VI.

"O, sister, look! white fireHas cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar;How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!"

But even in Shelley's array of these terrors we perceive a cunning outcrop of modernness in a direction which I have not yet mentioned but which we will have frequent occasion to notice when we come to read the modern novel together; and that is in the detail of the description Æschylus paints these conclusions with a big brush, and three sweeps of it; Shelley itemizes them.

It is worth while observing too, that the same spirit of detail in modern criticism forces us to convict Shelley here of an inconsistency in his scene; for how could this "snow-loaded cedar" of Ione exist with propriety in a scene which Prometheus himself has just described as "without herb, insect, or beast, or sound of life?"

The same instinct of modernness both in the spirituality of the torment and in the minuteness of its description displays itself a little farther on in the curse of Prometheus. Prometheus tells us in this same opening speech that long ago he uttered a certain awful curse against Jove which he now desires to recall; but it would seem that in order to recall it he wishes to hear the exact words of it. "What was that curse?"—he exclaims at the end of the speech; "for ye all heard me speak." To this question we have page after page of replies from five voices—namely, the Voice of the Mountains, of the Springs, of the Air, of the Whirlwinds and of the Earth—embodying such a mass of falsetto sublimity that Shelley himself would surely have drawn his pen through the whole, if he had lived into the term of manhood.

Finally the whole awkward device for getting the curse of Prometheus before the reader is consummated by raising up the phantasm of Jupiter which repeats the curse, word for word.

In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essential immaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man: he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical: so that I call him the modern boy.

These considerations quite cover the remaining three acts of hisPrometheus Unboundand render it unnecessary for me to quote from them in support of the passages already cited.

The first act contains, indeed, nearly the substance of the whole drama. Act II contains no important motive except the visit of Asia and Panthea to Demogorgonunder the earth. In the third act we have a view of Jove surrounded by his ministers; but in the midst of a short speech to them he is suddenly swept into hell for everlasting punishment. Here, of course, Shelley makes a complete departure from the old story of the compromise between Jove and Prometheus; Shelley makes Prometheus scornfully reject such a compromise and allow Jove to go down to his doom. Hercules then unbinds Prometheus who repairs to a certain exquisite interlunar cave and there dwells in tranquillity with his beloved Asia.

The rest of Act III. is filled with long descriptions of the change which comes upon the world with the dethronement of Jove. Act IV. is the most amazing piece of surplusage in literature; the catastrophe has been reached long ago in the third act. Jove is in eternal duress, Prometheus has been liberated and has gone with Asia and Panthea to his eternal paradise above the earth, and a final radiant picture of the reawakening of man and nature under the new régime has closed up the whole with the effect of a transformation-scene. Yet, upon all this, Shelley drags in Act IV. which is simply leaden in action and color alongside of Act III. and in which the voices of unseen spirits, the chorus of Hours, Jove, Panthea, Demogorgon, the Earth and the Moon pelt each other with endless sweetish speeches that rain like ineffectual comfits in a carnival of silliness. For example, a Voice of Unseen Spirits cries:

"Bright clouds float in heaven,Dew-stars gleam on earth,Waves assemble on ocean:They are gathered and drivenBy the storm of delight, by the panic of glee!They shake with emotion,They dance in their mirth.But where are ye?The pine boughs are singingOld songs with new gladness;The billows and fountainsFresh music are flingingLike the notes of a spirit from land and from sea;The storms mock the mountainsWith the thunder of gladness.But where are ye?"

The pine boughs are singingOld songs with new gladness;The billows and fountainsFresh music are flingingLike the notes of a spirit from land and from sea;The storms mock the mountainsWith the thunder of gladness.But where are ye?"

The people thus inquired for, being the chorus of Hours, sleepily reply:

"The voice of the spirits of air and of earthHas drawn back the figured curtain of sleepWhich covered our being and darkened our birthIn the deep."

A Voice.

In the deep?

semi-chorus.

Oh, below the deep.

semi-chorus i.

We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep;We have known the voice of love in dreams,We have felt the wand of power come and leap—

semi-chorus ii.

"As the billows leap in the morning beams,"

chorus.

"Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze,Pierce with song heaven's silent light,Enchant the day that too swiftly flees,To check its flight ere the cave of night.Once the hungry Hours were houndsWhich chased the day like a bleeding deer,And it limped and stumbled with many woundsThrough the nightly dells of the desert year.But now oh! weave the mystic measureOf music, and dance, and shapes of light;Let the Hours and the spirits of night and pleasureLike the clouds and sunbeams unite."

"Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze,Pierce with song heaven's silent light,Enchant the day that too swiftly flees,To check its flight ere the cave of night.

Once the hungry Hours were houndsWhich chased the day like a bleeding deer,And it limped and stumbled with many woundsThrough the nightly dells of the desert year.

But now oh! weave the mystic measureOf music, and dance, and shapes of light;Let the Hours and the spirits of night and pleasureLike the clouds and sunbeams unite."

chorus of spirits.

"We join the throngOf the dance and the song,By the whirlwind of gladness borne along;As the flying-fish leapFrom the Indian deepAnd mix with the sea-birds half asleep."

This long lyric outburst, wholly unnecessary to an action which was already complete, seems an instructive fact to place before young writers in a time when many souls which might be poetic gardens if they would compact all their energies into growing two roses and a lily—three poems in all, for a lifetime—become instead mere wastes of profuse weeds that grow and are cut down and cast into the oven with each monthly magazine.

But it would not be fair to leave Shelley with this flat taste in our mouths, and I will therefore beg to finish our examination of thePrometheus Unboundby three quotations from these last acts, in which his modernness of detail and of subtlety,—being exercised upon matters capable of such treatment—has made for us some strong and beautiful poetry. Here for instance at the opening of Scene I. Act II. we have a charming specimen of the modern poetic treatment of nature and of landscape, full of spirituality and full of detail. The stage direction is "Morning; A Lovely Vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia, alone." Asia, who is the lovely bride of Prometheus, is awaiting Panthea who is to come with news of him. She begins with an invocation of the Spring.

Asia.

"From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended!Yea, like a spirit, like a thought, which makesUnwonted tears throng to the horny eyes,And beatings haunt the desolated heartWhich should have learnt repose, thou hast descendedCradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring!O child of many winds! As suddenlyThou comest as the memory of a dream,Which now is sad because it hath been sweet!Like genius, or like joy which riseth up ...As from the earth, clothing with golden cloudsThe desert of our life.This is the season, this the day, the hour;At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine.Too long desired, too long delaying, come!How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl!The point of one white star is quivering stillDeep in the orange light of widening mornBeyond the purple mountains: through a chasmOf wind-divided mist the darker lakeReflects it: now it wanes: it gleams againAs the waves fade, and as the burning threadsOf woven cloud unravel the pale air:'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snowThe roseate sunlight quivers: hear I notThe Æolian music of her sea-green plumesWinnowing the crimson dawn?"

And here we find some details of underwater life which are modern. Two fauns are conversing: one inquires where live certain delicate spirits whom they hear talking about the woods, but never meet. We are here in an atmosphere very much like that ofThe Midsummer-Night's Dream. I scarcely know anything more compact of pellucid beauty: it seems quite worthy of Shakspeare.

"second faun.

'Tis hard to tell:I have heard those more skill'd in spirits say,The bubbles, which th' enchantment of the sunSucks from the pale faint water-flowers that paveThe oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,Are the pavilions where such dwell and floatUnder the green and golden atmosphereWhich noontide kindles through the woven leaves;And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,The which they breathed within those lucent domes,Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,They ride in them, and rein their headlong speed,And bow their burning crests, and glide in fireUnder the waters of the earth again."

Here again, in my third extract, we have poetry which is as strong as the other is dainty, and which is as modern as geology. Asia is describing a vision in which the successive deposits in the crust of the earth are revealed to her. The whole treatment is detailed, modern, vivid, powerful.

"... The beams flash onAnd make appear the melancholy ruinsOf cancell'd cycles: anchors, beaks of ships;Planks turn'd to marble; quivers, helms, and spears;And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheelsOf scythed chariots, and the emblazonryOf trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,Round which death laugh'd, sepulchred emblemsOf dread destruction, ruin within ruin!Whose population which the earth grew overWas mortal, but not human; see, they lie,Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons,Their statues, domes, and fanes, prodigious shapesHuddled in gray annihilation, split,Jamm'd in the hard, black deep; and over theseThe anatomies of unknown winged things,And fishes which were isles of living scale,And serpents, bony chains, twisted aroundThe iron crags, or within heaps of dustTo which the torturous strength of their last pangsHad crushed the iron crags; and over theseThe jagged alligator, and the mightOf earth-convulsing behemoth, which onceWere monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,And weed-overgrown continents of earth,Increased and multiplied like summer wormsOn an abandoned corpse till the blue globeWrapt deluge round it like a cloak, and theyYelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God,Whose throne was in a comet, past, and criedBe not! And like my words they were no more."

