by Walter Pater
“We proposed then just now,” says Socrates in the Phaedrus, “to consider the theory of the way in which one would or would not write or speak well.”— “Certainly!”— “Well then, must there not be in those who are to speak meritoriously, an understanding well acquainted with the truth of the things they are to speak about?”— “Nay!” answers Phaedrus, in that age of sophistry, “It is in this way I have heard about it: — that it is not necessary for one who would be a master of rhetoric to learn what really is just, for instance; but rather what seems just to the multitude who are to give judgment: nor again what is good or beautiful; but only what seems so to them. For persuasion comes of the latter; by no means of a hold upon the truth of things.”
Whether or not the Sophists were quite fairly chargeable with that sort of “inward lie,” just this, at all events, was in the judgment of Plato the essence of sophistic vice. With them art began too precipitately, as mere form without matter; a thing of disconnected empiric rules, caught from the mere surface of other people’s productions, in congruity with a general method which everywhere ruthlessly severed branch and flower from its natural root — art from one’s own vivid sensation or belief. The Lacedaemonian (ho Lakôn)+ Plato’s favourite scholar always, as having that infinite patience which is the note of a sincere, a really impassioned lover of anything, says, in his convinced Lacedaemonian way, that a genuine art of speech (tou legein etumos technę)+ unless one be in contact with truth, there neither is nor can be. We are reminded of that difference between genuine memory, and mere haphazard recollection, noted by Plato in the story he tells so well of the invention of writing in ancient Egypt. — It might be doubted, he thinks, whether genuine memory was encouraged by that invention. The note on the margin by the inattentive reader to “remind himself,” is, as we know, often his final good-bye to what it should remind him of. Now this is true of all art: Logôn ara technęn, ho tęn alętheian mę eidôs, doxas te tethęreukôs, geloion tina kai atexnon parexetai.+ — It is but a kind of bastard art of mere words (texnę atexnos)+ that he will have who does not know the truth of things, but has tried to hunt out what other people think about it. “Conception,” observed an intensely personal, deeply stirred, poet and artist of our own generation: “Conception, fundamental brainwork,- -that is what makes the difference, in all art.”
Against all pretended, mechanically communicable rules of art then, against any rule of literary composition, for instance, unsanctioned by the facts, by a clear apprehension of the facts, of that experience, which to each one of us severally is the beginning, if it be not also the end, of all knowledge, against every merely formal dictate (their name is legion with practising Sophists of all ages) Peri brachylogias, kai eleeinologias, kai deinôseôs,+ concerning freedom or precision, figure, emphasis, proportion of parts and the like, exordium and conclusion: — against all such the Platonic Socrates still protests, “You know what must be known before harmony can be attained, but not yet the laws of harmony itself,” — ta pro tragôdias,+ Sophocles would object in like case, ta pro tragôdias, all’ ou tragika.+ Given the dynamic Sophoclean intention or conviction, and the irresistible law of right utterance, (anankę logographikę)+ how one must write or speak, will make itself felt; will assuredly also renew many an old precept, as to how one shall write or speak, learned at school. To speak pros doxan+ only, as towards mere unreasoned opinion, might do well enough in the law-courts with people, who (as is understood in that case) do not really care very much about justice itself, desire only that a friend should be acquitted, or an enemy convicted, irrespectively of it; but
For the essence of all artistic beauty is expression, which cannot be where there’s really nothing to be expressed; the line, the colour, the word, following obediently, and with minute scruple, the conscious motions of a convinced intelligible soul. To make men interested in themselves, as being the very ground of all reality for them, la vraie vérité, as the French say: — that was the essential function of the Socratic method: to flash light into the house within, its many chambers, its memories and associations, upon its inscribed and pictured walls. Fully occupied there, as with his own essential business in his own home, the young man would become, of course, proportionately less interested, less meanly interested, in what was superficial, in the mere outsides, of other people and their occupations. With the true artist indeed, with almost every expert, all knowledge, of almost every kind, tells, is attracted into, and duly charged with, the force of what may be his leading apprehension. And as the special function of all speech as a fine art is the control of minds (psychagôgia)+ it is in general with knowledge of the soul of man — with a veritable psychology, with as much as possible as we can get of that — that the writer, the speaker, must be chiefly concerned, if he is to handle minds not by mere empiric routine, tribę monon, kai empeiria alla technę,+ but by the power of veritable fine art. Now such art, such theory, is not “to be caught with the left hand,” as the Greek phrase went; and again, chalepa ta kala.+ We have no time to hear in English Plato’s clever specimens of the way in which people would write about love without success. Let us rather hear himself on that subject, in his own characteristic mood of conviction. —
