Now, this is it: granted that we go all round
experimenting, and get it done at last, too, I do not believe we shall
have solved the elementary question, whether _any_ of them has the
much-desired; perhaps they are all wrong together.
experimenting, and get it done at last, too, I do not believe we shall
have solved the elementary question, whether _any_ of them has the
much-desired; perhaps they are all wrong together.
Lucian
A good plan; let us try it.
_Ly_. Very well, which shall we start with? However, that will make no
difference; we may begin with whomsoever we fancy, Pythagoras, say; how
long shall we allow for learning the whole of Pythagoreanism? and do
not omit the five years of silence; including those, I suppose thirty
altogether will do; or, if you do not like that, still we cannot put it
lower than twenty.
_Her_. Put it at that.
_Ly_. Plato will come next with as many more, and then Aristotle cannot do
with less.
_Her_. No.
_Ly_. As to Chrysippus, I need not ask you; you have told me already that
forty is barely enough.
_Her_. That is so.
_Ly_. And we have still Epicurus and the others. I am not taking high
figures, either, as you will see if you reflect upon the number of
octogenarian Stoics, Epicureans, and Platonists who confess that they
have not yet completely mastered their own systems. Or, if they did not
confess it, at any rate Chrysippus, Aristotle, and Plato would for them;
still more Socrates, who is as good as they; he used to proclaim to all
comers that, so far from knowing all, he knew nothing whatever, except
the one fact of his own ignorance. Well, let us add up. Twenty years we
gave Pythagoras, the same to Plato, and so to the others. What will the
total come to, if we assume only ten schools?
_Her_. Over two hundred years.
_Ly_. Shall we deduct a quarter of that, and say a hundred and fifty
will do? or can we halve it?
_Her_. You must decide about that; but I see that, at the best, it
will be but few who will get through the course, though they begin
philosophy and life together.
_Ly_. In that case, what are we to do? Must we withdraw our previous
admission, that no one can choose the best out of many without trying
all? We thought selection without experiment a method of inquiry
savouring more of divination than of judgement, did we not?
_Her_. Yes.
_Ly_. Without such longevity, then, it is absolutely impossible for
us to complete the series--experiment, selection, philosophy, Happiness.
Yet anything short of that is a mere game of blindman's-buff; whatever we
knock against and get hold of we shall be taking for the thing we want,
because the truth is hidden from us. Even if a mere piece of luck brings
us straight to it, we shall have no grounded conviction of our success;
there are so many similar objects, all claiming to be the real thing.
_Her_. Ah, Lycinus, your arguments seem to me more or less logical,
but--but--to be frank with you--I hate to hear you going through them and
wasting your acuteness. I suspect it was in an evil hour that I came out
to-day and met you; my hopes were almost in my grasp; and now here are
you plunging me into a slough of despond with your demonstrations; truth
is undiscoverable, if the search needs so many years.
_Ly_. My dear friend, it would be much fairer to blame your parents,
Menecrates and whatever your mother's name may have been--or indeed to go
still further back to human nature. Why did not they make you a Tithonus
for years and durability? instead of which, they limited you like other
men to a century at the outside. As for me, I have only been helping you
to deduce results.
_Her_. No, no; it is just your way; you want to crow over me; you
detest philosophy--I cannot tell why--and poke fun at philosophers.
_Ly_. Hermotimus, I cannot show what truth is, so well as wise people like
you and your professor; but one thing I do know about it, and that is that
it is not pleasant to the ear; falsehood is far more esteemed; it is
prettier, and therefore pleasanter; while Truth, conscious of its purity,
blurts out downright remarks, and offends people. Here is a case of it:
even you are offended with me for having discovered (with your assistance)
how this matter really stands, and shown that our common object is hard of
attainment. Suppose you had been in love with a statue and hoped to win
it, under the impression that it was human, and I had realized that it was
only bronze or marble, and given you a friendly warning that your passion
was hopeless--you might just as well have thought I was your enemy then,
because I would not leave you a prey to extravagant and impracticable
delusions.
_Her_. Well, well; are we to give up philosophy, then, and idle our
lives away like the common herd?
_Ly_. What have I said to justify that? My point is not that we are
to give up philosophy, but this: whereas we are to pursue philosophy, and
whereas there are many roads, each professing to lead to philosophy and
Virtue, and whereas it is uncertain which of these is the true road,
therefore the selection shall be made with care. Now we resolved that it
was impossible out of many offers to choose the best, unless a man should
try all in turn; and then the process of trial was found to be long. What
do _you_ propose? --It is the old question again. To follow and join
philosophic forces with whomsoever you first fall in with, and let him
thank Fortune for his proselyte?
_Her_. What is the good of answering your questions? You say no one
can judge for himself, unless he can devote the life of a phoenix to
going round experimenting; and on the other hand you refuse to trust
either previous experience or the multitude of favourable testimony.
_Ly_. Where is your multitude, with knowledge and experience _of all_?
Never mind the multitude; one man who answers the description will do for
me. But if you mean the people who do not know, their mere numbers will
never persuade me, as long as they pronounce upon all from knowledge of,
at the most, one.
_Her_. Are you the only man who has found the truth, and are all the
people who go in for philosophy fools?
_Ly_. You wrong me, Hermotimus, when you imply that I put myself
above other people, or rank myself at all with those who know; you forget
what I said; I never claimed to know the truth better than others, only
confessed that I was as ignorant of it as every one else.
_Her_. Well, but, Lycinus, it may be all very well to insist on going the
round, testing the various statements, and eschewing any other method of
choice; but it is ridiculous to spend so many years on each experiment, as
though there were no such thing as judging from samples. That device seems
to me quite simple, and economical of time. There is a story that some
sculptor, Phidias, I think, seeing a single claw, calculated from it the
size of the lion, if it were modelled proportionally. So, if some one were
to let you see a man's hand, keeping the rest of his body concealed, you
would know at once that what was behind was a man, without seeing his
whole body. Well, it is easy to find out in a few hours the essential
points of the various doctrines, and, for selecting the best, these will
suffice, without any of your scrupulous exacting investigation.
_Ly_. Upon my word, how confident you are in your faculty of divining the
whole from the parts! and yet I remember being told just the
opposite--that knowledge of the whole includes that of the parts, but not
vice versa. Well, but tell me; when Phidias saw the claw, would he ever
have known it for a lion's, if he had never seen a lion? Could you have
said the hand was a man's, if you had never known or seen a man? Why are
you dumb? Let me make the only possible answer for you--that you could
_not_; I am afraid Phidias has modelled his lion all for nothing;
for it proves to be neither here nor there. What resemblance is there?
What enabled you and Phidias to recognize the parts was just your
knowledge of the wholes--the lion and the man. But in philosophy--the
Stoic, for instance--how will the part reveal the other parts to you, or
how can you conclude that they are beautiful? You do not know the whole
to which the parts belong.
Then you say it is easy to hear in a few hours the essentials of all
philosophy--meaning, I suppose, their principles and ends, their accounts
of God and the soul, their views on the material and the immaterial,
their respective identification of pleasure or goodness with the
desirable and the Happy; well, it is easy--it is quite a trifle--to
deliver an opinion after such a hearing; but really to _know_ where
the truth lies will be work, I suspect, not for a few hours, but for a
good many days. If not, what can have induced them to enlarge on these
rudiments to the tune of a hundred or a thousand volumes apiece? I
imagine they only wanted to establish the truth of those few points which
you thought so easy and intelligible. If you refuse to spend your time on
a conscientious selection, after personal examination of each and all, in
sum and in detail, it seems to me you will still want your soothsayer to
choose the best for you. It would be a fine short cut, with no
meanderings or wastings of time, if you sent for him, listened to the
summaries, and killed a victim at the end of each; by indicating in its
liver which is the philosophy for you, the God would save you a pack of
troubles.
Or, if you like, I can suggest a still simpler way; you need not shed all
this blood in sacrifice to any God, nor employ an expensive priest; put
into an urn a set of tablets, each marked with a philosopher's name, and
tell a boy (he must be quite young, and his parents both be living) to go
to the urn and pick out whichever tablet his hand first touches; and live
a philosopher ever after, of the school which then comes out triumphant.
_Her_. This is buffoonery, Lycinus; I should not have expected it of you.
Now tell me, did you ever buy wine? in person, I mean.
_Ly_. Many a time.
_Her_. Well, did you go to every wine vault in town, one after another,
tasting and comparing?
_Ly_. Certainly not.
_Her_. No; as soon as you find good sound stuff, you have only to get it
sent home.
_Ly_. To be sure.
_Her_. And from that little taste you could have answered for the quality
of the whole?
