But, within these well-recognized limits, the Greek citizen was a Radical; that is to say, he was ready to apply his reason to public affairs without fear or prejudice. He loved straight and sincere thinking; he tried hard to face the real situation before him and not to be clouded or led astray by side-issues or inhibitions. There is many a lesson in common honesty to be learnt by our politicians and public in the speeches of Thucydides. Shallow critics have been known to dub them cynical, an adjective which the English, adepts in self-deception, are fond of applying to nations sincerer in self-analysis than themselves. When we refuse formally to reopen an issue on which action is in fact being taken daily, because it is a party question and a Coalition government is in power, when we leave to the healing mercies of time a problem with regard to which inaction itself constitutes a policy, when we deliberately invent party labels or election cries designed to confuse the mind of the voter and to distract him from the real issue, when our politicians have become professionals in the art of what Thucydides described as ‘the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends’ and a British Premier, more euphemistically, as ‘political strategy’, we might do worse than sit down to read, mark, learn, digest, and apply to our modern situations, the immortal speeches or essays in which Thucydides lays bare for us the heart of the political life of his day, and to let them act as a purge of some of our own too sugary diet. The bitter-sweet of truth is not always popular on the hustings; but it is good feeding for the plain citizen, whether ancient or modern.
This leads on to a further reflection. The Greeks, in their political thinking, were essentially realists, rather than idealists. This is true of all the Greek writers, even those who, like Plato, starting from the market-place of Athens, lead us up to a Utopia in the clouds. They were realists in that they basedtheir political studies on the world as it is and human nature as it is, rather than on some personal and fanciful conception of what man and the world ought to be. To put it in other words, they are realists because they are psychologists, because they applied the psychological method to political problems. That they were the first to do so goes without saying: for no one before them had applied any method at all, except in the most rough-and-ready manner. But they did it so perfectly, with such utter and artistic simplicity, that those who followed them accepted or criticized their results without observing the basis of human study on which they were built up, and it is only in quite recent years, through the work of patient inquirers who, like Graham Wallas, have laboured systematically in both fields, that politics and psychology have once more been drawn together.
It may perhaps seem strange to a modern reader to be told that, in this very important respect, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle are sounder in their method than the whole long line of political thinkers and statesmen up to our own day. Let the reader who doubts it turn to the texts. He will find that all the three writers whom I have named toiled at the study of human nature before they set pen to paper. TheRepublicopens with several books of psychological analysis, no doubt at times a little fantastic in its attempts at premature classification, but full of life and reality, and not only Greek reality but human reality. Aristotle precedes his work onPolitics, in which he embodied the results of a study of all the available political and constitutional material of his day—for a Greek could work like a modern German or American thesis-grubber when he tried—with a book onEthicswhich is still regarded, quite rightly, as a standard work for the modern student. As for Thucydides, his knowledge of men, the fruit of patient experience deepened by disappointment, is felt behind every line of his book, as one descries it in the features of his undegenerate descendant Venizelos. Turn now to the moderns. Wherein Hobbes or in Bentham, in Locke or Burke or Rousseau, in the individualists or the Socialists, the Hegelians or the anarchists, do we find, until quite recently, a really wide and open-minded attempt to see man as he is? Our ears are assailed by a chorus of catchwords, based on some arbitrary and ephemeral estimate of men’s reactions to outward events and institutions. Men argue backwards and forwards as to whether ‘human nature can be changed’, whether man is guided solely by self-interest, or is only waiting to be set free from sordid cares to be guided solely by his love for his fellows, whether fear or hope, custom or the sense of adventure, form his natural and most compelling spur to action. Meanwhile in the great debate, in Burke’sReflectionsas in Marx’sCapital, in Maine and Mill and Mazzini, as among the hacks who vulgarize their results in text-books and election literature, man as he is has vanished behind a cloud of doctrine or verbiage. We need the simplicity, or cynicism, of the Greeks to recall us to realities.
Let us for a moment imagine Thucydides face to face with the problems of our post-war world of to-day. We have only to read his immortal analysis of the war-mood of Greece, and of the nervous and emotional phenomena which accompanied it, to realize that his first effort would have been to explain us to ourselves. He would not allow us to acquiesce idly in our vague disillusionment, our impatience of foreigners, our suspicion of the idealisms of the Wilson brand. He would trace our discontent ruthlessly to its sources and hold up to our eyes the strange compound of sorrow and fatigue, impatience and disappointment, aspiration and helplessness which makes us what we are. ‘The war-mood brought with it many and terrible symptoms such as have occurred and will always continue to occur, so long as human nature remains what it is; though in a severer or milder form, according to the variety of the particular cases.’ Thucydides would have had eyes for it in all its forms, mild or severe, simple or complex,pitiful or repulsive. He would show us the English upper and middle class, shaken out of its comfort and complacency, its easy and patronizing security, by the shock of war and bereavement, facing a future of unknown and terrifying ideas and forces, with the brutal tax-gatherer administering thecoup de grâceto its equanimity: the working class, called to fight for a cause which it but dimly understood, in the hope of a new world which victory was to call into being, exhorted by the nation’s leaders to be as daring in its home policies as in the trenches, and then confronted with a world of failing markets and impoverished customers and with the full rigour of the merciless laws of supply and demand which, just because it had wished them out of existence, it had grown accustomed to believe could be ignored, oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience, between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging nerve-racked from a fifty years’ obsession and a five years’ nightmare, half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet too proud in victory to own her weakness, looking round, half-defiant, half-wistful, among her allies for one who can understand her unspoken need, and longing, with all the intensity of her sensitive nature, to be able to resume, in security and quietness of mind, the arts and activities of normal life in which she has been, and will be again, the Athens of the modern world: Germany, tougher in fibre than her western neighbour yet equally shaken and exhausted: a land of sheep without a shepherd, rushing hither and thither seeking for a direction and aWeltanschauung, her amazing powers of industry and concentration and her rich and turbid life of feeling running to waste for lack of channelled guidance: Belgium, self-confident, industrious and rejuvenated: Italy, made one at last and measuring her strength to face the tasks of a new epoch in her history: and, behind, the great new surging world of the Slav, from the disciplined enthusiasm of Prague, under her philosopher-president,to the birth-agonies of a new Russia in the grip of the rough tyrant-physicians of the Kremlin. All this a modern Thucydides would attempt to set before us, not forgetting the conservative forces and the gods of the older generation, the great Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Socialist traditions, the power of the bankers and the merchants, the universities and the press, and all the various types of humanity produced and hall-marked by their activity. And then, and not till then, having shown us what we are, each of us in his niche and all of us together in our little corner in the vast Temple of mankind, having made us see our pettyisms and orthodoxies against a universal background of time and space, he would have broken silence and allowed himself to speak to us of remedies.Know yourselfis the first, perhaps the only, message of the scientific historian to our bewildered age.