Try! she said (a certain Sibylline woman namely, from whose lips Socrates in the Symposium is supposed to quote what follows) Try to apply your mind as closely as possible to what I am going to say. For he who has been led thus far in the discipline of love, beholding beautiful objects in the right order, coming now towards the end of the doctrine of love, will on a sudden behold a beauty wonderful in its nature: — that, Socrates! towards which indeed the former exercises were all designed; being first of all ever existent; having neither beginning nor end; neither growing or fading away; and then, not beautiful in one way, unbeautiful in another; beautiful now, but not then; beautiful in this relation, unlovely in that; to some, but not to others. Nor again will that beauty appear to him to be beautiful as a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body; nor as any kind of reasoning or science; nor as being resident in anything else, as in a living creature or the earth or the sky or any other thing; but as being itself by itself, ever in a single form with itself; all other beautiful things so participating in it, that while they begin and cease to be, that neither becomes more nor less nor suffers any other change. Whenever, then, anyone, beginning from things here below, through a right practice of love, ascending, begins to discern that other beauty, he will almost have reached the end. For this in truth is the right method of proceeding towards the doctrine of love, or of being conducted therein by another, — beginning from these beautiful objects here below ever to be going up higher, with that other beauty in view; using them as steps of a ladder; mounting from the love of one fair person to the love of two; and from the love of two to the love of all; and from the love of beautiful persons to the love of beautiful employments — kala epitędeumata+ (that means being a soldier, or a priest, or a scholar) and from the love of beautiful employments to the love of beautiful kinds of knowledge; till he passes from degrees of knowledge to that knowledge which is the knowledge of nothing else save the absolute Beauty itself, and knows it at length as in itself it really is. At this moment of life, dear Socrates! said the Mantinean Sibyl, if at any moment, man truly lives, beholding the absolute beauty — the which, so you have once seen it, will appear beyond the comparison of gold, or raiment, or those beautiful young persons, seeing whom now, like many another, you are so overcome that you are ready, beholding those beautiful persons and associating ever with them, if it were possible, neither to eat nor drink but only to look into their eyes and sit beside them. What then, she asked, suppose we? if it were given to any one to behold the absolute beauty, in its clearness, its pureness, its unmixed essence; not replete with flesh and blood and colours and other manifold vanity of this mortal life; but if he were able to behold that divine beauty (monoeides)+ simply as it is. Do you think, she said, that life would be a poor thing to one whose eyes we
re fixed on that; seeing that, (hô dei)+ with the organ through which it must be seen, and communing with that? Do you not think rather, she asked, that here alone it will be his, seeing the beautiful with that through which it may be seen (namely with the imaginative reason, ho nous+) to beget no mere phantasms of virtue, as it is no phantom he apprehends, but the true virtue, as he embraces what is true? And having begotten virtue (virtue is the child that will be born of this mystic intellectual commerce, or connubium, of the imaginative reason with ideal beauty) and reared it, he will become dear to God, and if any man may be immortal he will be. Symposium, 210.+
The essential vice of sophistry, as Plato conceived it, was that for it no real things existed. Real things did exist for Plato, things that were “an end in themselves”; and the Platonic Socrates was right: — Plato has written so well there, because he was no scholar of the Sophists as he understood them, but is writing of what he really knows.
NOTES
99. +Transliteration: sophistai. Liddell and Scott definition: “at Athens, one who professed to make men wise.”
102. +Transliteration: pleista eidę. Pater’s translation: “the greatest possible variety.” Pater refers to the Funeral Oration given by Pericles to commemorate the Athenians who, to date, had died in the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.41.1.
107. +Plato, Republic 492.
109. +Transliteration: peithous didaskaloi. Pater’s translation: “teachers of persuasion.” Plato, Republic 365d.
109. +Transliteration: dęmos. Liddell and Scott definition: “the common people.”
110. +Plato, Republic 496.
111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater’s translation: “The doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein.” The translation elaborates on the original, but captures its meaning accurately. Plato, Republic 433a-b.
