cartesianized, pacing forth upon the domain of reason as if it were his own orchard, and seating himself in the centre of the universe as if it were his own easy chair, observing the fact and inferring the law as if with a personal passion for truth and a personal religion towards order. In short, and in terms of our present theory, with Sir Isaac Newton the growth of man's personality has reached a point when it has developed a true personal relation between man and nature.
I should have been glad if the scope of this part of my inquiry had allowed me to give some sketch at least of the special workers in science who immediately preceded Newton, and some of whose lives were most pathetic and beautiful illustrations of this personal love for nature which I have tried to show as now coming into being for the first time in the history of man. Besides such spectacles as the lonesome researches of Jeremiah Horrox, for example, I scarcely know anything in history which yields such odd and instructive contrasts as those glimpses of the scientific work which went on about the court of Charles II, and of what seems to have been the genuine interest of the monarch himself. In Pepys' Diary, for instance, under date of May 11th, 1663, I find the entry: "Went home after a little discourse with Mr. Pierce the surgeon who tells me that ... the other day Dr. Clarke and he did dissect two bodies, a man and a woman, before the king, with which the king was highly pleased." Again, February 1st, of the next year: "Thence to Whitehall, where in the Duke's chamber the King came and stayed an hour or two, laughing at Sir W. Petty ... and at Gresham College in general: Gresham College he mightily laughed at for spending time only in weighing of air and doing nothing else since they sat." On the 4th, he was at St. Paul's school and "Dr. Wilkins" is one of the "posers," Dr. Wilkins being John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, whose name was well-known in mathematics and in physics. Under date of March 1st, same year, the entry is: "To Gresham College where Mr. Hooke read a second very curious lecture about the late comet; among other things proving very probably that this is the very same comet that appeared before in the year 1618, and that in such a time probably it will appear again, which is a very new opinion; but all will be in print." And again on the 8th of August, 1666, I find an entry which is of considerable interest: "Discoursed with Mr. Hooke about the nature of sounds, and he did make me understand the nature of musical sounds made by strings mighty prettily; and told me that having come to a certain number of vibrations proper to make any tone, he is able to tell how many strokes a fly makes with her wings (those flies that hum in their flying) by the note that it answers to in music during their flying. That I suppose is a little too much refined; but his discourse in general of sound was mighty fine."
On the other hand, I scarcely know how I could show the newness of this science thus entering the world, more vividly than by recording two other entries which I find in the midst of these scientific notes. One of these records a charm for a burn, which Pepys thought so useful as to preserve. This is, in case one should be burned, to say immediately the following verse:
"There came three angels out of the East;
One brought fire, the other brought frost—
Out fire, in frost,
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost."
And the other is, under Sept. 29th, 1662, "To the King's Theatre, where we saw 'Midsummer's Night's Dream,' which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life."
Indeed, if you should wish to see how recently we are out of the range of Aristotle, you have only to read the chapter on Human Anatomy, which occurs in the early part of dear old Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Here is an account of the body which makes curious reading for the modern biologist. I give a line here and there. The body is divided into parts containing or contained, and the parts contained are either humors or spirits. Of these humors there are four: to wit, first, blood; next, phlegm; third, choler; and fourth, melancholy; and this is part of the description of each.
"Blood is a hot, sweet, temperate, red humor, ... made of the most temperate parts of the chylus in the liver.... And from it spirits are first begotten in the heart. Phlegm is a cold and moist humor, begotten of the colder part of the chylus in the liver. Choler is hot and dry, begotten of the hotter parts of the chylus. Melancholy, cold and dry, ... is a bridle to the other two hot humors, blood and choler. These four humors have some analogy with the four elements and to the four ages in man." Having disposed thus of humors, we have this account of spirit or the other contained part of the body. "Spirit is a most subtle vapor, which is expressed from the blood, and the instrument of the soul to perform all his actions; a common tie or medium between the body and the soul, as some will have it; or as Paracelsus—a fourth soul of itself." Proceeding to other parts of the body, here are the lungs. "The lungs is a thin spongy part like an ox-hoof.... The instrument of voice; ... and next to the heart to express their thoughts by voice. That it is the instrument of voice is manifest in that no creature can speak ... which wanteth these lights. It is besides the instrument of breathing; and its office is to cool the heart by sending air into it by the venosal artery," &c., &c.