But by what right, it will be asked, in this age ofWissenschaftandFachmenschen, of specialism and research-institutes and organized intellectual production, do you speak of Thucydides as a scientific historian? Here is a man who, without a university degree or any university training at all, after a brief military career for which he took no staff college course (as witness his generalship), sits down to write a chronicle of the war in which he played a part, basing his account simply on his own experience and on the testimony of such eye-witnesses as he was able to meet. Any tiro on the history staff at a modern college or university could predict the result—one of those bulky volumes, full of detail and post-prandial reminiscence, in which splenetic elderly gentlemen have so often sought to justify their own existence, and to call down damnation on the War Office, before an indifferent public. How can anything better be expected from a mere soldier, a rough practical man, untrained in the arts of research, in collecting facts on slips of paper and arranging and re-arranging them till an induction emerges, in looking up reference books inlibraries and ‘listing’ them in a neat alphabetical bibliography, totally ignorant of theHilfswissenschaften, the laborious subsidiary studies on the basis of which scientific history is built up, ignorant even of foreign languages, who has read no sociology, and is not even aware of its existence, whose geographical studies are limited to his own journeys and the tales of his friends, who, finally, has the impertinence to intersperse his narrative with fictitious speeches, thus destroying any pretence at a scientific character for his treatise, and revealing it in its true nature as a mere work of art or imagination? It may indeed be doubted whether a modern trained librarian, working according to the classification laid down by the standard Congress library at Washington, would, when his attention was drawn to it, admit so offending a writer on to his history shelves at all. His place, he would probably say, is with the prose-poets, or with the writers of historical fiction next door to them.
Yet turn to the opening chapters of Thucydides’ book. You will find most of the sciences on which long modern treatises are written: but you will find something more: you will find them blended into a unity. Let those who deny that Thucydides was a sociologist, who continue to claim that Herbert Spencer, inventor of the horrid word, invented also the science, re-read Thucydides’ account of the evolution (for it was as an evolution that he saw and depicted it) of Greek society from the earliest times to his own day. Let those who cry up anthropology examine into his treatment of legend and custom and his power, untrained in Seminar or institute, to use it as sociological evidence. Let the geographers, too forgetful sometimes that man is not the creature of environment alone, refresh their minds by recalling those brilliant sallies in geographical thinking in which he explains some of the features of early Greek settlement and city-building. It is not only orthodox history, of the school of Ranke, of which Thucydides is the father and inspirer: thereis not one of the many movements which have sought to broaden out historical study in recent years, from Buckle and Leplay and Vidal de la Blache down to the psycho-analysts of our own day and of to-morrow who will not find in Thucydides some gleaming anticipation along the path of their own thought.
Here we touch upon what is perhaps the cardinal merit of the Greek political thinkers, as it is of the Greek contribution as a whole. They saw all the problems: but saw each in its place within the larger whole. They ‘saw life steadily and saw it whole’. Matthew Arnold’s line is hackneyed enough; but it cannot be bettered. To put the same thought in another way, the Greeks were natural Catholics, while we of to-day, especially on the political field, are constantly relapsing into an unhelpful Protestantism. By Catholicism I mean nothing doctrinal, or indeed religious at all, but simply the habit of mind which insists on looking at the whole before the parts, at setting the common before the sectional interest, and in sweetening and harmonizing the inevitable contrarieties and antagonisms of life by remaining steadily conscious of its major and reconciling interests. A Catholic is one whose intellect, to use the words of Newman, himself, despite his religious label, one of the greatest of the tribe, ‘cannot be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, cannot be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected and majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every beginning, the origin in each end, the law in every interruption, the limit in each delay, because it ever knows where it stands and how its path lies from one point to another’. Protestantism, on the other hand, is the attitude of protest, of revolt, of indignation: the spirit which is conscious only of what it isagainst, and is too ignorant, or too angry, to survey the whole field of problems involved in its protest or to think out an alternative scheme. If the Greeks can render us no other service in our discontents they can at least lift us, by the example of their wide and fearless vision, out of our petty Protestant rebelliousnessand recrimination and plant our feet solidly on the rock of steady Catholic thinking.