111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater’s translation: “The doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein.” Plato, Republic 433a-b.
112. +Transliteration: sophos gar kai theios anęr. E-text editor’s translation: “for he was a wise and excellent man.” Plato, Republic 331e.
112. +Transliteration: alla ti poiousa. Pater’s translation: “but, by doing what. . .” Plato, Republic 367b.
112. +Transliteration: hautę di’ hautęn. Pater’s translation: “in and by itself.” Plato, Republic 367e.
113. +Transliteration: to ta opheilomena apodidonai. Pater’s translation: “to restore what one owes.” Plato, Republic 331e and 332a.
118. +Transliteration: ho Lakôn. Liddell and Scott definition: “The Lacedaemonian [i.e., Spartan].”
118. +Transliteration: tou legein etumos technę. Pater’s translation: “a genuine art of speech.” Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
118. +Transliteration: Logôn ara technęn, ho tęn alętheian mę eidôs, doxas te tethęreukôs, geloion tina kai atexnon parexetai. E-text editor’s translation: “In the art of speaking, therefore, the person who does not know the truth, who has sought out only the opinions of others, will come by nothing better than a kind of unskilled jesting.” Plato, Phaedrus 262c.
118. +Transliteration: texnę atexnos. Pater’s translation: “[a] bastard art of mere words.” Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
119. +Transliteration: Peri brachylogias, kai eleeinologias, kai deinôseôs. E-text editor’s translation: “Concerning brevity, and speech that moves to pity, and exaggeration. . .” Plato, Phaedrus 272a.
119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragôdias. E-text editor’s translation: “the things before tragedy.” Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragôdias, all’ ou tragika. E-text editor’s translation: “the things before tragedy, but not tragedy itself.” Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
119. +Transliteration: anankę logographikę. E-text editor’s translation: “[the manner] required [in] prose-writing or speech- making.” Plato, Phaedrus 264b contains similar language.
119. +Transliteration: pros doxan. E-text editor’s translation: “in accordance with received opinion.” Plato, Republic 362a, among other passages.
121. +Transliteration: psychagôgia. Pater’s translation: “the control of minds.” The verb agô means “lead or drive.” Plato, Phaedrus 261a and 271c.
121. +Transliteration: tribę monon, kai empeiria alla technę. Pater’s translation: “[not] by mere empiric routine, but by the power of veritable fine art.” Plato, Phaedrus 270b.
121. +Transliteration: chalepa ta kala. E-text editor’s translation: “fine things are hard [to obtain].” Plato, Republic 435c.
122. +Transliteration: kala epitędeumata. Pater’s translation: “beautiful employments.” Plato, Symposium 211c.
122. +Transliteration: monoeides. E-text editor’s translation: “of one kind, simple.” Plato, Symposium 211a and 211e.
122. +Transliteration: hô dei. E-text editor’s translation: “with what is necessary.” Plato, Symposium 212a.
122. +Transliteration: ho nous. Pater’s translation: “imaginative reason.” The word nous or noos generally means “mind.” Plato, Symposium 210-212.
123. +The passage Pater cites — Diotima’s speech about love — runs from 210-212a of the Symposium.
THE GENIUS OF PLATO
ALL true criticism of philosophic doctrine, as of every other product of human mind, must begin with an historic estimate of the conditions, antecedent and contemporary, which helped to make it precisely what it was. But a complete criticism does not end there. In the evolution of abstract doctrine as we find it written in the history of philosophy, if there is always, on one side, the fatal, irresistible, mechanic play of circumstance — the circumstances of a particular age, which may be analysed and explained; there is always also, as if acting from the opposite side, the comparatively inexplicable force of a personality, resistant to, while it is moulded by, them. It might even be said that the trial-task of criticism, in regard to literature and art no less than to philosophy, begins exactly where the estimate of general conditions, of the conditions common to all the products of this or that particular age — of the “environment” — leaves off, and we touch what is unique in the individual genius which contrived after all, by force of will, to have its own masterful way with that environment. If in reading Plato, for instance, the philosophic student has to re-construct for himself, as far as possible, the general character of an age, he must also, so far as he may, reproduce the portrait of a person. The Sophists, the Sophistical world, around him; his master, Socrates; the Pre-Socratic philosophies; the mechanic influence, that is to say, of past and present: — of course we can know nothing at all of the Platonic doctrine except so far as we see it in well-ascertained contact with all that; but there is also Plato himself in it.