_Ly_. Yes.
_Her_. Now suppose you had gone to all the wine-merchants and said: I want
to buy a pint of wine; I must ask you, gentlemen, to let me drink the
whole of the cask which each of you has on tap; after that exhaustive
sampling, I shall know which of you keeps the best wine, and is the man
for my money. If you had talked like that, they might have laughed at
you, and, if you persisted in worrying them, have tried how you liked
water.
_Ly_. Yes; it would be no more than my deserts.
_Her_. Apply this to philosophy. What need to drink the whole cask,
when you can judge the quality of the whole from one little taste?
_Ly_. What an adept at evasion you are, Hermotimus! How you slip
through one's fingers! However, it is all the better this time; you
fancied yourself out, but you have flopped into the net again.
_Her_. What do you mean?
_Ly_. You take a thing whose nature is self-evident and universally
admitted, like wine, and argue from it to perfectly unlike things, whose
nature is obscure and generally debated. In fact I cannot tell what
analogy you find between philosophy and wine; there is just one, indeed:
philosophers and wine-merchants both sell their wares, mostly resorting
to adulteration, fraud, and false measures, in the process. But let us
look into your real meaning. You say all the wine in a cask is of the
same quality--which is perfectly reasonable; further, that any one who
draws and tastes quite a small quantity will know at once the quality of
the whole--of which the same may be said; I should never have thought of
objecting. But mark what comes now: do philosophy and its professors
(your own, for instance) give you every day the same remarks on the same
subjects, or do they vary them? They vary them a great deal, friend; you
would never have stuck to your master through your twenty years'
wandering--quite a philosophic Odyssey--if he had always said the same
thing; one hearing would have been enough.
_Her_. So it would.
_Ly_. How could you have known the whole of his doctrines from the
first taste, then? They were not homogeneous, like the wine; novelty
to-day, and novelty to-morrow on the top of it. Consequently, dear friend,
short of drinking the whole cask, you might soak to no purpose;
Providence seems to me to have hidden the philosophic Good right at the
bottom, underneath the lees. So you will have to drain it dry, or you
will never get to that nectar for which I know you have so long thirsted.
According to your idea, it has such virtue that, could you once taste it
and swallow the very least drop, you would straightway have perfect
wisdom; so they say the Delphian prophetess is inspired by one draught of
the sacred spring with answers for those who consult the oracle. But it
seems not to be so; you have drunk more than half the cask; yet you told
me you were only beginning yet.
Now see whether this is not a better analogy. You shall keep your
merchant, and your cask; but the contents of the latter are not to be
wine, but assorted seeds. On the top is wheat, next beans, then barley,
below that lentils, then peas--and other kinds yet. You go to buy seeds,
and he takes some wheat out of that layer, and puts it in your hand as a
sample; now, could you tell by looking at that whether the peas were
Sound, the lentils tender, and the beans full?
_Her_. Impossible.
_Ly_. No more can you tell the quality of a philosophy from the first
statements of its professor; it is not uniform, like the wine to which you
compared it, claiming that it must resemble the sample glass; it is
heterogeneous, and it had better not be cursorily tested. If you buy bad
wine, the loss is limited to a few pence; but to rot with the common herd
(in your own words) is not so light a loss. Moreover, your man who wants
to drink up the cask as a preliminary to buying a pint will injure the
merchant, with his dubious sampling; but philosophy knows no such danger;
you may drink your fill, but this cask grows no emptier, and its owner
suffers no loss. It is cut and come again here; we have the converse of
the Danaids' cask; that would not hold what was put into it; it ran
straight through; but here, the more you take away, the more remains.
And I have another similar remark to make about these specimen drops of
philosophy. Do not fancy I am libelling it, if I say it is like hemlock,
aconite, or other deadly poison. Those too, though they have death in
them, will not kill if a man scrapes off the tiniest particle with the
edge of his nail and tastes it; if they are not taken in the right
quantity, the right manner, and the right vehicle, the taker will not
die; you were wrong in claiming that the least possible quantity is
enough to base a generalization on.
_Her_. Oh, have it your own way, Lycinus. Well then, we have got to live a
hundred years, and go through all this trouble? There is no other road to
philosophy?
_Ly_. No, none; and we need not complain; as you very truly said, _ars
longa, vita brevis_. But I do not know what has come over you; you now
make a grievance of it, if you cannot before set of sun develop into a
Chrysippus, a Plato, a Pythagoras.
_Her_. You trap me, and drive me into a corner, Lycinus; yet I never
provoked you; it is all envy, I know, because I have made some progress
in my studies, whereas you have neglected yourself, when you were old
enough to know better.
_Ly_. Seest, then, thy true course? never mind me, but leave me as a
lunatic to my follies, and you go on your way and accomplish what you
have intended all this time.
_Her_. But you are so masterful, you will not let me make a choice, till I
have proved all.
_Ly_. Why, I confess, you will never get me to budge from that. But when
you call me masterful, it seems to me you blame the blameless, as the poet
says; for I am myself being dragged along by reason, until you bring up
some other reason to release me from durance. And here is reason about to
talk more masterfully still, you will see; but I suppose you will
exonerate it, and blame me.
_Her_. What can it be? I am surprised to hear it still has anything in
reserve.
_Ly_. It says that seeing and going through all philosophies will not
suffice, if you want to choose the best of them; the most important
qualification is still missing.
_Her_. Indeed? Which?
_Ly_. Why (bear with me), a critical investigating faculty, mental acumen,
intellectual precision and independence equal to the occasion; without
this, the completest inspection will be useless. Reason insists that the
owner of it must further be allowed ample time; he will collect the rival
candidates together, and make his choice with long, lingering, repeated
deliberation; he will give no heed to the candidate's age, appearance, or
repute for wisdom, but perform his functions like the Areopagites, who
judge in the darkness of night, so that they must regard not the pleaders,
but the pleadings. Then and not till then will you be able to make a sound
choice and live a philosopher.
_Her_. Live? an after life, then. No mortal span will meet your demands;
let me see: go the whole round, examine each with care, on that
examination form a judgement, on that judgement make a choice, on that
choice be a philosopher; so and no otherwise you say the truth may be
found.
_Ly_. I hardly dare tell you--even that is not exhaustive; I am afraid,
after all, the solid basis we thought we had found was imaginary. You know
how fishermen often let down their nets, feel a weight, and pull them up
expecting a great haul; when they have got them up with much toil, behold,
a stone, or an old pot full of sand. I fear our catch is one of those.
_Her_. I don't know what this particular net may be; your nets are all
round me, anyhow.
_Ly_. Well, try and get through; providentially, you are as good a
swimmer as can be.
Now, this is it: granted that we go all round
experimenting, and get it done at last, too, I do not believe we shall
have solved the elementary question, whether _any_ of them has the
much-desired; perhaps they are all wrong together.
_Her_. Oh, come now! not one of _them_ right either?
_Ly_. I cannot tell. Do you think it impossible they may all be deluded,
and the truth be something which none of them has yet found?
_Her_. How can it possibly be?
_Ly_. This way: take a correct number, twenty; suppose, I mean, a man has
twenty beans in his closed hand, and asks ten different persons to guess
the number; they guess seven, five, thirty, ten, fifteen--various numbers,
in short. It is possible, I suppose, that one may be right?
_Her_. Yes.
_Ly_. It is not impossible, however, that they may all guess different
incorrect numbers, and not one of them suggest twenty beans. What say you?
_Her_. It is not impossible.
_Ly_. In the same way, all philosophers are investigating the nature of
Happiness; they get different answers one Pleasure, another Goodness,
and so through the list. It is probable that Happiness _is_ one of these;
but it is also not improbable that it is something else altogether. We
seem to have reversed the proper procedure, and hurried on to the end
before we had found the beginning I suppose we ought first to have
ascertained that the truth has actually been discovered, and that some
philosopher or other has it, and only then to have gone on to the next
question, _which_ of them is to be believed.
_Her_. So that, even if we go all through all philosophy, we shall have no
certainty of finding the truth even then; that is what you say.
_Ly_. Please, please do not ask _me_; once more, apply to reason itself.
Its answer will perhaps be that there can be no certainty yet--as long as
we cannot be sure that it is one or other of the things they say it is.
_Her_. Then, according to you, we shall never finish our quest nor
be philosophers, but have to give it up and live the life of laymen. What
you say amounts to that: philosophy is impossible and inaccessible to a
mere mortal; for you expect the aspirant first to choose the best
philosophy; and you considered that the only guarantee of such choice's
being correct was to go through all philosophy before choosing the
truest. Then in reckoning the number of years required by each you
spurned all limits, extended the thing to several generations, and made
out the quest of truth too long for the individual life; and now you
crown all by proving success doubtful even apart from all that; you say
it is uncertain whether the philosophers have ever found truth at all.