Take a few instances, drawn from Plato, of what I call the Catholic spirit. Perhaps the most difficult and unsettling of all our modern problems is that of the relations between men and women in a society which has granted or is about to grant to women complete equality of rights and opportunities without having effected the corresponding inner revolution of thought and sentiment. Masculine society, in other words, despite a multitude of professions, has not yet admitted, still less assimilated, the educated woman into its ranks. Here is a problem with far reaching and most difficult implications which Plato discussed more than two thousand years ago, but in how different a spirit from so many of the ‘feminists’ of to-day. Not that he was less ‘advanced’ in his speculations: he was ready to face all that there was to face and to go a good deal farther in his suggestions of policy than would be regarded as printable in a modern English or American review. But his spirit is throughout perfectly serene and, in the best sense of the word, scientific, so that he can work out his argument to the end without a trace of squeamishness or false modesty. Where shall we find in our modern discussions of women’s employment, equal work for equal pay, and the like, the central point so simply and clearly stated as in the following sentence: ‘Then, if we find either the male or the female sex excelling the other in any art or other pursuit, we shall say that this particular pursuit must be assigned to one and not to the other; but if we find that the difference simply consists in this, that the female conceives and the male begets, we shall not allow that that goes any way to prove that a woman differs from a man with reference to the subject of which we are speaking, and we shall still consider that our guardians and their wives should follow the same pursuits.’ If all our modern discussion were as clean and direct as this, we should have made greater progress in this subject by now. Greekintellectual integrity, and clarity of thought and expression, were not hampered by a festering and obstructive legacy of what it is a libel on a great movement to describe as Puritanism.
Take a second example—the influence of occupation on character. This is a subject which goes to the root of many of our social problems for, till we have studied the reactions of different classes of employment, not only on the body but on the mind, and perfected our methods of vocational guidance, we shall still have left open one of the greatest avenues to unhappiness. The modern inquirer will find a very interesting adumbration of this line of thought in theRepublic; and if here, as in the problem of the relations between men and women, he finds Plato’s remedies somewhat drastic, and is inclined to dissent from his veto on actors and acrobats, let him consider the appalling extent to which, during recent generations, the consumer has been pampered at the expense of the producer, and ask himself how often, when he attends a music-hall as a narcotic after a distracting day, or when he rings up on the telephone or books a ticket at a railway office, he considers the kind of life to which he is an accomplice in condemning those who minister to his needs and desires. Plato believed in the value of beauty and, being more than a mere modern aesthete, held no skindeep creed. He knew and understood the vital significance of rhythm and harmony, of grace and freedom, in the outward order of life as in the soul; and if he found himself plunged down in the centre of one of our modern hives of progress he would have some searching questions to ask. For ‘absence of grace’ he tells us ‘and bad rhythm and bad harmony are sisters to bad words and bad nature’ and ‘we would not have our guardians reared among images of evil as in a foul pasture and there day by day, and little by little, gather impressions from all that surrounds them, until at last a great mass of evil gathers in their inmost souls and they know it not’. Has the most widespread malady of our time ever been better diagnosed; and do not our capitalist and socialist physicians,with their merely material remedies, look very small by the side of this commanding and convincing simplicity of statement?
We have dwelt upon some of the special directions in which Thucydides and Plato can be of help to us. Let us now turn briefly to the third of the great triad. Aristotle is, of course, the most systematic thinker of the three: and it is just for that very reason that the two elements already noted in Greek political thought, the local and ephemeral and the universal, are most closely interwoven and most baffling to disentangle. Tutor of Alexander though he was, his mind is incapable of stepping outside the city-state framework. HisEthicsis half a treatise on human nature, half a book, akin to theCharactersof Theophrastus, on deportment for a Greek citizen. No wonder that successive generations of English undergraduates have failed to respond to the human excellence or social charm, of his hero or paragon, described as ‘the big-souled’ or ‘magnificent man’. Similarly thePoliticsis a book in which it needs a trained reader, already familiar with Greek life, to pick out the universal from the particular and draw his own modern conclusions. But when you have read, say, the first book of thePoliticsin this spirit, when you have ruled out from what is said of the State all that pertains solely to the City, when you have made allowance for the hazardous biological, psychological, and sociological generalizations (‘man is more of a political animal than bees or other gregarious animals’, ‘he who is by nature not his own but another’s and not a man is by nature a slave’, ‘the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part’), based, as the examples show, on the embryonic condition of those sciences at the time, you have a large residuum of practical wisdom that is and will remain of value to the modern world.
