"This is what another disciple of mine in Paris (a man called Anatole, and misnamed France), did do in an even worse case. In Anatole's story, the husband arrives in the most inopportune moment that a forgetful wife can dread. He looks at the scene with much self-control, takes up the Petit Parisien lying on the floor, and withdraws gracefully into another room, there to make sundry reflections on the Petit Parisien and on the 'Petite Parisienne.'
"How classically Cynical! How Bion, Metrocles, Menippus, and all the rest of our sect would have enjoyed that! Here is a true comedy! Here is something truly realistic, and realistically true. That's why Anatole is so much admired by Englishmen. He too is, as we Cynics have been called, a philosopher of the proletariate.
"Much, O Zeus, as I enjoy the honour and pleasure of being allowed to crouch on one of the steps of your divine halls, I do also keenly appreciate the pleasure of meeting my disciples of the hour. One of these next days I will ask Momus to invite Tolstoy, Ibsen, Shaw, Anatole, and a few others to a lunch, to meet me in a Swiss hotel. Plato, you better come and listen behind a screen. You might perhaps improve upon your Gorgias in which dialogue you attempt to sketch the superman and super-cynic. Ibsen will stammer and jerk his best in deathly hatred of all Authority. Shaw will pinprick to death the foundations of Marriage and Family. Anatole will try to upset, by throwing little mud-pellets at them, ideal figures such as Joan of Arc" (—Diogenes had barely uttered this name, when Zeus and all the other gods rose from their seats, and bowed towards Pallas Athene, who held Joan in her holy arms—). "Tolstoy, with a penny trumpet in his toothless mouth, will bray against war; Oh, it will be glorious.
"Of course, by this time I know very well that the controlling principle of all mundane and supramundane things is Authority. As we here all bow to Zeus, so mortals must always bow to some authority. Nothing more evident can be imagined nor shown. It is the broadest result of all history, of all experience. Just because this is so, and unmistakably so, my disciples must naturally say the reverse. They do not look at facts by a microscope or a telescope; they telescope train-loads of facts into a mass of pulverised debris.
"Instead of saying that in England, through her social caste system, there are many, too many, parvenus or tactless upstarts, my disciples must say: 'The greatness of England is owing to her tactlessness.' This is the real merchandise which I sold at Corinth over two thousand years ago.
"Tolstoy thunders against War. I wonder he does not thunder against mothers' breasts feeding their babies. Why, War made everything that is worth having. First of all, it made Peace. Without war there is no peace; there is only stagnation. The greater the ideal, the greater the price we have to pay for it. And since we always crave for the sublime ideals of Liberty, Honour, Wealth, Power, Beauty, and Knowledge, we must necessarily pay the highest price for it—ourselves, our lives in war. There is no Dante without the terrible wars of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. There could have been no ideal superman like Raphael without the counter-superman called Cesare Borgia. It is only your abominable Philistine who squeaks: 'Oh, we might have many a nice slice from the ham of Ideals without paying too dearly for it.' What do you think of that, Hercules? Did you win Hebe by avoiding conflicts and disasters?"
Hercules groaned deeply and looked first at his battered club and then at charming Hebe. The gods laughed aloud and Apollo, taking up his lyre, intoned a grand old Doric song in praise of the heroes of war who, by their valour, had prepared the palæstra for the heroes of thought and beauty. He was soon joined by a thousand harmonious voices from the temple of Isis, and from his own majestic sanctuary at Pompeii. Vesuvius counterpointed the lithe song with his deep bass; and, with Dionysus at the head of them, Pan and the nymphs came wafting through the air, strewing buds of melodies on to the Olympian wreaths of tones sung by Phœbus Apollo in praise of War.
When the song had subsided, Zeus, in a voice full of serenity and benign music, addressed the gods and heroes as follows: "We are very much beholden to Diogenes for his bright and amusing story of the Cynical ants that at present run about the woods and cottages of men, biting each other and their friends. Their epigrams and other eccentric utterances can affect none of us here assembled. You very well know that I have not allowed Apollo, or Reason to reign alone and unaided by Unreason, or Dionysus. The Cynical critics of men want to bring about the Age of Reason, or as these presumptuous half-knowers call it, the Age of Science. This, I have long since laid down, shall never be.