This anatomy of Burton's includes the soul, and here are some particulars of it. "According to Aristotle, the soul is defined to be emtelecheia, ... the perfection or first act of an organical body having power of life.... But many doubts arise about the essence, subject, seat, distinction and subordinate faculties of it.... Some make one soul; ... others, three.... The common division of the soul is into three principal faculties—vegetal, sensible and rational." The soul of man includes all three; for the "sensible includes vegetal and rational both; which are contained in it (saith Aristotle) ut trigonus in tetragono, as a triangle in a quadrangle.... Paracelsus will have four souls, adding to the three grand faculties a spiritual soul: which opinion of his Campanella in his book De Sensu Rerum much labors to demonstrate and prove, because carcases bleed at the sight of the murderer; with many such arguments." These are not the wanderings of ignorance; they represent the whole of human knowledge, and are an epitome made up from Aristotle, Galen, Vesalius, Fallopius, Wecker, Melancthon, Feruclius, Cicero, Pico Mirandola, Paracelsus, Campanella, Taurellus, Philip, Flavius, Macrobius, Alhazen the Arabian, Vittellio, Roger Bacon, Baptista Porta, Cardan, Sambucus, Pliny, Avicenna, Lucretius, and such another list as makes one weary with the very names of authorities.
These details of antique science brought face to face with the weighing of air at Gresham College, and with Sir Isaac Newton, represent with sufficient sharpness the change from the old reign of enmity between Nature and man, from the stern ideal of justice to the later reign of love which embraces in one direction, God, in another, fellow-man, in another, physical nature.
Now, in these same sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which we have seen science recovering itself after having been so long tongue-tied by authority, a remarkably similar process goes on in the art of music. If, as we did in considering the progress of science, we now place ourselves at a standpoint from which we can precisely estimate that extension of man's personal relation towards the unknown during these centuries, which resulted in modern music, we are met with a chain of strikingly similar facts and causes. The Greek music quite parallels Greek physical science. We have seen how, in the latter, a Greek philosopher would start off with a well-sounding proposition that all things originated in moisture, or in fire, or in air, and we have seen how, instead of attacking moisture, fire and air, and of observing and classifying all the physical facts connected with them, the philosopher after awhile presents us with an amazing superstructure of pure speculation wholly disconnected from facts of any kind, physical or otherwise. Greek music offers us precisely the same net outcome. It was enthusiastically studied, there were multitudes of performers upon the lyre, the flute, and so on, it was a part of common education, and the loftiest souls exerted their loftiest powers in theorizing upon it. For example, in Plato's Republic, Socrates earnestly condemns every innovation upon music. His words are: "For any musical innovation is full of danger to the State.... Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him ... that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them;" ... (therefore) "our guardians must lay the foundations of their fortress in music." Again, in Book III., during a discussion as to the kind of music to be permitted in our Republic, we have this kind of talk. Socrates asks: "Which are the harmonies expressive of sorrow?" It is replied, they are "the mixed Lydian and the full-toned or bass Lydian."
"These must be banished.... Which are the soft or drinking harmonies?"
"The Ionian and the Lydian."
These, it appears, must also be banished.
"Then the Dorian and the Phrygian appear to be the only ones which remain."
Socrates "answered; of the harmonies I know nothing; but I want to have one warlike which will sound the word or note which a brave man utters in the hour of danger or stern resolve, or when his cause is failing ... (and he) meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and another to be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action.... These two harmonies I ask you to leave: the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom, the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the strain of courage and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave."
Simmias draws a charming analogy in the Phædo between the relation of a beautiful and divine harmony to the lyre and that of the soul to the body; Pythagoras dreams upon the music of the spheres; everywhere the Greek is occupied with music, practical and theoretical. I find a lively picture of the times where in Book VII. of the Republic, Socrates describes the activity of the musical searchers: "By heaven," he says, "'tis as good as a play to hear them talking about their condensed notes, as they call them; they put their ears alongside of their neighbors.... one set of them declaring that they catch an intermediate note and have found the least interval which should be the unit of measurement; the others maintaining the opposite theory, that the two sounds have passed into the same, each party setting their ears before their understanding."
And in this last clause we have a perfectly explicit statement of that lack of personal relation to facts which makes Greek music as meagre as Greek science. We found it the common fault of Greek scientific thought that it took more satisfaction in an ingenious argument upon a pseudo-fact than in a solid conclusion based upon plain observation and reasoning. So here, Socrates is satirizing even the poor attempt at observation made by these people, and sardonically accuses them of what is the very pride of modern science—namely, of setting their ears before their understanding,—that is, of rigorously observing the facts before reasoning upon them.
At any rate, in spite of all this beautiful and comprehensive talk of harmony and the like, the fact is clear, that the Greek had no harmony worth the name; he knew nothing but the crude concords of the octave, the fourth and the fifth; moreover, his melody was equally meagre; and altogether his ultimate flight in music was where voices of men and women sang, accompanied in unison or octave by the lyre, the flute and the like.