Let us look for a moment at one element in this legacy, for it has recently become a subject of much controversy—Aristotle’s conception of the State, and of its relation to other social and political groupings. As has already been said, Greekpolitical thought is open to criticism for unduly neglecting the claim of the individual. Aristotle is less open to this indictment than either of his great compeers: he does indeed allow, for certain favoured individuals, an inner or ‘theoretical’ life, as he calls it, remote from the concerns of the City-State and almost, except for its excessive intellectuality, recalling the monastic ideal of the Middle Age. But this is only for the fewest. Nevertheless it involved the admission that behind the citizen remained the man, who might conceivably on occasion have his rights, that ‘political science’, as he says, ‘does not make men’, as Thucydides regarded Athens as making Athenians, ‘but receives them from nature and uses them’. And the justification for this taking over of human nature by the state, this subjection of man over the whole or part of his nature, is clearly set forth. It is that ‘man when perfected [i. e. taken over and educated by the State] is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all’, or, as he puts it in another place, the man who does not participate in State or city life is ‘either a beast or a god’—more likely (as the order of the words indicates) the former. In other words, it is law and justice, not, as Thucydides would have it, an exaltation of the spirit to its highest power, nor, as Plato preaches, some organic identification between the inner life of the soul and the outward order of society, which is the basis and justification of politics. ‘It is justice’, he says, using the word in a strict, not a platonic or metaphysical sense, ‘which is the bond of men in states, and the administration of justice, i. e. the determination of what is just, which is the principle of order in political society.’
Now, with this principle clearly laid down, and with the claim of the individual thus partially or at least implicitly recognized, it is easier to understand Aristotle’sintransigeantattitude towards the claims of associations other than the state, a point on which much recent controversy has turned. ‘Every state’, so hisPoliticsopen, ‘is an association of some kind, and every association is established with a view to somegood.... But if all associations aim at some good, the state, or political association,which is the highest of all and which embraces all the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good.’ In other words, in cases of conflict of allegiance between the state or political association and some other form of grouping, whether Church or Trade Union or professional or humanitarian organization, the claim of the state must take precedence.
This doctrine has been much attacked as involving an indefensible ‘State absolutism’, a denial of ‘personality’ to lesser groups, even as a negation of the right to lesser loyalties. Mr. Figgis, in a number of suggestive, if unconvincing, writings, has recalled the theories of the Jesuits and other anti-state minorities and protestants on this subject, reinforcing them from the Nonconformist and Trade Union theories or inclinations of our own day: and a whole school of younger ‘progressive’ intellectuals made bold to follow him. The assault on state-sovereignty has, however, already been brought to a standstill by the impact of fact. Strange as it may appear in an age of sectarianism and rebel theorizing, the war revealed the truth that the mass of mankind, now as in ancient Greece, respond at need to the call of citizenship: that when the cry goes up summoning each and all to the tents, it is not this or that little tabernacle but the protecting shelter of the larger and more truly representative state organizations to which men flock; that the sects and conventicles which have fed the enthusiasm and provided the activity of leisure hours cannot maintain their appeal when the whole fabric of our society is in danger. Exclusive of those who refused allegiance on true grounds of conscience, and the despicable remnant who shammed a similar conviction, the number of Englishmen who definitely set allegiance to some other political or social grouping before allegiance to the state was surprisingly small. So little are fundamental loyalties, or the dictates of an unanalysed common sense, affected, in this country, by fine-spun theories and arguments.
But what we called commonsense views, after all, can be analysed and ought to be analysed. And there is a very sound and practical reason, as Aristotle knew, why men prefer the state to lesser associations. It is because the state leaves them more free. Those who talk of state-absolutism are ignoring the simple truth that there is no tyranny like the tyranny of near neighbours. The smaller the group the tighter its stranglehold over your life and activities. Groups and lesser loyalties are highly necessary, and indeed desirable, in our modern large-scale society; but they involve men, and especially weak-willed and thoughtless men, in far greater dangers than their larger citizenship. What the confessional at its worst may be to a woman, professional or business or other loyalty may be to a man. The modern world is full of men who have bartered away their integrity of soul to preserve the unity of the party or the unbroken tradition of the organization or the interests of the trade or even the existence of the business. If the secrets of all hearts could be revealed, how many high officials and dignitaries in Church and Party, in Trade Union and employers’ federation, would be discovered to be thinking and even saying in private what their lesser loyalties forbid them to proclaim in public to their fellow-guildsmen. The state, in its larger field, may sometimes commit terrible blunders and even crimes; but at least, in these days of large-scale government, it does not expose its citizens to the daily falsehoods and hypocrisies, to the insidious clogging of the wheels of progress with the grit of petty personal considerations, which seem inevitable in the life of the smaller groupings of men and women. Seen in this light, the state stands out as the guardian not only of justice but of freedom, of an inner freedom of soul and spirit with which the professional and syndicalist attitude of mind is so often in flagrant, if unavowed, contradiction. If all this was not visible to Aristotle when he penned his immortal opening paragraph of thePolitics, he is at least entitled to the credit of having laid his doctrine of state-sovereignty on a foundationso sure that over twenty centuries of discussion from the Stoics and Cynics, through Augustine and Dante, down to Rousseau and Lenin, have not been able to shake it. Against Church and Soviet, as against sage and hermit and anarchist, the territorial state still holds its own over the whole civilized world; and the latest construction of idealism at Geneva, misnamed though it is, is but an association of such states, far larger indeed in average size, but of the same kind and composition as those upon which the Greek philosopher fixed as the true object of political study and the most effective and enduring agency for securing a good life for civilized mankind.
