Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown,
he seems to shed upon things a light brought from that haunted world. There is more colour in Keats than in Shelley, but there is more light in Shelley than in Keats. Did he not speak of the poet as “hidden in the light of thought”? His radiance is different in kind from that of any other poet. For it is the radiance of a world in which things are not made of substances but of dreams—a world in which we walk over rainbows instead of bridges and ride not upon horses but upon clouds.
IX
PLUTARCH’S ANECDOTES
Anecdotes, like most other forms of literary entertainment, have been spoken ill of by grave persons, but seldom by the wise. “How superficial,” wrote Isaac Disraeli, “is that cry of some impertinent pretended geniuses of these times who affect to exclaim, ‘Give me no anecdotes of an author, but give me his works!’ I have often found the anecdotes more interesting than the works.” And he pointed out that “Dr. Johnson devoted one of his periodical papers to a defence of anecdotes.” The defence was hardly needed. The imagination of mankind has by universal consent paid honour to the anecdote, and Montaigne is supreme among essayists, and Plutarch among biographers, by virtue of anecdotes as well as of wisdom. Plutarch himself has given the anecdote its just praise in the opening paragraph of his life of Alexander, when he explains: “It is not Histories I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice—nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fell, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.” Hence the general appetite for trifling facts about great men is not a mere vice of gossips. It may help to preserve a detail which will give a later man of genius a clue to a character—the character of a man or the character of a book. The theory that we can criticise a poet more profoundly by leaving aside the ordinary facts of his life as though he had never existed in the flesh is an absurd piece of pedantry. The life of Shelley throws a flood of light on the poetry of Shelley. It contains in itself a profound criticism of the genius of Shelley—a genius that was of the air rather than of the earth—a genius at once noble and incongruous with the world in which men live.
Writers, however, may make a dozen different uses of anecdotes. The anecdote may be anything from a jest to an awakening touch of portraiture, and from that to a fable that reveals a piece of new or old truth to the imagination. It is not open to dispute that the great writers of anecdotes are not those who believe in anecdotes for anecdotes’ sake. They are those who everywhere see signs and connections, and for whom an anecdote is a pattern in little suggesting a pattern of life itself. Plutarch speaks of himself as looking for “the signs of the soul in men,” and the phrase gives some notion of the moral and spiritual pattern into which his anecdotes are woven.
I doubt if a more virtuous imagination ever applied itself to literature. Plutarch’s unending quest was virtue, and no illustrious man ever sat to him for a portrait without discovering to him virtues that he would never have revealed to a scandalmonger such as Suetonius. It was as though moral dignity were the chief of the colours on Plutarch’s palette. He was fond of contrasting his heroes with one another, but, even when he took for heroes men who were mortal enemies, he would penetrate deep into the heart of each in search of some hidden or imprisoned nobleness. He cannot paint an Alcibiades or a Sulla as a model for children, but even in them he seems to perceive and reverence a greatness of spirit in ruins—some brightness of charm or courage beyond the scope of little men. No other writer except Shakespeare has had the same power of setting before the imagination characters that remain noble though undone by great vices. To do this is, to some extent, in the common tradition of tragedy, but there is in Shakespeare and Plutarch a certain sweetness and warmth of understanding—something even more than an enthusiasm for the best in full view and admission of the worst—unlike anything else in literature. It was not an accident that Shakespeare drew so freely and so confidently on Plutarch. The geniuses of the two men were akin.