_Ly_. Could you state on oath that they have?
_Her_. Not on oath, no.
_Ly_. And yet there is much that I have intentionally spared you, though
it merits careful examination too.
_Her_. For instance?
_Ly_. Is it not said that, among the professed Stoics, Platonists, and
Epicureans, some do know their respective doctrines, and some do not
(without prejudice to their general respectability)?
_Her_. That is true.
_Ly_. Well, don't you think it will be a troublesome business to
distinguish the first, and know them from the ignorant professors?
_Her_. Very.
_Ly_. So, if you are to recognize the best of the Stoics, you will have to
go to most, if not all, of them, make trial, and appoint the best your
teacher, first going through a course of training to provide you with the
appropriate critical faculty; otherwise you might mistakenly prefer the
wrong one. Now reflect on the additional time this will mean; I purposely
left it out of account, because I was afraid you might be angry; all the
same, it is the most important and necessary thing of all in questions
like this--so uncertain and dubious, I mean. For the discovery of truth,
your one and only sure or well-founded hope is the possession of this
power: you _must_ be able to judge and sift truth from falsehood; you must
have the assayer's sense for sound and true or forged coin; if you could
have come to your examination of doctrines equipped with a technical skill
like that, I should have nothing to say; but without it there is nothing
to prevent their severally leading you by the nose; you will follow a
dangled bunch of carrots like a donkey; or, better still, you will be
water spilt on a table, trained whichever way one chooses with a
finger-tip; or again, a reed growing on a river's bank, bending to every
breath, however gentle the breeze that shakes it in its passage.
If you could find a teacher, now, who understood demonstration and
controversial method, and would impart his knowledge to you, you would be
quit of your troubles; the best and the true would straightway be
revealed to you, at the bidding of this art of demonstration, while
falsehood would stand convicted; you would make your choice with
confidence; judgement would be followed by philosophy; you would reach
your long-desired Happiness, and live in its company, which sums up all
good things.
_Her_. Thank you, Lycinus; that is a much better hearing; there is
more than a glimpse of hope in that. We must surely look for a man of
that sort, to give us discernment, judgement, and, above all, the power
of demonstration; then all will be easy and clear, and not too long. I am
grateful to you already for thinking of this short and excellent plan.
_Ly_. Ah, no, I cannot fairly claim gratitude yet. I have not discovered
or revealed anything that will bring you nearer your hope; on the
contrary, we are further off than ever; it is a case of much cry and
little wool.
_Her_. Bird of ill omen, pessimist, explain yourself.
_Ly_. Why, my friend, even if we find some one who claims to know this art
of demonstration, and is willing to impart it, we shall surely not take
his word for it straight off; we shall look about for another man to
resolve us whether the first is telling the truth. Finding number two, we
shall still be uncertain whether our guarantor really knows the difference
between a good judge and a bad, and shall need a number three to guarantee
number two; for how can we possibly know ourselves how to select the best
judge? You see how far this must go; the thing is unending; its nature
does not allow us to draw the line and put a stop to it; for you will
observe that all the demonstrations that can possibly be thought of are
themselves unfounded and open to dispute; most of them struggle to
establish their certainty by appealing to facts as questionable as
themselves; and the rest produce certain truisms with which they compare,
quite illegitimately, the most speculative theories, and then say they
have demonstrated the latter: our eyes tell us there are altars to the
Gods; therefore there must be Gods; that is the sort of thing.
_Her_. How unkindly you treat me, Lycinus, turning my treasure into
ashes; I suppose all these years are to have been lost labour.
_Ly_. At least your chagrin will be considerably lessened by the
thought that you are not alone in your disappointment; practically all
who pursue philosophy do no more than disquiet themselves in vain. Who
could conceivably go through all the stages I have rehearsed? you admit
the impossibility yourself. As to your present mood, it is that of the
man who cries and curses his luck because he cannot climb the sky, or
plunge into the depths of the sea at Sicily and come up at Cyprus, or
soar on wings and fly within the day from Greece to India; what is
responsible for his discontent is his basing of hopes on a dream-vision
or his own wild fancy, without ever asking whether his aspirations were
realizable or consistent with humanity. You too, my friend, have been
having a long and marvellous dream; and now reason has stuck a pin into
you and startled you out of your sleep; your eyes are only half open yet,
you are reluctant to shake off a sleep which has shown you such fair
visions, and so you scold. It is just the condition of the day-dreamer;
he is rolling in gold, digging up treasure, sitting on his throne, or
somehow at the summit of bliss; for dame _How-I-wish_ is a lavish
facile Goddess, that will never turn a deaf ear to her votary, though he
have a mind to fly, or change statures with Colossus, or strike a gold-
reef; well, in the middle of all this, in comes his servant with some
every-day question, wanting to know where he is to get bread, or what he
shall say to the landlord, tired of waiting for his rent; and then he
flies into a temper, as though the intrusive questioner had robbed him of
all his bliss, and is ready to bite the poor fellow's nose off.
As you love me, do not treat me like that. I see you digging up treasure,
spreading your wings, nursing extravagant ideas, indulging impossible
hopes; and I love you too well to leave you to the company of a life-long
dream--a pleasant one, if you will, but yet a dream; I beseech you to get
up and take to some every-day business, such as may direct the rest of
your life's course by common sense. Your acts and your thoughts up to now
have been no more than Centaurs, Chimeras, Gorgons, or what else is
figured by dreams and poets and painters, chartered libertines all, who
reek not of what has been or may be. Yet the common folk believe them,
bewitched by tale and picture just because they are strange and monstrous.
I fancy you hearing from some teller of tales how there is a certain lady
of perfect beauty, beyond the Graces themselves or the Heavenly
Aphrodite, and then, without ever an inquiry whether his tale is true,
and such a person to be found on earth, falling straight in love with
her, like Medea in the story enamoured of a dream-Jason. And what most
drew you on to love, you and the others who worship the same phantom,
was, if I am not mistaken, the consistent way in which the inventor of
the lady added to his picture, when once he had got your ear. That was
the only thing you all looked to, with that he turned you about as he
would, having got his first hold upon you, averring that he was leading
you the straight way to your beloved. After the first step, you see, all
was easy; none of you ever looked round when he came to the entrance, and
inquired whether it was the right one, or whether he had accidentally
taken the wrong; no, you all followed in your predecessors' footsteps,
like sheep after the bell-wether, whereas the right thing was to decide
at the entrance whether you should go in.
Perhaps an illustration will make my meaning clearer: when one of those
audacious poets affirms that there was once a three-headed and six-handed
man, if you accept that quietly without questioning its possibility, he
will proceed to fill in the picture consistently--six eyes and ears,
three voices talking at once, three mouths eating, and thirty fingers
instead of our poor ten all told; if he has to fight, three of his hands
will have a buckler, wicker targe, or shield apiece, while of the other
three one swings an axe, another hurls a spear, and the third wields a
sword. It is too late to carp at these details, when they come; they are
consistent with the beginning; it was about that that the question ought
to have been raised whether it was to be accepted and passed as true.
Once grant that, and the rest comes flooding in, irresistible, hardly now
susceptible of doubt, because it is consistent and accordant with your
initial admissions. That is just your case; your love-yearning would not
allow you to look into the facts at each entrance, and so you are dragged
on by consistency; it never occurs to you that a thing may be self-
consistent and yet false; if a man says twice five is seven, and you take
his word for it without checking the sum, he will naturally deduce that
four times five is fourteen, and so on _ad libitum_. This is the way
that weird geometry proceeds: it sets before beginners certain strange
assumptions, and insists on their granting the existence of inconceivable
things, such as points having no parts, lines without breadth, and so on,
builds on these rotten foundations a superstructure equally rotten, and
pretends to go on to a demonstration which is true, though it starts from
premisses which are false.
Just so you, when you have granted the principles of any school, believe
in the deductions from them, and take their consistency, false as it is,
for a guarantee of truth. Then with some of you, hope travels through,
and you die before you have seen the truth and detected your deceivers,
while the rest, disillusioned too late, will not turn back for shame:
what, confess at their years that they have been abused with toys all
this time? so they hold on desperately, putting the best face upon it and
making all the converts they can, to have the consolation of good company
in their deception; they are well aware that to speak out is to sacrifice
the respect and superiority and honour they are accustomed to; so they
will not do it if it may be helped, knowing the height from which they
will fall to the common level. Just a few are found with the courage to
say they were deluded, and warn other aspirants. Meeting such a one, call
him a good man, a true and an honest; nay, call him philosopher, if you
will; to my mind, the name is his or no one's; the rest either have no
knowledge of the truth, though they think they have, or else have
knowledge and hide it, shamefaced cowards clinging to reputation.