What are the chief and most enduring thoughts which contact with the Greek political thinkers leaves with us? They are surely twofold, the first concerning the material of politics, the second concerning the men and women of to-day who are called to be citizens. Public affairs, we feel, so far from being a tiresome preoccupation or ‘a dirty business’ are one of the great permanent interests of the race: if they were not too trivial or too debasing for great artists like Thucydides and Plato, we need not fear lest they be too trivial or debasing for ourselves. And if they are not beneath our study, neither should they elude it by being enwrapped in clouds of rhetoric or in the cotton-wool of sentimentality. The Greeks should teach us, once and for all, that the common affairs of mankind are matter to think about as well as to feel about. What distinguishes what we call a ‘good’ statesman and a ‘public-spirited’ citizen from their less truly political colleagues is not that they have warmer feelings—there are as many affectionate sons and loving husbands among the tools of politics as among the elect—but the fact that by a resolute use of the related powers of intellect and imagination they have been able to raise their feelings on to a higher plane and to face great issues with a mind attuned, not to the familiar appeal of hearth and home, but to the grander and more difficult music of humanity. The psychologists are teaching us, in the individual life, how we can ‘sublimate’ our emotions,when life denies them an outlet on the level of our desire, by raising them to a higher and more rarified range of feeling and action. As we can sublimate our love of individuals, so we can sublimate our love of country, not quenching or denying our patriotism, but consciously dividing and apportioning it. We must learn to preserve for our blood and nation that precious part of our gift of service which, just because it is intimate and of the family, cannot be offered directly to humanity; but we must learn also the more difficult lesson of transferring to the international stage, the arena where men, because they are men, labour at common tasks and seek a greatest common measure of co-operation, all these interests and loyalties which safely and rightly belong there. This is the claim and call of the modern Caesar, whether his separate capitals remain, as they are to-day, in London, Paris, Washington, and the other centres of state-sovereignty, or whether mankind can rise, if not in our own day, to the level of a single allegiance. We shall neglect that call at our peril. For, unless we render unto Caesar that which is properly his, unless we discard our unthinking and divisive nationalisms, our noble sentiments will avail us nothing and, in the civil war of the angels, patriotism against patriotism, Mammon and Beelzebub will come into their own. In these days of large-scale organization and mammoth syndicates, it takes a Caesar, a multi-national government, to keep a giant trust at bay. Had the land of Washington and Lincoln been broken up into separate governments instead of drawn together into a single territory of United States, private interests would have taken and defeated each government in detail, and freedom would have vanished from the land—unless indeed, in some conflict of devil with devil, of bank and railroad against oil and lumber, the angels crept once more into their own. The same reasoning applies to the smaller governments in other continents to-day. Local patriotism is but a stripling David in face of the Goliaths of modern commercialism. More and more men will be driven, if not by reason, then by exploitation andsuffering, to learn the lesson of what is still mistakenly thought of as imperialism until they find themselves crying out, with the apostle of the Gentiles, who fought his own battle against nationalism, ‘I appeal unto Caesar.’
But the Greeks have a message for us not only as regards the material of our politics but as regards ourselves. What can we do to help humanity forward in these problems of its common affairs? The age of Utopia-dreams is over. We know now that modern science has made the world one place and that social salvation is not to be found, as the early socialists imagined, by fleeing from the haunts of men and founding some model city in a wilderness. We must make our contribution here and now, in the drab world in which fate has set us. If we cannot hope to turn it into Utopia, let us at least make it as much like Utopia as we can. This, after all, is Plato’s message, even in the most idealistic and visionary of his books. The famous passage is worth quoting in detail:
‘Then do you think any less of our argument because we cannot prove that it is possible to found a state of the kind we have described?’‘Surely not,’ he said....‘Then do not compel me to show that what we have decided in our argument could in all respects be reproduced in experience. If we manage to discover how a state could be organized in any close correspondence to our description, then you must allow that we have discovered that your commands could be realized. Will you not be content with that? I certainly should be.’‘Yes, I will,’ he said.’Then next apparently we must try to discover ... what is the smallest change by which a state might arrive at this manner of constitution....’‘Most certainly,’ he said.‘Well, there is one change,’ I said, ‘which I think we could certainly prove would bring about the revolution. It is certainly neither a small nor an easy change, but it is possible.’‘What is it?’ he said.‘Now,’ I said, ‘I am at the very topic which we likened to the greatest wave. Spoken, however, it shall be, even thoughit is likely to deluge me with laughter and ridicule.... Consider then what I am about to say.’‘Say on,’ he said.‘Unless,’ I said, ‘lovers of wisdom bear sovereign rule in states, or those who are now called sovereigns and governors become sincere and capable lovers of wisdom, and government and love of wisdom be brought together, and unless the numerous natures who at present pursue either government or wisdom, the one to the exclusion of the other, be forcibly debarred from this behaviour, there will be no respite from evil, my dear Glaucon, for states, nor, I fancy, for humanity; nor will this constitution, which we have just described in our argument, come to that realization which is possible for it and see the light of day. It is this which has for so long made me hesitate to speak. I saw how paradoxical it would sound. For it is given to few to perceive that no other constitution could ever bring happiness either to states or individuals.’
‘Then do you think any less of our argument because we cannot prove that it is possible to found a state of the kind we have described?’
‘Surely not,’ he said....
‘Then do not compel me to show that what we have decided in our argument could in all respects be reproduced in experience. If we manage to discover how a state could be organized in any close correspondence to our description, then you must allow that we have discovered that your commands could be realized. Will you not be content with that? I certainly should be.’
‘Yes, I will,’ he said.
’Then next apparently we must try to discover ... what is the smallest change by which a state might arrive at this manner of constitution....’
‘Most certainly,’ he said.
‘Well, there is one change,’ I said, ‘which I think we could certainly prove would bring about the revolution. It is certainly neither a small nor an easy change, but it is possible.’
