"CLEON" is a protest against the inadequacy of the earthly life; and the writer is supposed to be one of those Greek poets or thinkers to whom St. Paul alludes, in a line quoted from Aratus in the Acts, and which stands at the head of the poem. Cleon believes in Zeus under the attributes of the one God; but he sees nothing in his belief to warrant the hope of immortality; and his love of life is so intense and so untiring that this fact is very grievous to him.
He is stating his case to an imaginary king—Protus—his patron and friend; whose convictions are much the same as his own, but who thinks him in some degree removed from the common lot: since his achievements in philosophy and in art must procure him not only a more perfect existence, but in one sense a more lasting one. Cleon protests against this idea.
"He has," he admits, "done all which the King imputes to him. If he has not been a Homer, a Pheidias, or a Terpander, his creative sympathies have united all three; and in thus passing from the simple to the complex, he has obeyed the law of progress, though at the risk perhaps of appearing a smaller man."
"But his life has not been the more perfect on that account. Perfection exists only in those more mechanical grades of being, in which joy is unconscious, but also self-sufficing. To grow in consciousness is to grow in the capability and in the desire for joy; to decline rather than advance, in the physical power of attaining it. Man's soul expands; his 'physical recipiency' remains for ever bounded."
"Nor are his works a source of life to him either now or for the future. The conception of youth and strength and wisdom is not its reality: the knowing (and depicting) what joy is, is not the possession of it. And the surviving of his work, when he himself is dead, is but a mockery the more."
It is all so horrible that he sometimes imagines another life, as unlimited in capability, as this in the desire, for joy, and dreams that Zeus has revealed it. "But he has not revealed it, and therefore it will not be." St. Paul is preaching at this very time, and Protus sends a letter to be forwarded to him; but Cleon does not admit that knowledge can reside in a "barbarian Jew;" and gently rebukes his royal friend for inclining to such doctrine, which, as he has gathered from one who heard it, "can be held by no sane man."
Cleon constantly uses the word soul as antithesis to body: but he uses it in its ancient rather than its modern sense, as expressing the sentient life, not the spiritual; and this perhaps explains the anomaly of his believing that it is independent of the lower physical powers, and yet not destined to survive them.
The EPISTLE of Karshish is addressed to a certain Abib, the writer's master in the science of medicine. It is written from Bethany; and the "strange medical experience" of which it treats, is the case of Lazarus, whom Karshish has seen there. Lazarus, as he relates, has been the subject of a prolonged epileptic trance, and his reason impaired by a too sudden awakening from it. He labours under the fixed idea that he was raised from the dead; and that the Nazarene physician at whose command he rose (and who has since perished in a popular tumult) was no other than God: who for love's sake had taken human form, and worked and died for men. Karshish regards the madness of this idea as beyond rational doubt: but he is perplexed and haunted by its consistency: by the manner in which this supposed vision of the Heavenly life has transformed, even inverted the man's judgment of earthly things. He combats the impression as best he can: recounts his scientific discoveries—the new plants, minerals, sicknesses, or cures to which his travels in Judea have introduced him; half apologizes for his digression from these more important matters; tries to excuse the hold which Lazarus has taken upon him by the circumstances in which they met; and breaks out at last in this agitated appeal to Abib and the truth:—
"The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too—