But now for goodness' sake let us drop all this, cover it up with an
amnesty, and let it be as if it had not been said; let us, assume that
the Stoic philosophy, and no other, is correct; then we can examine
whether it is practicable and possible, or its disciples wasting their
pains; it makes wonderful promises, I am told, about the Happiness in
store for those who reach the summit; for none but they shall enter into
full possession of the true Good. The next point you must help me with--
whether you have ever met such a Stoic, such a pattern of Stoicism, as to
be unconscious of pain, untempted by pleasure, free from wrath, superior
to envy, contemptuous of wealth, and, in one word, Happy; such should the
example and model of the Virtuous life be; for any one who falls short in
the slightest degree, even though he is better than other men at all
points, is not complete, and in that case not yet Happy.
_Her_. I never saw such a man.
_Ly_. I am glad you do not palter with the truth. But what are your hopes
in pursuing philosophy, then? You see that neither your own teacher, nor
his, nor his again, and so on to the tenth generation, has been absolutely
wise and so attained Happiness. It will not serve you to say that it is
enough to get near Happiness; that is no good; a person on the doorstep is
just as much outside and in the air as another a long way off, though with
the difference that the former is tantalized by a nearer view. So it is to
get into the neighbourhood of Happiness--I will grant you so much--that
you toil like this, wearing yourself away, letting this great portion of
your life slip from you, while you are sunk in dullness and wakeful
weariness; and you are to go on with it for twenty more years at the
least, you tell me, to take your place when you are eighty--always
assuming some one to assure you that length of days--in the ranks of the
not yet Happy. Or perhaps you reckon on being the exception; you are to
crown your pursuit by attaining what many a good man before you, swifter
far, has pursued and never overtaken.
Well, overtake it, if that is your plan, grasp it and have it whole, this
something, mysterious to me, of which the possession is sufficient reward
for such toils; this something which I wonder how long you will have the
enjoyment of, old man that you will be, past all pleasure, with one foot
in the grave; ah, but perhaps, like a brave soul, you are getting ready
for another life, that you may spend it the better when you come to it,
having learned how to live: as though one should take so long preparing
and elaborating a superlative dinner that he fainted with hunger and
exhaustion!
However, there is another thing I do not think you have observed: Virtue
is manifested, of course, in action, in doing what is just and wise and
manly; but you--and when I say you, I mean the most advanced
philosophers--you do not seek these things and ensue them, but spend the
greater part of your life conning over miserable sentences and
demonstrations and problems; it is the man who does best at these that
you hail a glorious victor. And I believe that is why you admire this
experienced old professor of yours: he nonplusses his associates, knows
how to put crafty questions and inveigle you into pitfalls; so you pay no
attention to the fruit--which consists in action--, but are extremely
busy with the husks, and smother each other with the leaves in your
debates; come now, Hermotimus, what else are you about from morning to
night?
_Her_. Nothing; that is what it comes to.
_Ly_. Is it wronging you to say that you hunt the shadow or the snake's
dead slough, and neglect the solid body or the creeping thing itself? You
are no better than a man pouring water into a mortar and braying it with
an iron pestle; he thinks he is doing a necessary useful job, whereas, let
him bray till all's blue (excuse the slang), the water is as much water as
ever it was.
And here let me ask you whether, putting aside his discourse, you would
choose to resemble your master, and be as passionate, as sordid, as
quarrelsome, ay, and as addicted to pleasure (though that trait of his is
not generally known). Why no answer, Hermotimus? Shall I tell you a plea
for philosophy which I lately heard? It was from the mouth of an old, old
man, who has quite a company of young disciples. He was angrily demanding
his fees from one of these; they were long overdue, he said; the day
stated in the agreement was the first of the month, and it was now the
fifteenth.
The youth's uncle was there, a rustic person without any notion of your
refinements; and by way of stilling the storm, _Come, come, sir_, says he,
_you need not make such a fuss because we have bought words of you and not
yet settled the bill. As to what you have sold us, you have got it still;
your stock of learning is none the less; and in what I really sent the boy
to you for, you have not improved him a bit; he has carried off and
seduced neighbour Echecrates's daughter, and there would have been an
action for assault, only Echecrates is a poor man; but the prank cost me a
couple of hundred. And the other day he struck his mother; she had tried
to stop him when he was smuggling wine out of the house, for one of his
club-dinners, I suppose. As to temper and conceit and impudence and brass
and lying, he was not half so bad twelve months ago as he is now. That is
where I should have liked him to profit by your teaching; and we could
have done, without his knowing the stuff he reels of at table every day:
'a crocodile [Footnote: See _Puzzles_ in Notes. ] seized hold of a baby,'
says he, 'and promised to give it back if its father could answer'--the
Lord knows what; or how, 'day [Footnote: See _Puzzles_ in Notes. ] being,
night cannot be'; and sometimes his worship twists round what we say
somehow or other, till there we are with horns [Footnote: See _Puzzles_ in
Notes. ] on our heads! We just laugh at it--most of all when he stuffs up
his ears and repeats to himself what he calls temperaments and conditions
and conceptions and impressions, and a lot more like that. And he tells us
God is not in heaven, but goes about in everything, wood and stone and
animals--the meanest of them, too; and if his mother asks him why he talks
such stuff, he laughs at her and says if once he gets the 'stuff' pat off,
there will be nothing to prevent him from being the only rich man, the
only king, and counting every one else slaves and offscourings. _
When he had finished, mark the reverend philosopher's answer. _You should
consider_, he said, _that if he had never come to me, he would have
behaved far worse--very possibly have come to the gallows. As it is,
philosophy and the respect he has for it have been a check upon him, so
that you find he keeps within bounds and is not quite unbearable; the
philosophic system and name tutor him with their presence, and the
thought of disgracing them shames him. I should be quite justified in
taking your money, if not for any positive improvement I have effected,
yet for the abstentions due to his respect for philosophy; the very
nurses will tell you as much: children should go to school, because, even
if they are not old enough to learn, they will at least be out of
mischief there. My conscience is quite easy about him; if you like to
select any of your friends who is acquainted with Stoicism and bring him
here to-morrow, you shall see how the boy can question and answer, how
much he has learnt, how many books he has read on axioms, syllogisms,
conceptions, duty, and all sorts of subjects. As for his hitting his
mother or seducing girls, what have I to do with that? am I his keeper? _
A dignified defence of philosophy for an old man! Perhaps _you_ will say
too that it is a good enough reason for pursuing it, if it will keep us
from worse employments. Were our original expectations from philosophy
at all of a different nature, by the way? did they contemplate anything
beyond a more decent behaviour than the average? Why this obstinate
silence?
_Her_. Oh, why but that I could cry like a baby? It cuts me to the
heart, it is all so true; it is too much for me, when I think of my
wretched, wasted years--paying all that money for my own labour, too! I
am sober again after a debauch, I see what the object of my maudlin
affection is like, and what it has brought upon me.
_Ly_. No need for tears, dear fellow; that is a very sensible fable
of Aesop's. A man sat on the shore and counted the waves breaking;
missing count, he was excessively annoyed. But the fox came up and said
to him: 'Why vex yourself, good sir, over the past ones? you should let
them go, and begin counting afresh. ' So you, since this is your mind, had
better reconcile yourself now to living like an ordinary man; you will
give up your extravagant haughty hopes and put yourself on a level with
the commonalty; if you are sensible, you will not be ashamed to unlearn
in your old age, and change your course for a better.
Now I beg you not to fancy that I have said all this as an anti-Stoic,
moved by any special dislike of your school; my arguments hold against
all schools. I should have said just the same if you had chosen Plato or
Aristotle, and condemned the others unheard. But, as Stoicism was your
choice, the argument has seemed to be aimed at that, though it had no
such special application.
_Her_. You are quite right. And now I will be off to metamorphose
myself. When we next meet, there will be no long, shaggy beard, no
artificial composure; I shall be natural, as a gentleman should. I may go
as far as a fashionable coat, by way of publishing my renunciation of
nonsense. I only wish there were an emetic that would purge out every
doctrine they have instilled into me; I assure you, if I could reverse
Chrysippus's plan with the hellebore, and drink forgetfulness, not of the
world but of Stoicism, I would not think twice about it. Well, Lycinus, I
owe you a debt indeed; I was being swept along in a rough turbid torrent,
unresisting, drifting with the stream; when lo, you stood there and
fished me out, a true _deus ex machina_. I have good enough reason,
I think, to shave my head like the people who get clear off from a wreck;
for I am to make votive offerings to-day for the dispersion of that thick
cloud which was over my eyes. Henceforth, if I meet a philosopher on my
walks (and it will not be with my will), I shall turn aside and avoid him
as I would a mad dog.