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘I am at the very topic which we likened to the greatest wave. Spoken, however, it shall be, even thoughit is likely to deluge me with laughter and ridicule.... Consider then what I am about to say.’
‘Say on,’ he said.
‘Unless,’ I said, ‘lovers of wisdom bear sovereign rule in states, or those who are now called sovereigns and governors become sincere and capable lovers of wisdom, and government and love of wisdom be brought together, and unless the numerous natures who at present pursue either government or wisdom, the one to the exclusion of the other, be forcibly debarred from this behaviour, there will be no respite from evil, my dear Glaucon, for states, nor, I fancy, for humanity; nor will this constitution, which we have just described in our argument, come to that realization which is possible for it and see the light of day. It is this which has for so long made me hesitate to speak. I saw how paradoxical it would sound. For it is given to few to perceive that no other constitution could ever bring happiness either to states or individuals.’
Thus far the philosopher of antiquity. His words are sometimes interpreted as a cry for some philosopher-genius to take the task of government out of our too feeble grasp. But that is not his message for us. The age in which philosopher-emperors were possible has passed beyond recall. To us Plato’s words are an appeal to become, each and all of us, in our own sphere, lovers of wisdom according to the measure of our ability. If we would amend the world around us—and it is in sore need of amendment—our first duty is to eschew falsehood and to follow truth in our own lives, in our thoughts and actions. Revolutions spring not from without inwards but from within outwards; and it is often when the external world seems most sick and sorrowful, when selfishness and irresponsibility sit enthroned in the world’s seats of government, that the power of truth is most active in the silent region of the soul, strengthening it in order that it may issue forth once again to impress man’s unconquerable purpose of order, justice and freedom upon the recalcitrant material which forms the stuff of men’s common problems on this small globe of ours.
A. E. Zimmern.
Amid the superficialities and struggles of the world around us, it is refreshing to turn back for a moment to the mellow wisdom of Matthew Arnold; and I will start with a quotation fromLiterature and Dogma: ‘As well imagine a man with a sense for sculpture not cultivating it by the help of the remains of Greek art, or a man with a sense for poetry not cultivating it by the help of Homer and Shakespeare, as a man with a sense for conduct not cultivating it by the help of the Bible.’ To Arnold the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Greek art, are the great and eternal classics, which for all time must be the stimulus and the models for the greatest of human achievements. Beyond doubt in the fifty years since Arnold wrote there has been a marked drift away from classics of every kind. To acknowledge classics at all seems a survival of the spirit of aristocracy. We are convinced that we are better than our fathers, and must break away from their tutelage. In some degree this arises out of the unrest and nervous strain produced by the great war. But it does not come only from nervous tension. It is a definite tendency of society, which has to be considered on its merits by all who feel called on to take a share in the world movement. We cannot ignore those who are drifting away from the settled anchorages, or we run the risk of being ignored ourselves.
The task has fallen to me to try to give reasons why Greek art has still a claim on our attention. Among Englishmen the appreciation of art never has been and never can be as keen as the appreciation of poetry and philosophy. But on the other hand I think it can be shown that in the field of art ourdebt to Greece is even greater than in the field of philosophy and poetry. For in these latter we have a certain national genius, and have produced classics recognized through Europe. But in art our achievements have been but moderate; and at the present time a living sense of art is probably rarer among us than in any highly civilized country except America.
I will begin with a bold assertion, which I hope to justify as we proceed. But for ancient Greece, the art of Europe would to-day be on much the same level as the fantastic and degraded art of India. And but for the continued influence of Greek art, that of Europe would continually be in danger of drifting into chaotic extravagance.
In the century before the Persian wars of 500-480B. C., Greece, both Ionian and Dorian, was throwing out fresh shoots of life in every direction, breaking through the crust of archaic convention, producing a new standard of excellence, in poetry, in philosophy, in history, and in art. In every province, morals, intellect, imagination, Greece was striking out, to the right and the left. And in the century after the Persian wars, she reaped the full harvest of her splendid sowing, and produced the masterpieces which have remained ever since memorable, to the study of which each generation recurs, and whence it learns of what human nature is capable.
After 400B. C.there was not, as many suppose, a sudden decline in the quality of artistic production. Many of the works of the later centuries were in their way almost unsurpassable. The philosophy of Aristotle, the poetry of Theocritus, such statues as the Aphrodite of Melos and the Victory of Samothrace, are great lights for all time. But the works of maturity have seldom the charm which marks those which are full of the optimism and promise of youth.
Ruskin has written an admirable work on the Seven Lamps of Architecture, a work which, though it sometimes passes into extravagance, is full of suggestion and even inspiration.It seems to me strange that while the economic views of Ruskin, full of generosity, but also wanting in measure and any basis of fact, should still be current among us, his writings on art, in which his genius had full course, should be comparatively neglected. However that may be, as one who has been greatly stimulated by those writings, I propose to try to produce a faint echo of one of them by speaking successively of the lamps of Greek art, lamps which give us light and serve to show our way. I find in Greek art eight notable features: (1) Humanism, (2) Simplicity, (3) Balance and Measure, (4) Naturalism, (5) Idealism, (6) Patience, (7) Joy, (8) Fellowship.
As my space is closely limited I cannot attempt to develop the subject of Greek art in all its provinces and in all its bearings. I must limit myself to the art of sculpture, the most characteristic branch, and the only branch which has left us sufficient materials for the formation of a satisfactory notion. And I must limit myself further to such of the sculpture as represents the human form. In the representation of some animals, such as the horse, the later Greeks produced some wonderful examples, but in the depiction of animals other peoples have rivalled them, whereas in the depiction of men and women they stand alone.