Shelley appears not to have been completely satisfied with the Prometheus story. This dissatisfaction displays itself in a characteristic passage of his preface to the Prometheus, which happens very felicitously to introduce the only other set of antique considerations I shall offer you on this subject. "Let this opportunity," (he says in one place) "be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms 'a passion for reforming the world'.... But it is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life....

... Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstition flatter themselves that I should take Æschylus rather than Plato as my model."

In Shelley's poem we have found much of the modernness between the lines, or appearing as the result, merely, of that spirit of the time which every writer mustshare to a greater or less extent with his fellow-beings of the same period. But as we proceed now to examine Bayard Taylor's poem,Prince Deukalion, we find a man not only possessed with modernness, but consciously possessed; so that what was implicit in Shelley—and a great deal more—here becomes explicit and formulated.

As one opens the book, a powerful note of modernness in the drama, as opposed to the drama of Æschylus, strikes us at the outset in the number of the actors. One may imagine the amazement of old Æschylus as he read down this truly prodigious array ofdramatos prosopa:

Eos, Goddess of the Dawn: Gæa, Goddess of the Earth; Eros; Prometheus; Epimetheus; Pandora; Prince Deukalion; Pyrrha; Agathon; Medusa; Calchas; Buddha; Spirits of Dawn; Nymphs; Chorus of Ghosts; Charon; Angels; Spirits; The Nine Muses; Urania; Spirit of the Wind; Spirit of the Snow; Spirit of the Stream; Echoes; the Youth; the Artist; the Poet; the Shepherd; the Shepherdess; the Mediæval Chorus; Mediæval Anti-Chorus; Chorus of Builders; Four Messengers. With these materials Mr. Taylor's aim is to array before us the whole panorama of time, painted in symbols of the great creeds which have characterized each epoch. These epochs are four; and one act is devoted to each. In the first act we have the passing away of nymph and satyr and the whole antique Greek mythos; and we are shown the coming man and woman in the persons of Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, his wife-to-be, whose figures, however, are as yet merely etched upon a mist of prophecy.

In Act II, we have the reign and fall of the mediæval faith, all of which is mysteriously beheld by these sameshadowy personalities, Deukalion and Pyrrha. In Act III. the faith of the present is similarly treated. In Act IV. we have at last the coming man, or developed personality fairly installed as ruler of himself and of the world, and Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, the ideal man and the ideal woman, now for the first time united in deed as well as in inspiration, pace forth into the world to learn it and to enjoy it. Mr. Taylor, as I said, is so explicit upon the points of personality and modernness as compared with the Æschylean play, that few quotations would be needed from his work, and I will not attempt even such a sketch of it as that of Shelley's. For example, in Scene 1, Act I, ofPrince Deukalion, Scene I being given in the stage direction as

"A plain sloping from high mountains towards the sea; at the base of the mountains lofty, vaulted entrances of caverns; a ruined temple on a rocky height; a shepherd asleep in the shadow of a clump of laurels; the flock scattered over the plain,"—a shepherd awakes and wonderingly describes his astonishment at certain changes which have occurred during his sleep. This shepherd, throughout the book, is a symbol of the mass of the common people, the great herd of men. Voices from various directions interrupt his ejaculations: and amongst other utterances of this sort, we have presently one from the nymphs—as representative of the Greek nature—myths—which is quite to our present purpose.

Nymphs

(Who are to the shepherd voices, and nothing more):

"Our service hath ceased for you, shepherds!We fade from your days and your dreams,With the grace that was lithe as a leopard's,The joy that was swift as a stream's!To the musical reeds, and the grasses;To the forest, the copse, and the dell;To the mist and the rainbow that passes,The vine, and the goblet, farewell!Go, drink from the fountains that flow not!Our songs and our whispers are dumb:—But the thing ye are doing ye know not,Nor dream of the thing that shall come."

In Scene IV., Deukalion, leading Pyrrha, passes into a cavern, the last mouth of Hades left on the earth. Presently, the two emerge upon "a shadowy, colorless landscape," and are greeted by a chorus of ghosts, which very explicitly formulates that dreary impossibility of growth which I pointed out in the last lecture as incident to the old conception of personality.

"Chorus of Ghosts.

"Away!Ashes that once were fires,Darkness that once was day,Dead passions, dead desires,Alone can enter here!In rest there is no strife,

Like some forgotten star,What first we were, we are,The past is adamant:The future will not grantThat, which in all its rangeWe pray for—change."