— A personality, we may notice at the outset, of a certain complication. The great masters of philosophy have been for the most part its noticeably single-minded servants. As if in emulation of Aristotle’s simplicity of character, his absorbing intellectualism — impressive certainly, heroic enough, in its way — they have served science, science in vacuo, as if nothing beside, faith, imagination, love, the bodily sense, could detach them from it for an hour. It is not merely that we know little of their lives (there was so little to tell!) but that we know nothing at all of their temperaments; of which, that one leading abstract or scientific force in them was in fact strictly exclusive. Little more than intellectual abstractions themselves, in them philosophy was wholly faithful to its colours, or its colourlessness; rendering not grey only, as Hegel said of it, but all colours alike, in grey.
With Plato it was otherwise. In him, the passion for truth did but bend, or take the bent of, certain ineradicable predispositions of his nature, in themselves perhaps somewhat opposed to that. It is however in the blending of diverse elements in the mental constitution of Plato that the peculiar Platonic quality resides. Platonism is in one sense an emphatic witness to the unseen, the transcendental, the non- experienced, the
beauty, for instance, which is not for the bodily eye. Yet the author of this philosophy of the unseen was, — Who can doubt it who has read but a page of him? this, in fact, is what has led and kept to his pages many who have little or no turn for the sort of questions Plato actually discusses: — The author of this philosophy of the unseen was one, for whom, as was said of a very different French writer, “the visible world really existed.” Austere as he seems, and on well- considered principle really is, his temperance or austerity, aesthetically so winning, is attained only by the chastisement, the control, of a variously interested, a richly sensuous nature. Yes, the visible world, so pre-eminently worth eye-sight at Athens just then, really existed for him: exists still — there’s the point! — is active still everywhere, when he seems to have turned away from it to invisible things.
To the somewhat sad-coloured school of Socrates, and its discipline towards apathy or contempt in such matters, he had brought capacities of bodily sense with the making in them of an Odyssey; or (shall we say?) of a poet after the order of Sappho or Catullus; as indeed also a practical intelligence, a popular management of his own powers, a skill in philosophic yet mundane Greek prose, which might have constituted him the most successful of Sophists. You cannot help seeing that his mind is a storehouse of all the liveliest imageries of men and things. Nothing, if it really arrests eye or ear at all, is too trivial to note. Passing through the crowd of human beings, he notes the sounds alike of their solemn hymns and of their pettiest handicraft. A conventional philosopher might speak of “dumb matter,” for instance; but Plato has lingered too long in braziers’ workshops to lapse into so stupid an epithet. And if the persistent hold of sensible things upon him thus reveals itself in trifles, it is manifest no less in the way in which he can tell a long story, — no one more effectively! and again, in his graphic presentment of whole scenes from actual life, like that with which The Republic opens. His Socrates, like other people, is curious to witness a new religious function: how they will do it. As in modern times, it would be a pleasant occasion also for meeting the acquaintance one likes best — Synesometha pollois tôn neôn autothi.+ “We shall meet a number of our youth there: we shall have a dialogue: there will be a torchlight procession in honour of the goddess, an equestrian procession: a novel feature! — What? Torches in their hands, passed on as they race? Aye, and an illumination, through the entire night. It will be worth seeing!” — that old midnight hour, as Carlyle says of another vivid scene, “shining yet on us, ruddy-bright through the centuries.” Put alongside of that, and, for life-like charm, side by side with Murillo’s Beggar- boys (you catch them, if you look at his canvas on the sudden, actually moving their mouths, to laugh and speak and munch their crusts, all at once) the scene in the Lysis of the dice-players. There the boys are! in full dress, to take part in a religious ceremony. It is scarcely over; but they are already busy with the knuckle-bones, some just outside the door, others in a corner. Though Plato never tells one without due motive, yet he loves a story for its own sake, can make one of fact or fancy at a moment’s notice, or re-tell other people’s better: how those dear skinny grasshoppers of Attica, for instance, had once been human creatures, who, when the Muses first came on earth, were so absorbed by their music that they forgot even to eat and drink, till they died of it. And then the story of Gyges in The Republic, and the ring that can make its wearer invisible: — it goes as easily, as the ring itself round the finger.