Humanism.Three great discoveries lay open to the awakened spirit of man, when he began to realize and reflect upon his surroundings. The first was the discovery of God, which was mainly the work of the Prophets of Israel, though no doubt Greece added much on the intellectual side; and the religions both of Judaea and Greece were carried to a higher point by Christianity. The second was the discovery of man himself, which was in all essentials the great work of Greek thinkers and writers. The third, begun in Greece, has been carriedvery much farther in modern times, the discovery of nature and her laws. I think that reflection will show that of the three discoveries the last is the least important, for though it has vastly changed the habits and the surroundings of mankind, and has offered him long vistas of material progress, yet it has not changed his nature much, nor added greatly to his happiness. We know how the delights of thought, of art, of poetry and music have overcome barbarism and given to multitudes a new pleasure in existence. But the results of scientific progress have not as yet done all that we might have hoped for mankind. Every great discovery in physical science has been turned, primarily, not to the welfare but to the destruction of mankind. The ocean-going ship is tracked by the submarine; air-ships are used to drop bombs on defenceless cities, some of the most notable achievements of chemistry are poison-gases. We may of course hope that this is but a passing phase, and that brighter times are before us. But I venture to suggest that the true road to progress cannot be found unless we preserve the Jewish and the Greek points of view. We must not lose sight of the ethical and religious bearing of science, and not be content with merely regarding it as a means of exploiting the material world. Instead of harnessing the forces of nature to true human ends, to happiness, we have allowed them to be used for any purpose, moral or immoral, by any one who by cunning or pushing has gained control of them. We have dehumanized the world, and allowed it to ride rough shod over human life.
The discovery of man and his capacities, then, is the great gift of Greece to the world. There were epics before theIliad, but no epic full of charm, of tragedy, of tears and laughter. There were philosophers before Socrates; but they were busied in trying to find the physical constituents of the world. Socrates took up the motto of Delphi ‘Know thyself’, and became the progenitor of all who study the nature of duty andof happiness. In the same way there was much art in the world before the rise of Greece, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Crete. But it was not a humanist art. It represented the worship of the Gods, battles, and sieges, the life of the fields. But the human figures in these scenes were conventional: there was nothing in them to stir the finer feelings, to produce a love of beauty, to raise man above the ordinary daily level. The Greeks knew of earlier works of art; but they declined to be seduced, as the Phoenicians and Etruscans were seduced, into a facile imitation of them. They realized, no doubt subconsciously rather than consciously, that they were called to set forth a new and human art, and had in them powers which could produce it. They began a process which developed with astonishing rapidity, and which cannot cease, unless, as seems now not impossible, barbarism reinvades a weary world.
‘Man is the measure of all things’ is the doctrine ascribed to Protagoras of Abdera, which shocked the people of Athens and is attacked by Plato in his more constructive mood. It is a doctrine lending itself to abuse, and still more to caricature; but it is really the teaching of Socrates no less than of Protagoras; and it has held its own from his times to those of the Utilitarians and Pragmatists. Certainly it is at the basis of the Greek view of life, in which man with his feelings, his faculties, and his endeavours, stands in the foreground, and all else appears as a vague background.
It was quite natural that as the Greek thinkers interpreted all experience in relation to human powers and faculties, so the artists of Greece thought of all nature in terms of the human body. Thus while the stern monotheism of later Israel absolutely prohibited the representation in art of any living thing, and especially of man, Greek artists entirely devoted themselves to such representation.
The great result of the working of the spirit of humanism in Greek art was the representation of the Gods in human form.There is still prevalent among us a survival of the Jewish hatred of the representation of the divine element in the world by the mimetic art of sculpture. We still repeat, day by day, the Jewish commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image’. Now I am not going to find any fault with the intense feeling of iconoclasm, which was one of the mainsprings of Jewish religion. I have no doubt that in the development of that religion, hatred and contempt for the idols of the surrounding nations was of inestimable value to the race. The struggle, ever renewed, against the invasion of idolatry was necessary to the development of that pure prophetic religion which it was the highest mission of the Jewish race to set forth and propagate in the world. I would not even speak against the echoes of it in the modern world. To the Moslems of our days, as to the ancient Jews, it appears to be a necessary corollary of any lofty and spiritual conception of the divine. And when we read of the destruction of religious images by our Puritan ancestors we cannot withhold from them an inner sympathy. The hatred of images was one side of the pure and passionate belief in spiritual religion which it was the mission of the great Reformers to revive and propagate in Europe.
But it is possible to appreciate this side of religion without being blind to other aspects of it. Our religion comes not only from Judaea, but also from Greece. The Jewish passion for the divine righteousness lies at its roots. But that passion is consistent with narrowness, bigotry, inhumanity. For the modifications of it which come from the working of the spirit of humanism we have to turn to the Hellenes, for the feeling of the likeness in nature between God and man, the love of the beauty of the created works of God, the joy in whatever is sweet, whatever is comely, whatever is charming. The beauty and majesty of God appealed to the Greek, as the unapproachable transcendence of God inspired the Jew.