In spite of these warnings, they push on, find Charon at his old place by the dark river, but are left to row themselves across, Charon pleading age and long-unused joints; and, after many adventures, find Prometheus, who very distinctly declares to Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha their mission.

"Since thou adrìft,"

says Prometheus,

"And that immortal woman by thy sideFloated above submerged barbarityTo anchor, weary, on the cloven mount,Thou wast my representative."

Prince Deukalion—as perhaps many will remember—is the Noah of the old Promethean cyclus, and the story ran, that the drowned world was miraculously repeopled by him and Pyrrha. In the same speech Prometheus introduces to Deukalion as a future helper his brother Epimetheus—one of the most striking conceptions of the old fable, and one of the most effective characters in Mr. Taylor's presentation. We saw in the last lecture that Prometheus was called the Provident,—thepro-metheusbeing a looking forward. Precisely opposite is Epimetheus, that is, he who looksepi—upon or backward. Perhaps it is a fair contrast to regard Prometheus as a symbol of striving onward or progress; and Epimetheus as a symbol of the historic instinct,—the instinct which goes back and clears up the past as if it were the future; which with continual effort reconstructs it; which keeps the to-be in full view of what has been; which reconciles progress and conservation. Accordingly, the old story reports Epimetheus as oldest at his birth, and growing younger with the progress of the ages.

"Take one new comfort"

says Prometheus,

Epimetheus lives.Though here beneath the shadow of the crags.He seems to slumber, head on nerveless knees,His life increases; oldest at his birth,The ages heaped behind him shake the snowFrom hoary locks, and slowly give him youth,"Tis he shall be thy helper: Brother, rise!

epimetheus—(coming forward)

I did not sleep: I mused. Ha! comest thou, Deukalion?

prometheus.

Soon thy work shall come!Shame shall ceaseWhen midway on their paths our mighty schemesMeet, and complete each other! Yet my son,Deukalion—yet one other guide I give,Eos!"

And presently Prometheus leads Deukalion and Pyrrha to what is described in the stage-direction as "The highest verge of the rocky table-land of Hades, looking eastward." Eos is summoned by Prometheus, much high conversation ensues, and this, the sixth and last scene of the first Act ends thus:

Eos, (addressing young Deukalion and Pyrrha.)

Faith, when none believe;Truth, when all deceive;Freedom, when force restrained;Courage to sunder chains;Pride, when good is shame;Love, when love is blame,—These shall call me in stars and flame!Thus if your souls have wrought,Ere ye approach me, I shine unsought."

But Eos proceeds to warn Deukalion and Pyrrha of long trial, and of many disappointments, closing thus:

"When darkness falls,And what may come is hard to see;When solid adamant wallsSeem built against the Future that shall be;When Faith looks backward, Hope dies, Life appals,Think most of Morning and of me!

[The rosy glow in the sky fades away]

Prometheus(toPrince Deukalion),

Go back to Earth, and wait!

Pandora(toPyrrha),

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 toPrince Deukalionby 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 employTo 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 beAlong the line of God's decree,To find in endless growth all good;In endless toil, beatitude.Seek not to know Him; yet aspireAs 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 fallBeyond 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 hoursClasps 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 announcedas 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 hisRepublic. Nothing is more irresistible than the conviction that the being who planned Plato'sRepubliccould 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'sRepublic.

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 designatea 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 themwithout 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 aboutmeumandtuum; 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."

Now, as soon as the ideal dispositions of Plato are propounded to a modern hearer, they send an instantaneous shock to the remotest ends of his nature; and what I will ask you to do at present is to formulate this shock in terms of personality. Taking for example the Platonic provision with regard to marriage (how grotesquely, by the way, these provisions show alongside of what have gained great currency as "Platonic attachments"): perhaps the two thousand years since Plato, have taught us nothing so clearly as that one of the most mysterious and universal elements of personality, is that marvelous and absolutely inconsequential principle by which a given man finds himself determined to lovea certain woman, or a given woman determined to love a certain man; and if we look back we find that the most continuous travail of the ages has been to secure perfect freedom for these determinations.

Does it not seem as if Time grinned at us in some horrible dream when we remind ourselves that here the divine Plato, as he has been called, and the unspeakable Zola (as some of us have learned to call him) have absolutely come cheek by jowl, and that the physiological marriage of Zola's is no more nor less than the ideal marriage of Plato?