HERODOTUS AND AETION
I devoutly wish that Herodotus's other characteristics were imitable; not
all of them, of course--that is past praying for--, but any one of them:
the agreeable style, the constructive skill, the native charm of his
Ionic, the sententious wealth, or any of a thousand beauties which he
combined into one whole, to the despair of imitators. But there is one
thing--the use he made of his writings, and the speed with which he
attained the respect of all Greece; from that you, or I, or any one else,
might take a hint. As soon as he had sailed from his Carian home for
Greece, he concentrated his thoughts on the quickest and easiest method
of winning a brilliant reputation for himself and his works. He might
have gone the round, and read them successively at Athens, Corinth,
Argos, and Sparta; but that would be a long toilsome business, he
thought, with no end to it; so he would not do it in detail, collecting
his recognition by degrees, and scraping it together little by little;
his idea was, if possible, to catch all Greece together. The great
Olympic Games were at hand, and Herodotus bethought him that here was the
very occasion on which his heart was set. He seized the moment when the
gathering was at its fullest, and every city had sent the flower of its
citizens; then he appeared in the temple hall, bent not on sight-seeing,
but on bidding for an Olympic victory of his own; he recited his
_Histories_, and bewitched his hearers; nothing would do but each
book must be named after one of the Muses, to whose number they
corresponded.
He was straightway known to all, better far than the Olympic winners.
There was no man who had not heard his name; they had listened to him at
Olympia, or they were told of him by those who had been there; he had
only to appear, and fingers were pointing at him: 'There is the great
Herodotus, who wrote the Persian War in Ionic, and celebrated our
victories. ' That was what he made out of his _Histories_; a single
meeting sufficed, and he had the general unanimous acclamation of all
Greece; his name was proclaimed, not by a single herald; every spectator
did that for him, each in his own city.
The royal road to fame was now discovered; it was the regular practice of
many afterwards to deliver their discourses at the festival; Hippias the
rhetorician was on his own ground there; but Prodicus came from Ceos,
Anaximenes from Chios, Polus from Agrigentum; and a rapid fame it
brought, to them and many others.
However, I need not have cited ancient rhetoricians, historians, and
chroniclers like these; in quite recent times the painter Aetion is said
to have brought his picture, _Nuptials of Roxana and Alexander_, to
exhibit at Olympia; and Proxenides, High Steward of the Games on the
occasion, was so delighted with his genius that he gave him his daughter.
It must have been a very wonderful picture, I think I hear some one say,
to make the High Steward give his daughter to a stranger. Well, I have
seen it--it is now in Italy--, so I can tell you. A fair chamber, with
the bridal bed in it; Roxana seated--and a great beauty she is--with
downcast eyes, troubled by the presence of Alexander, who is standing.
Several smiling Loves; one stands behind Roxana, pulling away the veil on
her head to show her to Alexander; another obsequiously draws off her
sandal, suggesting bed-time; a third has hold of Alexander's mantle, and
is dragging him with all his might towards Roxana. The King is offering
her a garland, and by him as supporter and groom's-man is Hephaestion,
holding a lighted torch and leaning on a very lovely boy; this is
Hymenaeus, I conjecture, for there are no letters to show. On the other
side of the picture, more Loves playing among Alexander's armour; two are
carrying his spear, as porters do a heavy beam; two more grasp the
handles of the shield, tugging it along with another reclining on it,
playing king, I suppose; and then another has got into the breast-plate,
which lies hollow part upwards; he is in ambush, and will give the royal
equipage a good fright when it comes within reach.
All this is not idle fancy, on which the painter has been lavishing
needless pains; he is hinting that Alexander has also another love, in
War; though he loves Roxana, he does not forget his armour. And, by the
way, there was some extra nuptial virtue in the picture itself, outside
the realm of fancy; for it did Aetion's wooing for him. He departed with
a wedding of his own as a sort of pendant to that of Alexander;
_his_ groom's-man was the King; and the price of his marriage-piece
was a marriage.
Herodotus, then (to return to him), thought that the Olympic festival
would serve a second purpose very well--that of revealing to the Greeks a
wonderful historian who had related their victories as he had done. As
for me--and in Heaven's name do not suppose me so beside myself as to
intend any comparison between my works and his; I desire his favour too
much for that--but one experience I have in common with him. On my first
visit to Macedonia, _my_ thoughts too were busy with my best policy.
My darling wish was to be known to you all, and to exhibit my writings to
as many Macedonians as might be; I decided that it would be too great an
undertaking at such a time of year to go round in person visiting city by
city; but if I seized the occasion of this your meeting, appeared before
you all, and delivered my discourse, my aspirations, I thought, might be
realized that way.
And now here are you met together, the _elite_ of every city, the
true soul of Macedonia; the town which lodges you is the chief of all,
little enough resembling Pisa, with its crowding, its tents and hovels
and stifling heat; there is as great a difference between this audience
and that promiscuous crowd, mainly intent upon mere athletics, and
thinking of Herodotus only as a stop-gap; here we have orators,
historians, professors, the first in each kind--that is much in itself;
my arena, it seems, need not suffer from comparison with Olympia. And
though, if you insist on matching me with the Polydamases, Glaucuses, and
Milos of literature, you must think me a very presumptuous person, it is
open to you on the other hand to put them out of your thoughts
altogether; and if you strip and examine me independently, you may decide
that at least I need not be whipped. [Footnote: Cf. _Remarks addressed
to an Illiterate Book-fancier_, 9. ] Considering the nature of the
contest, I may well be satisfied with that measure of success.
ZEUXIS AND ANTIOCHUS
I was lately walking home after lecturing, when a number of my audience
(you are now my friends, gentlemen, and there can be no objection to my
telling you this)--these persons, then, came to me and introduced
themselves, with the air of admiring hearers. They accompanied me a
considerable way, with such laudatory exclamations that I was reduced to
blushing at the discrepancy between praise and thing praised. Their chief
point, which they were absolutely unanimous in emphasizing, was that the
substance of my work was so fresh, so crammed with novelty. I had better
give you their actual phrases: 'How new! What paradoxes, to be sure! What
invention the man has! His ideas are quite unequalled for originality. '
They said a great deal of this sort about my fascinating lecture, as they
called it; they could have had no motive for pretending, or addressing
such flatteries to a stranger who had no independent claims on their
attention.
These commendations, to be quite frank, were very far from gratifying to
me; when at length they left me to myself, my reflections took this
course:--_So the only attraction in my work is that it is unusual, and
does not follow the beaten track; good vocabulary, orthodox composition,
insight, subtlety, Attic grace, general constructive skill--these may for
aught I know be completely wanting; else indeed they would hardly have
left them unnoticed, and approved my method only as new and startling.
Fool that I was, I did indeed guess, when they jumped up to applaud, that
novelty was part of the attraction; I knew that Homer spoke truly when he
said there is favour for the new song; but I did not see that novelty was
to have so vast a share--the whole, indeed--of the credit; I thought it
gave a sort of adventitious charm, and contributed, its part to the
success, but that the real object of commendation--what extracted the
cheers--was those other qualities. Why, I have been absurdly self-
satisfied, and come very near believing them when they called me the one
and only real Greek, and such nonsense.
_Ly_. Very well, which shall we start with? However, that will make no
difference; we may begin with whomsoever we fancy, Pythagoras, say; how
long shall we allow for learning the whole of Pythagoreanism? and do
not omit the five years of silence; including those, I suppose thirty
altogether will do; or, if you do not like that, still we cannot put it
lower than twenty.
_Her_. Put it at that.
_Ly_. Plato will come next with as many more, and then Aristotle cannot do
with less.
_Her_. No.
_Ly_. As to Chrysippus, I need not ask you; you have told me already that
forty is barely enough.
_Her_. That is so.
_Ly_. And we have still Epicurus and the others. I am not taking high
figures, either, as you will see if you reflect upon the number of
octogenarian Stoics, Epicureans, and Platonists who confess that they
have not yet completely mastered their own systems. Or, if they did not
confess it, at any rate Chrysippus, Aristotle, and Plato would for them;
still more Socrates, who is as good as they; he used to proclaim to all
comers that, so far from knowing all, he knew nothing whatever, except
the one fact of his own ignorance. Well, let us add up. Twenty years we
gave Pythagoras, the same to Plato, and so to the others. What will the
total come to, if we assume only ten schools?