So it fell to the Greek artists to try to set forth in marbleand in bronze the gentler and more social side of the divine nature. There is a sweet reasonableness in the words of Maximus of Tyre: ‘The Greek custom is to represent the Gods by the most beautiful things on earth—pure material, the human form, consummate art. The idea of those who make divine images in human shape is quite reasonable, since the spirit of man is nearest of all things to God and most godlike.’
The whole history of Greek sculpture, from its rise in the sixth century to its decline in the third, is inspired by this desire to represent the divine by the most beautiful things on earth. The sculpture of the great nations of the East, Egypt and Assyria, is full of figures of the Gods, and of scenes of worship. But these figures do not rise above the human. The gods appear as conventional figures, mere ordinary men and women. And to distinguish them from mortal beings, the artists of the East proceed in the manner of symbolism: they make additions to the human types which are to signify the divine attributes, but do not really embody them. They add wings to represent the swiftness of the deity, wings not meant for actual flight, but only symbols of rapid motion. They represent them as victoriously overthrowing wild beasts and monsters, which stand for the powers of evil, ever bent on thwarting their action. In some of their most archaic works, the Greeks fall into the imitation of this way. They represent Apollo flanked by two vanquished griffins, Artemis with wings, and holding in her hands captive lions. But their artistic sense soon revolted against such crude and clumsy ways of representation. They began to try to represent the divine character of their deities, not by arbitrary and external symbols, but by modifying the human types in the direction of the ideal. Sometimes, indeed, in later art we find survivals of early symbolism in the form of an attribute. Hermes is still winged, but the wings are transferred to his cap or his boots. Zeus may still carry the thunderbolt, the symbol of his rule over thestorm. Apollo may be still radiate, combining human form with the rays which proceed from the visible sun.
But these are only survivals, and do not affect the process, carried on by artist after artist and school after school, by which the gods absorbed ever more fully the qualities of the most perfect manhood. Zeus, as father of gods and men, is an idealization of the human father, combining justice and dignity with benevolence and kindness; Athena becomes the embodiment of the divine reason and wisdom, perhaps the most fully idealized of all the forms of the gods, since this armed and victorious virgin with wisdom seated on her brow had little in common with the secluded and domestic women of her city of Athens. Apollo has not the muscles of the trained athlete, but in his nobleness of countenance and perfect symmetry of shape, he stands for all that a young man might grow towards by self-restraint and aspiration. At a somewhat lower level Herakles bears the form of the wrestler, admirably proportioned but more powerful than even the greatest of athletes; Hermes is the ideal runner, every muscle adapted to swift and lithe movements.
Thus in the types of the gods which were produced when Greek art was at its best we have a series of supermen and superwomen who represent the highest and best to which mortals can hope to attain, types embodying the highest perfection of body and mind. The influence of those types has gone on from century to century, never in the darkest ages wholly forgotten, and serving at all times to redeem human nature from foulness and degradation. All through the history of art they have been acting as a raising and purifying element.
It was not until the decay of the Olympic religion in the fourth century that these types fell to a lower level. The sense of beauty in the artist remained as keen as ever, the technique of art even improved, but the religion of humanism was debased by less noble tendencies, and the gods took on too much notthe nature of man as he might become, but the form of man as he actually is in the world.
Not the forms only of the gods, but the history of their appearances on earth and their dealings with mankind found expression in painting and relief. Plato, as we know, condemned the myths of the gods as unworthy from the ethical point of view. But we shall misjudge myths if we suppose that they were actually believed in, or served to regulate conduct. What they did was greatly to further the picturesqueness and joy of life. And when they became less important in cultus they survived in poetry, and served greatly to temper the harsh prose of actual life. We must remember that some of the Jewish tales which have so much interested and charmed our forefathers are hardly to be defended on strict ethical principles, yet they have been a leavening and widening influence. Who would wish to expel from churches the stories of Adam and Eve, of Joseph and David, on grounds of ethical purism? The life of the many is not so highly decorated that we should wish to expel from it elements so pleasing.
As the Gods tend more and more to take forms beautiful but entirely human, so do the notable features of the landscape, rivers and mountains, sky and sea, take on themselves human shape. Sun and moon, wind and storm, are completely humanized. The society of Olympus, the powers manifested in nature, appear in sculpture as a human society, but of more than human beauty and dignity. And such rendering of the gods leads, as we shall presently see, to an ideal rendering of men. As the gods come down in the likeness of men, so men are raised to the level of the gods. Hence the intrinsic and inexhaustible idealism of Greek sculpture, to which I will presently return.
Few works of art more fully and more attractively show the anthropomorphic tendency of Greek art than the sunrise vase of the British Museum. It shows us the whole morningpageant of nature humanized. On the right appears the sun-god driving a chariot of winged horses, who rise out of the sea. Before him the stars, represented as youths, plunge into the water. To the left is the moon-goddess on horseback, setting behind the hills, on one of which is a mountain-god in an attitude of surprise. Before the sun hurries Eos, the winged dawn, who by a bold citation of mythology is represented as pursuing Cephalus the hunter, of whom she was enamoured. We have the features of the daybreak; but they are all represented not as facts of nature, but in their influence on Gods and men.
I do not figure this vase, as I have already done so in myPrinciples of Greek Art; but instead I give an almost equally beautiful representation from the lid of a toilet vase in the Sabouroff Collection at Berlin. We have here the same three figures of the sun-god, the moon-goddess, and the winged dawn, who, however, in this case is driving a chariot. The form of the whole group and the radiate symbol in the midst stands admirably for the vault of heaven (Fig. 1).