Rejecting comment on the child-nursing arrangement of Plato it is instructive to pass on and regard from a different point of view, though still from the general direction of personality, the Platonic community of property. If men desire property says Plato, "one man's desire will contravene another's, and we shall have trouble. How shall we remedy it? Crush out the desire; and to that end abolish property."

But no, cries modern personality to Plato, cannot you imagine such an extension of personality as to make each man see that on the whole the shortest way to carry out his desires for property is to respect every other man's desire for property, and thus, in the regulations which will necessarily result from this mutual respect, to secure everything he acquires by spiritual considerations infinitely more effective than spears and bars?

We had occasion to observe the other day how complete has been the success of this doctrine here in the United States: we found that the real government now going on is individual, personal,—not at Washington and that we have every proper desire,—of love in marriage, of having one woman to wife, of cherishing our own children, of accumulating property,—secured byexternal law apparently, and really by respect for that law and the principles of personality it embodies.

It seems curious to me here to make two further points of contact, which taken with the Zola point just made, seem to tax the extremes of the heavens and the earth. Plato's organic principle appears to emerge from some such consideration as this:—A boy ten years old is found to possess a wondrous manual deftness: he can do anything with his fingers: word is brought to Plato: what shall the State do with this boy? Why, says Plato, if he be manually so adroit, likely he will turn pickpocket: the plain course is to chop off his hands,—or to expose him to die in one of those highly respectable places such as decency requires for generally unavailable children.

No, says the modern man: you are destroying his manifest gift, the very deepest outcome of his personality: he might be a pickpocket, true, but then he might be a great violinist, he might be a great worker in all manner of materials requiring deftness: instead of cutting off his hands, let us put him at an industrial school, let us set him to playing the violin, let us cherish him, let us develop his personality. So, Plato takes the gift of acquiring property—for it is a real gift and blessing to man, if properly developed—and he will chop it off, that is, he will crush out the desire of property by destroying the possibility of its exercise.

And what is this in its outcome but the Nirvana of the Buddhists? My passions keep me in fear and hope; therefore I will annihilate them: when I neither think nor desire, then I shall rest, then I shall enjoy Nirvana. Plato institutes a Nirvana for the ills of marriage, of offspring, of property: and he realizes it by the slow death through inanition of the desire for love, for children, for property.

And as we have found the Platonic Plato arguing himself into Zola, the dialectic Plato arguing himself into a dreaming Buddha, all for lack of the sense of personality, we now find the ideal Plato arguing himself, for the same lack, into a brawny Whitman. Think of Plato's community of property, and listen to Whitman's reverie, as he looks at some cattle. It is curious to notice how you cannot escape a certain sense ofnaïvetéin this, and how you are taken by it,—until a moment's thought shows you that thenaïvetéis due to a cunning and bold contradiction of every fact in the case.

"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd:I stand and look at them long and long.Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things:Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth."

"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd:I stand and look at them long and long.

Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things:Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth."

The Whitman method of reachingnaïvetéis here so queerly illustrated that it seems worth while to stop a moment and point it out. Upon the least reflection, one must see that "animals" here must mean cows, and well-fed cows; for they are about the only animals in the world to whom these items would apply. For says Whitman, "not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things:" but suppose he were taking one of his favorite night-strolls in the woods of Bengal rather than of New Jersey, is it not more than probable that the first animal he met would be some wicked tiger not only dissatisfied, but perfectly demented with the mania of owning Whitman, the only kind of property the tiger knows? Seriously, when we reflect that property to the animal means no more than food or nestor lair, and that the whole wing-shaken air above us, the earth-surface about us, the earth-crust below us, the seas, and all, are alive day and night with the furious activity of animals quite as fairly demented with the mania of owning their property as men theirs; and that it is only the pampered beast who is not so demented,—the cow, for instance, who has her property duly brought to her so many times a day and has no more to do but to enjoy the cud thereof until next feed-time,—we have a very instructive model of methods by which poetry can make itselfnaïve.

And finally, what a conclusive light is shed upon the principles supporting Plato's community of property, when we bring forward the fact, daily growing more and more notable, that along with the modern passion for acquiring property has grown the modern passion of giving away property, that is, of charity? What ancient scheme ever dreamed of the multitudinous charitable organizations of some of our large cities? Charity has become organic and a part of the system of things: it has sometimes overflowed its bounds so that great social questions now pend as to how we shall direct the overflowing charitable instincts of society so as really to help the needy and not pamper the lazy: its public manifestations are daily, its private ministrations are endless.