_Her_. Over two hundred years.
_Ly_. Shall we deduct a quarter of that, and say a hundred and fifty
will do? or can we halve it?
_Her_. You must decide about that; but I see that, at the best, it
will be but few who will get through the course, though they begin
philosophy and life together.
_Ly_. In that case, what are we to do? Must we withdraw our previous
admission, that no one can choose the best out of many without trying
all? We thought selection without experiment a method of inquiry
savouring more of divination than of judgement, did we not?
_Her_. Yes.
_Ly_. Without such longevity, then, it is absolutely impossible for
us to complete the series--experiment, selection, philosophy, Happiness.
Yet anything short of that is a mere game of blindman's-buff; whatever we
knock against and get hold of we shall be taking for the thing we want,
because the truth is hidden from us. Even if a mere piece of luck brings
us straight to it, we shall have no grounded conviction of our success;
there are so many similar objects, all claiming to be the real thing.
_Her_. Ah, Lycinus, your arguments seem to me more or less logical,
but--but--to be frank with you--I hate to hear you going through them and
wasting your acuteness. I suspect it was in an evil hour that I came out
to-day and met you; my hopes were almost in my grasp; and now here are
you plunging me into a slough of despond with your demonstrations; truth
is undiscoverable, if the search needs so many years.
_Ly_. My dear friend, it would be much fairer to blame your parents,
Menecrates and whatever your mother's name may have been--or indeed to go
still further back to human nature. Why did not they make you a Tithonus
for years and durability? instead of which, they limited you like other
men to a century at the outside. As for me, I have only been helping you
to deduce results.
_Her_. No, no; it is just your way; you want to crow over me; you
detest philosophy--I cannot tell why--and poke fun at philosophers.
_Ly_. Hermotimus, I cannot show what truth is, so well as wise people like
you and your professor; but one thing I do know about it, and that is that
it is not pleasant to the ear; falsehood is far more esteemed; it is
prettier, and therefore pleasanter; while Truth, conscious of its purity,
blurts out downright remarks, and offends people. Here is a case of it:
even you are offended with me for having discovered (with your assistance)
how this matter really stands, and shown that our common object is hard of
attainment. Suppose you had been in love with a statue and hoped to win
it, under the impression that it was human, and I had realized that it was
only bronze or marble, and given you a friendly warning that your passion
was hopeless--you might just as well have thought I was your enemy then,
because I would not leave you a prey to extravagant and impracticable
delusions.
_Her_. Well, well; are we to give up philosophy, then, and idle our
lives away like the common herd?
_Ly_. What have I said to justify that? My point is not that we are
to give up philosophy, but this: whereas we are to pursue philosophy, and
whereas there are many roads, each professing to lead to philosophy and
Virtue, and whereas it is uncertain which of these is the true road,
therefore the selection shall be made with care. Now we resolved that it
was impossible out of many offers to choose the best, unless a man should
try all in turn; and then the process of trial was found to be long. What
do _you_ propose? --It is the old question again. To follow and join
philosophic forces with whomsoever you first fall in with, and let him
thank Fortune for his proselyte?
_Her_. What is the good of answering your questions? You say no one
can judge for himself, unless he can devote the life of a phoenix to
going round experimenting; and on the other hand you refuse to trust
either previous experience or the multitude of favourable testimony.
_Ly_. Where is your multitude, with knowledge and experience _of all_?
Never mind the multitude; one man who answers the description will do for
me. But if you mean the people who do not know, their mere numbers will
never persuade me, as long as they pronounce upon all from knowledge of,
at the most, one.
_Her_. Are you the only man who has found the truth, and are all the
people who go in for philosophy fools?
_Ly_. You wrong me, Hermotimus, when you imply that I put myself
above other people, or rank myself at all with those who know; you forget
what I said; I never claimed to know the truth better than others, only
confessed that I was as ignorant of it as every one else.
_Her_. Well, but, Lycinus, it may be all very well to insist on going the
round, testing the various statements, and eschewing any other method of
choice; but it is ridiculous to spend so many years on each experiment, as
though there were no such thing as judging from samples. That device seems
to me quite simple, and economical of time. There is a story that some
sculptor, Phidias, I think, seeing a single claw, calculated from it the
size of the lion, if it were modelled proportionally. So, if some one were
to let you see a man's hand, keeping the rest of his body concealed, you
would know at once that what was behind was a man, without seeing his
whole body. Well, it is easy to find out in a few hours the essential
points of the various doctrines, and, for selecting the best, these will
suffice, without any of your scrupulous exacting investigation.
_Ly_. Upon my word, how confident you are in your faculty of divining the
whole from the parts! and yet I remember being told just the
opposite--that knowledge of the whole includes that of the parts, but not
vice versa. Well, but tell me; when Phidias saw the claw, would he ever
have known it for a lion's, if he had never seen a lion? Could you have
said the hand was a man's, if you had never known or seen a man? Why are
you dumb? Let me make the only possible answer for you--that you could
_not_; I am afraid Phidias has modelled his lion all for nothing;
for it proves to be neither here nor there. What resemblance is there?
What enabled you and Phidias to recognize the parts was just your
knowledge of the wholes--the lion and the man. But in philosophy--the
Stoic, for instance--how will the part reveal the other parts to you, or
how can you conclude that they are beautiful? You do not know the whole
to which the parts belong.
Then you say it is easy to hear in a few hours the essentials of all
philosophy--meaning, I suppose, their principles and ends, their accounts
of God and the soul, their views on the material and the immaterial,
their respective identification of pleasure or goodness with the
desirable and the Happy; well, it is easy--it is quite a trifle--to
deliver an opinion after such a hearing; but really to _know_ where
the truth lies will be work, I suspect, not for a few hours, but for a
good many days. If not, what can have induced them to enlarge on these
rudiments to the tune of a hundred or a thousand volumes apiece? I
imagine they only wanted to establish the truth of those few points which
you thought so easy and intelligible. If you refuse to spend your time on
a conscientious selection, after personal examination of each and all, in
sum and in detail, it seems to me you will still want your soothsayer to
choose the best for you. It would be a fine short cut, with no
meanderings or wastings of time, if you sent for him, listened to the
summaries, and killed a victim at the end of each; by indicating in its
liver which is the philosophy for you, the God would save you a pack of
troubles.
Or, if you like, I can suggest a still simpler way; you need not shed all
this blood in sacrifice to any God, nor employ an expensive priest; put
into an urn a set of tablets, each marked with a philosopher's name, and
tell a boy (he must be quite young, and his parents both be living) to go
to the urn and pick out whichever tablet his hand first touches; and live
a philosopher ever after, of the school which then comes out triumphant.
_Her_. This is buffoonery, Lycinus; I should not have expected it of you.
Now tell me, did you ever buy wine? in person, I mean.
_Ly_. Many a time.
_Her_. Well, did you go to every wine vault in town, one after another,
tasting and comparing?
_Ly_. Certainly not.
_Her_. No; as soon as you find good sound stuff, you have only to get it
sent home.
_Ly_. To be sure.
_Her_. And from that little taste you could have answered for the quality
of the whole?
_Ly_. Yes.
_Her_. Now suppose you had gone to all the wine-merchants and said: I want
to buy a pint of wine; I must ask you, gentlemen, to let me drink the
whole of the cask which each of you has on tap; after that exhaustive
sampling, I shall know which of you keeps the best wine, and is the man
for my money. If you had talked like that, they might have laughed at
you, and, if you persisted in worrying them, have tried how you liked
water.
_Ly_. Yes; it would be no more than my deserts.
_Her_. Apply this to philosophy. What need to drink the whole cask,
when you can judge the quality of the whole from one little taste?
_Ly_. What an adept at evasion you are, Hermotimus! How you slip
through one's fingers! However, it is all the better this time; you
fancied yourself out, but you have flopped into the net again.
_Her_. What do you mean?
_Ly_. You take a thing whose nature is self-evident and universally
admitted, like wine, and argue from it to perfectly unlike things, whose
nature is obscure and generally debated. In fact I cannot tell what
analogy you find between philosophy and wine; there is just one, indeed:
philosophers and wine-merchants both sell their wares, mostly resorting
to adulteration, fraud, and false measures, in the process. But let us
look into your real meaning. You say all the wine in a cask is of the
same quality--which is perfectly reasonable; further, that any one who
draws and tastes quite a small quantity will know at once the quality of
the whole--of which the same may be said; I should never have thought of
objecting. But mark what comes now: do philosophy and its professors
(your own, for instance) give you every day the same remarks on the same
subjects, or do they vary them? They vary them a great deal, friend; you
would never have stuck to your master through your twenty years'
wandering--quite a philosophic Odyssey--if he had always said the same
thing; one hearing would have been enough.