And if we consider the state of music after the passing away of the Greek cultus up to the fifteenth century, we have much the same story to tell as was just now told of mediæval science. For a time the world's stock of tunes is practically comprised in the melodies collected by Gregory, known as the Gregorian Chant. Presently the system of polyphonic music arises, in which several voices sing different melodies so arranged as not to jar with each other. But when we now come down to the sixteenth century, we find a wonderful new activity in music accompanying that in science. Luther in Germany, Gondimel in France, push forward the song: in Spain, Salinas of Salamanca, studies ancient music for thirty years, and finally arrives at the conclusion that the Greek had no instrumental music, and that all their melody was originally derived from the order of syllables in verse. In Italy, Montaverde announces what were called his "new discords," and the beautiful maestro, Palestrina, writes compositions in several parts, which are at once noble, simple and devout. England at this time is filled with music; and by the end of the sixteenth century the whole land is a-warble with the madrigals and part-compositions of Weelkes, Wilbye, John Milton, Sr., and the famous Dr. John Bull, together with those of Tye, Tallis, Morley, Orlando Gibbons, and hundreds more. But as yet modern music is not. There is no orchestra; Queen Elizabeth's dinner-music is mainly drums and trumpets. It is not until the middle of the seventeenth century that Jenkins and Purcell begin to write sonatas for a small number of violins with organ accompaniment.
A curious note of the tendency towards instrumental music at this time, however, is found in the fact that people begin to care so little for the words of songs as to prefer them in a foreign language. Henry Lawes, one of the most famous musicians of the middle of the seventeenth century, he who suggested Milton's Comus and set it to music, endeavored to rebuke this affectation, as he supposed it, by a cruel joke: he wrote a song, of which the words were nothing more than the index of an old volume of musical compositions, and had it sung amidst great applause. It must have been in the same course of feeling that Waller—several of whose poems had been set to music by Lawes—addressed to him the following stanza:
"Let those who only warble long,
And gargle in their throat a song,
Content themselves with do, re, mi;
Let words of sense be set by thee."
And so through Allegri, Stradella, the Scarlattis and a thousand singers, players and composers we come to the year 1685 in which both Bach and Handel were born. Here we are fairly in the face of modern music. What then is modern music? Music at this time bounds forward in the joy of an infinitely developable principle. What is this principle? In its last analysis it is what has now come to be called Harmony, or more specially Tonality. According to the modern musical feeling when any tone is heard it is heard in its relation to some other tone which from one circumstance or another may have been taken as a basis of such relations. By a long course of putting our ears before our understanding,—a course carried on by all those early musicians whose names I have mentioned, each contributing some new relation between tones which his ear had discovered, we have finally been able to generalize these relations in such a way as to make a complete system of tonality in which every possible tone brings to our ear an impression dependent on the tone or tones in connection with which it is heard. As the Pupil at Sais ere long began to see nothing alone, so we hear nothing alone. You have only to remember that the singer now-a-days must always have the piano accompaniment in order to satisfy our demand for harmony, that we never hear any unmixed melody in set music, in order to see how completely harmony reigns in our music, instead of bare melody. We may then broadly differentiate the modern music which begins at the same time with modern science, from all precedent music, as Harmony contrasted with Melody. To this we must add the idea of instrumental harmony, of that vast extension of harmonies rendered possible by the great development of orchestral instruments whose compass greatly exceeds that of the human voice, which formerly limited all musical energy.
It is tempting, here, to push the theory of personality into fanciful extremes. You have seen how the long development of melody—melody being here the individual—receives a great extension in the polyphonic music, when individual melodies move along side by side without jostling: and how at length the whole suddenly bursts into the highest type of social development, where the melody is at once united with the harmony in the most intimate way, yet never loses its individuality; where the melody would seem to maintain towards the harmony almost the ideal relation of our finite personality, to the Infinite personality; at once autonomous as finite, and yet contained in, and rapturously united with the infinite.
But without pressing the matter, it now seems clear from our sketch that just as in the 17th century the spirit of man has opened up for the first time a perfectly clear and personal relation with physical nature and has thus achieved modern science with Sir Isaac Newton, so in this 17th century, the spirit of man opens up a new relation to the infinite, to the unknown, and achieves modern music in John Sebastian Bach.
Nor need I waste time in defending this category in which I placed music, as a relation to the Unknown. If you collect all the expressions of poets and philosophers upon music, you will find them converging upon this idea. No one will think Thomas Carlyle sentimental; yet it is he who says "music which leads us to the verge of the infinite, and lets us gaze on that."
And so finally, with the first English novel of Richardson in 1739-40, we have completed our glance at the simultaneous birth of modern science, modern music, and the modern novel.
And we are now prepared to carry forward our third and fourth lines of thought together: which were to show the development of the novel from the Greek Drama, and to illustrate the whole of the principles now advanced, with some special studies of the modern novel. These two lines will mutually support each other, and will emerge concurrently, as we now go on to study the life and works of that George Eliot, who has so recently solved the scientific problem which made her life one of the most pathetic and instructive in human history.