Plato would have crushed the instinct of property; but the instinct, vital part of man's personality, as it is, has taken care of itself, has been cherished and encouraged by the modern cultus, and behold, instead of breeding a wild pandemonium of selfishness as Plato argued, it has in its orderly progress developed this wonderful new outgrowth of charity which fills every thoughtful man's heart with joy, because it covers such a multitude of the sins of the time.

I have been somewhat earnest—I fear tediously so—upon this matter, because I have seen what seem the greatest and most mischievous errors concerning it, receiving the stamp of men who usually think with clearness and who have acquired just authority in many premises.

It would not be fair to the very different matters which I have now to treat, to detail these errors; and I will only mention that if, with these principles of personality fairly fixed in one's mind, one reads for example the admirable Introduction of Professor Jowett to his translation of Plato'sRepublic, one has a perfect clew to many of the problems over which that translator labors with results which, I think, cannot be conclusive to his own mind.

Here, too, no one can be satisfied with the otherwise instructive chapter on Individuality in Professor Eucken'sFundamental Concepts of Modern Philosophic Thought. Eucken's direct reference to Plato's Republic is evidently made upon only a very vague recollection of Plato's doctrine, which is always dangerous. "The complete subordination and sacrifice of the individual expressed in Plato's idea of a state arose from his opposition to a tendency of the times which he considered pernicious, and so is characterized rather by moral energy and intensity of feeling than by the quiet and simple resignation to the objection which we find in the great men of the preceding period." But a mere opposition to a tendency of the times could never have bred this elaborate and sweeping annihilation of individuality; and it is forgotten that Plato is not here legislating for his times or with the least dream of the practical establishment of his Republic: again and again he declares his doubts as to the practicability of his plans for any time. No; heis building a republic for all time, and is consistently building upon the ruins of that personality which he was not sensible of except in its bad outcome as selfishness.

I must add, too, that there was an explicit theory of what was called Individuality among the Greeks; the phenomenon of the unaccountable differences of men from birth early attracted those sharp eyes, and the Stoics and others soon began to build in various directions from this basis. But just as the Greeks had a theory of harmony—though harmony was not developed until the last century—as Richter says somewhere that a man may contemplate the idea of death for twenty years, and only in some moment of the twenty-first suddenly have the realization of death come upon him, and shake his soul; so their theory of individuality must have been wholly amateur, not a working element, and without practical result. Surely, we seem in condition to say so with confidence if you run your minds back along this line of development which now comes to an end. For what have we done? We have interrogated Æschylus and Plato, whom we may surely call the two largest and most typic spirits of the whole Greek cultus, upon the main fact of personality; we have verified the abstract with the concrete by questioning them upon the most vital and well-known elements of personality: what do you believe about spiritual growth, about spiritual compactness, about true love, marriage, children, property? and we have received answers which show us that they have not yet caught a conception of what personality means, and that when they explicitly discuss individuality in their theories, it is a discussion of blind men about colors.

We are now to enter upon the second of our four lines of study by concentrating our attention upon three historicdetailsin the growth of this personality whosegeneraladvance has been so carefully illustrated in our first line. These details are found in the sudden rise of Physical Science, of Modern Music, and of the Modern Novel, at periods of time so little separated from each other, that we may consider these great fields of human activity as fairly opened simultaneously to the entrance of man about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Addressing ourselves first, then, to the idea of Science, let us place ourselves at a point of view from which we can measure with precision the actual height and nature of the step which man took in ascending from the plane of, say, Aristotle's "science" to that of Sir Isaac Newton's "science." And the only possible method of placing ourselves at this point of view is to pass far back and fix ourselves in the attitude which antiquity maintained towards physical nature, and in which succeeding ages comfortably dozed, scarcely disturbed even by Roger Bacon's feeble protest in the thirteenth century, until it was shocked out of all future possibility by Copernicus, Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton.

Accordingly, in pursuance of our custom of abandoning abstract propositions at the earliest moment, when we can embody them in terms of the concrete, let us spend a quiet hour in contemplating some of the specificabsurdities of our ancestors in scientific thought and in generalizing them into the lack of personality. Let us go and sit with Socrates on his prison-bed, in thePhædo, and endeavor to see this matter of man's scientific relation to physical nature, with his sight. Hear Socrates talking to Simmias: he is discussing the method of acquiring true knowledge: it is well we are invisible as we sit by him, for we can not keep back a quiet smile,—we who come out of a beautiful and vast scientific acquirement all based upon looking at things with our eyes; we whose very intellectual atmosphere is distilled from the proverb, "seeing is believing"—when we hear these grave propositions of the wisest antique man. "But what of the acquisition of wisdom," says Socrates: ... "do the sight and hearing convey any certainty to mankind, or are they such as the poets incessantly report them, who say that we neither hear nor see anything as it is?... Do they not seem so to you?"

