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."