_Her_. So it would.
_Ly_. How could you have known the whole of his doctrines from the
first taste, then? They were not homogeneous, like the wine; novelty
to-day, and novelty to-morrow on the top of it. Consequently, dear friend,
short of drinking the whole cask, you might soak to no purpose;
Providence seems to me to have hidden the philosophic Good right at the
bottom, underneath the lees. So you will have to drain it dry, or you
will never get to that nectar for which I know you have so long thirsted.
According to your idea, it has such virtue that, could you once taste it
and swallow the very least drop, you would straightway have perfect
wisdom; so they say the Delphian prophetess is inspired by one draught of
the sacred spring with answers for those who consult the oracle. But it
seems not to be so; you have drunk more than half the cask; yet you told
me you were only beginning yet.
Now see whether this is not a better analogy. You shall keep your
merchant, and your cask; but the contents of the latter are not to be
wine, but assorted seeds. On the top is wheat, next beans, then barley,
below that lentils, then peas--and other kinds yet. You go to buy seeds,
and he takes some wheat out of that layer, and puts it in your hand as a
sample; now, could you tell by looking at that whether the peas were
Sound, the lentils tender, and the beans full?
_Her_. Impossible.
_Ly_. No more can you tell the quality of a philosophy from the first
statements of its professor; it is not uniform, like the wine to which you
compared it, claiming that it must resemble the sample glass; it is
heterogeneous, and it had better not be cursorily tested. If you buy bad
wine, the loss is limited to a few pence; but to rot with the common herd
(in your own words) is not so light a loss. Moreover, your man who wants
to drink up the cask as a preliminary to buying a pint will injure the
merchant, with his dubious sampling; but philosophy knows no such danger;
you may drink your fill, but this cask grows no emptier, and its owner
suffers no loss. It is cut and come again here; we have the converse of
the Danaids' cask; that would not hold what was put into it; it ran
straight through; but here, the more you take away, the more remains.
And I have another similar remark to make about these specimen drops of
philosophy. Do not fancy I am libelling it, if I say it is like hemlock,
aconite, or other deadly poison. Those too, though they have death in
them, will not kill if a man scrapes off the tiniest particle with the
edge of his nail and tastes it; if they are not taken in the right
quantity, the right manner, and the right vehicle, the taker will not
die; you were wrong in claiming that the least possible quantity is
enough to base a generalization on.
_Her_. Oh, have it your own way, Lycinus. Well then, we have got to live a
hundred years, and go through all this trouble? There is no other road to
philosophy?
_Ly_. No, none; and we need not complain; as you very truly said, _ars
longa, vita brevis_. But I do not know what has come over you; you now
make a grievance of it, if you cannot before set of sun develop into a
Chrysippus, a Plato, a Pythagoras.
_Her_. You trap me, and drive me into a corner, Lycinus; yet I never
provoked you; it is all envy, I know, because I have made some progress
in my studies, whereas you have neglected yourself, when you were old
enough to know better.
_Ly_. Seest, then, thy true course? never mind me, but leave me as a
lunatic to my follies, and you go on your way and accomplish what you
have intended all this time.
_Her_. But you are so masterful, you will not let me make a choice, till I
have proved all.
_Ly_. Why, I confess, you will never get me to budge from that. But when
you call me masterful, it seems to me you blame the blameless, as the poet
says; for I am myself being dragged along by reason, until you bring up
some other reason to release me from durance. And here is reason about to
talk more masterfully still, you will see; but I suppose you will
exonerate it, and blame me.
_Her_. What can it be? I am surprised to hear it still has anything in
reserve.
_Ly_. It says that seeing and going through all philosophies will not
suffice, if you want to choose the best of them; the most important
qualification is still missing.
_Her_. Indeed? Which?
_Ly_. Why (bear with me), a critical investigating faculty, mental acumen,
intellectual precision and independence equal to the occasion; without
this, the completest inspection will be useless. Reason insists that the
owner of it must further be allowed ample time; he will collect the rival
candidates together, and make his choice with long, lingering, repeated
deliberation; he will give no heed to the candidate's age, appearance, or
repute for wisdom, but perform his functions like the Areopagites, who
judge in the darkness of night, so that they must regard not the pleaders,
but the pleadings. Then and not till then will you be able to make a sound
choice and live a philosopher.
_Her_. Live? an after life, then. No mortal span will meet your demands;
let me see: go the whole round, examine each with care, on that
examination form a judgement, on that judgement make a choice, on that
choice be a philosopher; so and no otherwise you say the truth may be
found.
_Ly_. I hardly dare tell you--even that is not exhaustive; I am afraid,
after all, the solid basis we thought we had found was imaginary. You know
how fishermen often let down their nets, feel a weight, and pull them up
expecting a great haul; when they have got them up with much toil, behold,
a stone, or an old pot full of sand. I fear our catch is one of those.
_Her_. I don't know what this particular net may be; your nets are all
round me, anyhow.
_Ly_. Well, try and get through; providentially, you are as good a
swimmer as can be.
Now, this is it: granted that we go all round
experimenting, and get it done at last, too, I do not believe we shall
have solved the elementary question, whether _any_ of them has the
much-desired; perhaps they are all wrong together.
_Her_. Oh, come now! not one of _them_ right either?
_Ly_. I cannot tell. Do you think it impossible they may all be deluded,
and the truth be something which none of them has yet found?
_Her_. How can it possibly be?
_Ly_. This way: take a correct number, twenty; suppose, I mean, a man has
twenty beans in his closed hand, and asks ten different persons to guess
the number; they guess seven, five, thirty, ten, fifteen--various numbers,
in short. It is possible, I suppose, that one may be right?
_Her_. Yes.
_Ly_. It is not impossible, however, that they may all guess different
incorrect numbers, and not one of them suggest twenty beans. What say you?
_Her_. It is not impossible.
_Ly_. In the same way, all philosophers are investigating the nature of
Happiness; they get different answers one Pleasure, another Goodness,
and so through the list. It is probable that Happiness _is_ one of these;
but it is also not improbable that it is something else altogether. We
seem to have reversed the proper procedure, and hurried on to the end
before we had found the beginning I suppose we ought first to have
ascertained that the truth has actually been discovered, and that some
philosopher or other has it, and only then to have gone on to the next
question, _which_ of them is to be believed.
_Her_. So that, even if we go all through all philosophy, we shall have no
certainty of finding the truth even then; that is what you say.
_Ly_. Please, please do not ask _me_; once more, apply to reason itself.
Its answer will perhaps be that there can be no certainty yet--as long as
we cannot be sure that it is one or other of the things they say it is.
_Her_. Then, according to you, we shall never finish our quest nor
be philosophers, but have to give it up and live the life of laymen. What
you say amounts to that: philosophy is impossible and inaccessible to a
mere mortal; for you expect the aspirant first to choose the best
philosophy; and you considered that the only guarantee of such choice's
being correct was to go through all philosophy before choosing the
truest. Then in reckoning the number of years required by each you
spurned all limits, extended the thing to several generations, and made
out the quest of truth too long for the individual life; and now you
crown all by proving success doubtful even apart from all that; you say
it is uncertain whether the philosophers have ever found truth at all.
_Ly_. Could you state on oath that they have?
_Her_. Not on oath, no.
_Ly_. And yet there is much that I have intentionally spared you, though
it merits careful examination too.
_Her_. For instance?
_Ly_. Is it not said that, among the professed Stoics, Platonists, and
Epicureans, some do know their respective doctrines, and some do not
(without prejudice to their general respectability)?
_Her_. That is true.
_Ly_. Well, don't you think it will be a troublesome business to
distinguish the first, and know them from the ignorant professors?
_Her_. Very.
_Ly_. So, if you are to recognize the best of the Stoics, you will have to
go to most, if not all, of them, make trial, and appoint the best your
teacher, first going through a course of training to provide you with the
appropriate critical faculty; otherwise you might mistakenly prefer the
wrong one. Now reflect on the additional time this will mean; I purposely
left it out of account, because I was afraid you might be angry; all the
same, it is the most important and necessary thing of all in questions
like this--so uncertain and dubious, I mean. For the discovery of truth,
your one and only sure or well-founded hope is the possession of this
power: you _must_ be able to judge and sift truth from falsehood; you must
have the assayer's sense for sound and true or forged coin; if you could
have come to your examination of doctrines equipped with a technical skill
like that, I should have nothing to say; but without it there is nothing
to prevent their severally leading you by the nose; you will follow a
dangled bunch of carrots like a donkey; or, better still, you will be
water spilt on a table, trained whichever way one chooses with a
finger-tip; or again, a reed growing on a river's bank, bending to every
breath, however gentle the breeze that shakes it in its passage.