"They do, indeed," replied Simmias. "When, then," continued Socrates, "does the soul attain to the truth? For when it attempts to investigate anything along with the body, it is plain that the soul is led astray by the body.... Is it not by reasoning, if by anything, that reality is made manifest to the soul?"

"Certainly."

But now Socrates advances a step to show that not only are we misled when we attempt to get knowledge by seeing things, but that nothing worth attention is capable of being physically seen. I shall have occasion to recur in another connection to the curious fallacy involved in this part of Socrates' argument. He goes on to inquire of Simmias: "Do we assert that Justice is anything, or not?"

"We say that it is."

"And beauty and goodness, also?"

"Surely."

"Did you ever see anything of the kind with your eyes?"

"Never," replied Simmias.

... "Then," continues Socrates, "whoever amongst us prepares, with the greatest caution and accuracy, to reflect upon that particular thing by itself upon which he is inquiring" and ... "using reflection alone, endeavors to investigate every reality by itself, ... abstaining as much as possible from the use of the eyes ... is not such an one, if any, likely to arrive at what really exists?"

"You speak, Socrates," answered Simmias, "with amazing truth."

It is curious to note in how many particulars this process of acquiring knowledge is opposed to that of the modern scientific man. Observe specially that Socrates wishes to investigate every reality by itself, while we, on the contrary, fly from nothing with so much vehemence as from an isolated fact; it maddens us until we can put it into relation with other facts, and delights us in proportion to the number of facts with which we can relate it. In that book of multitudinous suggestions which Novalis (Friedrich Von Hardenberg) callsThe Pupil at Sais, one of the most modern sentences is that where, after describing many studies of his wondrous pupil, Novalis adds that "erelong he saw nothing alone."

Surely, one of the earliest and most delightful sensations one has in spiritual growth, after one has acquired the true synthetic habit which converts knowledge into wisdom, is that delicious, universal impulse which accompanies every new acquisition as it runs along like a warp across the woof of our existing acquisition, makinga pleasant tang of contact, as it were, with each related fibre.

But Plato speaks even more directly upon our present point, in advocating a similar attitude towards physical science. In Book VII. of theRepublic, he puts these words into the mouth of Socrates: "And whether a man gapes at the heavens, or blinks on the ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I would deny that he can learn, for nothing of that sort is matter of science."

Of course these, as the opinions of professed idealists, would not be representative of the Greek attitude towards physical science.

Yet when we turn to those who are pre-eminently physical philosophers, we find that the mental disposition, though the reverse of hostile, is nearly always such as to render the work of these philosophers unfruitful. When we find, for example, that Thales in the very beginning of Greek philosophy holds the principle, or beginning, ἡ ἀρχἡ of all things to be moisture, or water; that Anaximenes a little while after holds the beginning of things to be air; that Heraclitus holds thearcheto be fire: thissoundsphysical, and we look for a great extension of men's knowledge in regard to water, air and fire, upon the idea that if these are really the organic principles of things, thousands of keen inquiring eyes would be at once leveled upon them, thousands of experiments would be at once set on foot, all going to reveal properties of water, air and fire.

But perhaps no more expressive summary of the real relation between man and nature, not only during the Greek period but for many centuries after it, could be given than the fact that these three so-called elements which begin the Greek physical philosophy remainedthemselves unknown for more than two thousand years after Thales and Anaximenes and Heraclitus, until the very last century when, with the discovery of oxygen, men are able to prove that they are not elements at all; but that what we call fire is merely an effect of the rapid union of oxygen with bodies, while water and air are compounds of it with other gases. It is perfectly true that in the years between Thales and the death of Aristotle, a considerable body of physical facts had been accumulated; that Pythagoras had observed a number of acoustic phenomena and mathematically formulated their relations; it is true that—without detaining you to specify intermediate inquirers—we have that wonderful summary of Aristotle—wonderful for one man—which is contained in hisPhysics, from which the name "meta-physics" originated, though the circumstance that he placed the other booksafterthose on physics, calling them Τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσιχὰ βιβλἱα, the meta-physical, or over and above physical, books.