Plutarch, no doubt, was more consciously ethical than Shakespeare, but he was ethical not after the manner of the narrow propagandist, but after the manner of the imaginative artist. He does not write of model characters. He knows that there are no perfect human beings. He recognises the goodness in bad men, and the badness in good men. No biographer has been more keenly aware of the corruptibility of human nature. Hence the characters in his Lives are real men, with not a fault (and hardly the rumour of a fault) hidden. He will not bear false witness for the sake of making great men appear better than they are. He achieves the difficult feat of praising virtue without either canting or lying. He is not afraid to hold the mirror up to nature and to show us virtue fighting a doubtful battle in a corrupt and tragic scene. He does not believe that the virtuous man is necessarily secure either from corruption or defeat, but he believes that virtue itself is secure from defeat. His recurrent theme is the Christian theme: “Fear not them that kill the body.” He is the painter, not only of illustrious lives, but of illustrious deaths. He feels a spectator’s elation as he watches a noble fifth act. He obtains from the spectacle of virtue impavid amid the ruins an æsthetic as well as an ethical pleasure. If any man wishes to make a study of the æsthetics of virtue, he will find abundant material in Plutarch. Plutarch writes of the tragic hero as of a man playing a fine part finely. He delights in the moving speeches, in the very gestures. He makes us conscious of a rhythm of nobleness running through human life, as when he describes the conduct of the Spartan women who fled with Cleomenes (the quasi-Socialist king) to Egypt, and who were murdered by their cruel hosts. He first wins our sympathies for the wife of Panteus, “most noble and beautiful to look upon,” and tells us how she was but lately married to Panteus, so that “their misfortunes came to them in the heyday of their love.” He then describes how this great lady behaved when she was overtaken by death in company with the mother and children of the king:
She it was who now took the hand of Cratesicleia as she was led forth by the soldiers, held up her robe for her, and bade her be of good courage. And Cratesicleia herself was not one whit dismayed at death, but asked one favour only, that she might die before the children died. However, when they were come to the place of execution, first the children were slain before her eyes, and then Cratesicleia herself was slain, making but one cry at sorrows so great: “O children, whither are ye gone?” Then the wife of Panteus, girding up her robe, vigorous and stately woman that she was, ministered to each of the dying women calmly and without a word, and laid them out for burial as well as she could. And, finally, after all were cared for, she arrayed herself, let down her robe from about her neck, and suffering no one besides the executioner to come near or look on her, bravely met her end, and had no need of any one to array or cover up her body after death. Thus her decorum of spirit attended her in death, and she maintained to the end that watchful care of her body which she had set over it in life.
That “decorum of spirit” is, for Plutarch, the finishing grace of the noble life. And he summarises his creed in the triumphant comment on the Spartan women: “So then, Sparta, bringing her women’s tragedy into emulous competition with that of her men, showed the world that in the last extremity Virtue cannot be outraged by Fortune.”
Catholic though Plutarch is, however, in his appreciation of virtue, and gently though he scans his brother man—does he not forgive the baseness of Aratus in the sentence: “I write this, however, not with any desire to denounce Aratus, for in many ways he was a true Greek and a great one, but out of pity for the weakness of human nature, which, even in characters so notably disposed towards excellence, cannot produce a nobility that is free from blame”?—in spite of this imaginative understanding and sympathy, he has himself a rigid and almost Puritanical standard of virtue. His ideal is an ideal of temperance—of temperance in the pleasures of the body as well as in the love of money and the love of glory. His Alexander the Great is a figure of mixed passions, but he commends him most warmly on those points on which he was temperate, as when the beautiful wife of Dareius and her companions fell into his hands. “But Alexander, as it would seem,” writes Plutarch, “considering the mastery of himself a more kingly thing than the conquest of his enemies, neither laid hands upon these women, nor did he know any other before marriage, except Bersine.” As for the other women, “displaying in rivalry with their fair looks the beauty of his own sobriety and self-control, he passed them by as though they were lifeless images for display.” Again, when Plutarch writes of the Gracchi, he praises them as men who “scorned wealth and were superior to money,” and, if he loves Tiberius the better of the two, it is because he was the more temperate and austere and could never have been charged, as Caius was, with the innocent extravagance of buying silver dolphins at twelve hundred and fifty drachmas the pound. Agis, the youthful king of Sparta, who (though brought up amid luxury) “at once set his face against pleasures” and attempted to banish luxury from the State by restoring equality of possessions, brings together in his person the virtues that inevitably charm Plutarch. Like so many of the old moralists, Plutarch cries out upon riches and pleasures as the great corrupters, and Agis, the censor of these things, comes into a Sparta ruined by gold and silver as a beautiful young redeemer. He dies, a blessed martyr, and his mother, when she stands over his murdered body, kisses his face and cries: “My son, it was thy too great regard for others, and thy gentleness and humanity, which have brought thee to ruin, and us as well.” But, even here, Plutarch does not surrender himself wholly to Agis. He will not admit that Agis, any more than the Gracchi, was a perfect man. “Agis,” he says, “would seem to have taken hold of things with too little spirit.” He “abandoned and left unfinished the designs which he had deliberately formed and announced owing to a lack of courage due to his youth.” Plutarch’s heroes are men in whom a god dwells at strife with a devil—the devil of sin and imperfection. He loves them in their inspired hour: he pities them in the hour of their ruin. Thus he does not love men at the expense of truth, as some preachers do, or tell the truth about men at the expense of love, as some cynics do. His imagination holds the reins both of the heart and of the mind. That is the secret of his genius as a biographer.