When we read the titles of these productions—here are "Eight Books of Physical Lectures," "Four Books of the Heavens," "Two Books of Production and Destruction," Treatises "On Animals," "On Plants," "On Colors," "On Sound"—we feel that we must be in a veritable realm of physical science. But if we examine these lectures and treatises, which probably contain the entire body of Greek physical learning, we find them hampered by a certain disability which seems to me characteristic not only of Greek thought, but of all man's early speculation, and which excludes the possibility of a fruitful and progressive physical science. I do not know how to characterize this disability otherwise than by calling it a lack of that sense of personal relation to fact which makes the thinker passionately andsupremely solicitous about the truth, that is, the existence of his facts and the soundness of his logic; solicitous of these, not so much with reference to the value of his conclusions as because of an inward tender inexorable yearning for the truth and nothing but the truth.

In short, I find that early thought everywhere, whether dealing with physical facts or meta-physical problems, is lacking in what I may call the intellectual conscience—the conscience, for example, which makes Mr. Darwin spend long and patient years in investigating small facts before daring to reason upon them; and which makes him state the facts adverse to his theory with as much care as the facts which make for it.

Part of the philosophy of this personal relation between a man and a fact is very simple. For instance what do you know at present of the inner life of the Patagonians? Probably no more than your Mitchell's or Cornell's Geography told you at school. But if a government expedition is soon to carry you to the interior of that country, a personal relation arises which will probably set you to searching all the libraries at your command for such travels or treatises as may enlarge your knowledge of Patagonia.

It is easy to give a thousand illustrations of this lack of intellectual conscience in Greek thought, which continued indeed up to the time of the Renaissance. For example: it would seem that nothing less than a sort of amateur mental attitude towards nature, an attitude which does not bind the thinker to his facts with such iron conscientiousness that if one fact were out of due order, it would rack him, could account for Aristotle's grave exposition of the four elements. "We seek," he says "the principles of sensible things, that is of tangible bodies. We must take therefore not all the contrarieties of qualitybut those only which have reference to the touch.... Now the contrarieties of quality which refer to the touch are these: hot, cold; dry, wet; heavy, light; hard, soft; unctuous, meagre; rough, smooth; dense, rare." Aristotle then rejects the last three couplets on several grounds and proceeds: "Now in four things there are six combinations of two; but the combinations of two opposites, as hot and cold, must be rejected; we have therefore four elementary combinations which agree with the four apparently elementary bodies. Fire is hot and dry; air is hot and wet; water is cold and wet: earth is cold and dry." And thus we comfortably fare forward with fire, air, earth and water for the four elements of all things.

But Aristotle argues that there must be a fifth element: and our modern word quintessence is, by the way, a relic of this argument, this fifth element having been called by later writersquinta essentiaor quintessence. The argument is as follows: "the simple elements must have simple motions, and thus fire and air have their natural motions upwards and water and earth have their natural motions downwards; but besides these motions there is motion in a circle which is unnatural to these elements, but which is a more perfect motion than the other, because a circle is a perfect line and a straight line is not; and there must be something to which this motion is natural. From this it is evident that there is some essence or body different from those of the four elements, ... and superior to them. If things which move in a circle move contrary to nature it is marvelous, or rather absurd that this, the unnatural motion should alone be continuous and eternal; for unnatural motions decay speedily. And so from all this we must collect that besides the four elements which we have here and about us, there is another removed faroff and the more excellent in proportion as it is more distant from us."

Or take Aristotle's dealing with the heaviness and lightness of bodies.

After censuring former writers for considering these as merely relative, he declares that lightness is a positive or absolute property of bodies just as weight is; that earth is absolutely heavy, and therefore tends to take its place below the other three elements; that fire has the positive property of lightness, and hence tends to take its place above the other three elements; (the modern wordempyreanis a relic of this idea from thepyror fire, thus collected in the upper regions), and so on; and concludes that bodies which have the heavy property tend to the centre, while those with the light property tend to the exterior, of the earth, because "Exterior is opposite to Centre, as heavy is to light."

This conception, or rather misconception, of opposites appears most curiously in two of the proofs which Socrates offers for the immortality of the soul, and I do not know how I can better illustrate the infirmity of antique thought which I have just been describing than by citing the arguments of Socrates in that connection according to thePhædo. Socrates introduced it with special solemnity. "I do not imagine," he says, "that any one, not even if he were a comic poet, would now say that I am trifling.... Let us examine it in this point of view, whether the souls of the dead survive or not.

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