If you could find a teacher, now, who understood demonstration and
controversial method, and would impart his knowledge to you, you would be
quit of your troubles; the best and the true would straightway be
revealed to you, at the bidding of this art of demonstration, while
falsehood would stand convicted; you would make your choice with
confidence; judgement would be followed by philosophy; you would reach
your long-desired Happiness, and live in its company, which sums up all
good things.
_Her_. Thank you, Lycinus; that is a much better hearing; there is
more than a glimpse of hope in that. We must surely look for a man of
that sort, to give us discernment, judgement, and, above all, the power
of demonstration; then all will be easy and clear, and not too long. I am
grateful to you already for thinking of this short and excellent plan.
_Ly_. Ah, no, I cannot fairly claim gratitude yet. I have not discovered
or revealed anything that will bring you nearer your hope; on the
contrary, we are further off than ever; it is a case of much cry and
little wool.
_Her_. Bird of ill omen, pessimist, explain yourself.
_Ly_. Why, my friend, even if we find some one who claims to know this art
of demonstration, and is willing to impart it, we shall surely not take
his word for it straight off; we shall look about for another man to
resolve us whether the first is telling the truth. Finding number two, we
shall still be uncertain whether our guarantor really knows the difference
between a good judge and a bad, and shall need a number three to guarantee
number two; for how can we possibly know ourselves how to select the best
judge? You see how far this must go; the thing is unending; its nature
does not allow us to draw the line and put a stop to it; for you will
observe that all the demonstrations that can possibly be thought of are
themselves unfounded and open to dispute; most of them struggle to
establish their certainty by appealing to facts as questionable as
themselves; and the rest produce certain truisms with which they compare,
quite illegitimately, the most speculative theories, and then say they
have demonstrated the latter: our eyes tell us there are altars to the
Gods; therefore there must be Gods; that is the sort of thing.
_Her_. How unkindly you treat me, Lycinus, turning my treasure into
ashes; I suppose all these years are to have been lost labour.
_Ly_. At least your chagrin will be considerably lessened by the
thought that you are not alone in your disappointment; practically all
who pursue philosophy do no more than disquiet themselves in vain. Who
could conceivably go through all the stages I have rehearsed? you admit
the impossibility yourself. As to your present mood, it is that of the
man who cries and curses his luck because he cannot climb the sky, or
plunge into the depths of the sea at Sicily and come up at Cyprus, or
soar on wings and fly within the day from Greece to India; what is
responsible for his discontent is his basing of hopes on a dream-vision
or his own wild fancy, without ever asking whether his aspirations were
realizable or consistent with humanity. You too, my friend, have been
having a long and marvellous dream; and now reason has stuck a pin into
you and startled you out of your sleep; your eyes are only half open yet,
you are reluctant to shake off a sleep which has shown you such fair
visions, and so you scold. It is just the condition of the day-dreamer;
he is rolling in gold, digging up treasure, sitting on his throne, or
somehow at the summit of bliss; for dame _How-I-wish_ is a lavish
facile Goddess, that will never turn a deaf ear to her votary, though he
have a mind to fly, or change statures with Colossus, or strike a gold-
reef; well, in the middle of all this, in comes his servant with some
every-day question, wanting to know where he is to get bread, or what he
shall say to the landlord, tired of waiting for his rent; and then he
flies into a temper, as though the intrusive questioner had robbed him of
all his bliss, and is ready to bite the poor fellow's nose off.
As you love me, do not treat me like that. I see you digging up treasure,
spreading your wings, nursing extravagant ideas, indulging impossible
hopes; and I love you too well to leave you to the company of a life-long
dream--a pleasant one, if you will, but yet a dream; I beseech you to get
up and take to some every-day business, such as may direct the rest of
your life's course by common sense. Your acts and your thoughts up to now
have been no more than Centaurs, Chimeras, Gorgons, or what else is
figured by dreams and poets and painters, chartered libertines all, who
reek not of what has been or may be. Yet the common folk believe them,
bewitched by tale and picture just because they are strange and monstrous.
I fancy you hearing from some teller of tales how there is a certain lady
of perfect beauty, beyond the Graces themselves or the Heavenly
Aphrodite, and then, without ever an inquiry whether his tale is true,
and such a person to be found on earth, falling straight in love with
her, like Medea in the story enamoured of a dream-Jason. And what most
drew you on to love, you and the others who worship the same phantom,
was, if I am not mistaken, the consistent way in which the inventor of
the lady added to his picture, when once he had got your ear. That was
the only thing you all looked to, with that he turned you about as he
would, having got his first hold upon you, averring that he was leading
you the straight way to your beloved. After the first step, you see, all
was easy; none of you ever looked round when he came to the entrance, and
inquired whether it was the right one, or whether he had accidentally
taken the wrong; no, you all followed in your predecessors' footsteps,
like sheep after the bell-wether, whereas the right thing was to decide
at the entrance whether you should go in.
Perhaps an illustration will make my meaning clearer: when one of those
audacious poets affirms that there was once a three-headed and six-handed
man, if you accept that quietly without questioning its possibility, he
will proceed to fill in the picture consistently--six eyes and ears,
three voices talking at once, three mouths eating, and thirty fingers
instead of our poor ten all told; if he has to fight, three of his hands
will have a buckler, wicker targe, or shield apiece, while of the other
three one swings an axe, another hurls a spear, and the third wields a
sword. It is too late to carp at these details, when they come; they are
consistent with the beginning; it was about that that the question ought
to have been raised whether it was to be accepted and passed as true.
Once grant that, and the rest comes flooding in, irresistible, hardly now
susceptible of doubt, because it is consistent and accordant with your
initial admissions. That is just your case; your love-yearning would not
allow you to look into the facts at each entrance, and so you are dragged
on by consistency; it never occurs to you that a thing may be self-
consistent and yet false; if a man says twice five is seven, and you take
his word for it without checking the sum, he will naturally deduce that
four times five is fourteen, and so on _ad libitum_. This is the way
that weird geometry proceeds: it sets before beginners certain strange
assumptions, and insists on their granting the existence of inconceivable
things, such as points having no parts, lines without breadth, and so on,
builds on these rotten foundations a superstructure equally rotten, and
pretends to go on to a demonstration which is true, though it starts from
premisses which are false.
Just so you, when you have granted the principles of any school, believe
in the deductions from them, and take their consistency, false as it is,
for a guarantee of truth. Then with some of you, hope travels through,
and you die before you have seen the truth and detected your deceivers,
while the rest, disillusioned too late, will not turn back for shame:
what, confess at their years that they have been abused with toys all
this time? so they hold on desperately, putting the best face upon it and
making all the converts they can, to have the consolation of good company
in their deception; they are well aware that to speak out is to sacrifice
the respect and superiority and honour they are accustomed to; so they
will not do it if it may be helped, knowing the height from which they
will fall to the common level. Just a few are found with the courage to
say they were deluded, and warn other aspirants. Meeting such a one, call
him a good man, a true and an honest; nay, call him philosopher, if you
will; to my mind, the name is his or no one's; the rest either have no
knowledge of the truth, though they think they have, or else have
knowledge and hide it, shamefaced cowards clinging to reputation.
But now for goodness' sake let us drop all this, cover it up with an
amnesty, and let it be as if it had not been said; let us, assume that
the Stoic philosophy, and no other, is correct; then we can examine
whether it is practicable and possible, or its disciples wasting their
pains; it makes wonderful promises, I am told, about the Happiness in
store for those who reach the summit; for none but they shall enter into
full possession of the true Good. The next point you must help me with--
whether you have ever met such a Stoic, such a pattern of Stoicism, as to
be unconscious of pain, untempted by pleasure, free from wrath, superior
to envy, contemptuous of wealth, and, in one word, Happy; such should the
example and model of the Virtuous life be; for any one who falls short in
the slightest degree, even though he is better than other men at all
points, is not complete, and in that case not yet Happy.
_Her_. I never saw such a man.
_Ly_. I am glad you do not palter with the truth. But what are your hopes
in pursuing philosophy, then? You see that neither your own teacher, nor
his, nor his again, and so on to the tenth generation, has been absolutely
wise and so attained Happiness. It will not serve you to say that it is
enough to get near Happiness; that is no good; a person on the doorstep is
just as much outside and in the air as another a long way off, though with
the difference that the former is tantalized by a nearer view. So it is to
get into the neighbourhood of Happiness--I will grant you so much--that
you toil like this, wearing yourself away, letting this great portion of
your life slip from you, while you are sunk in dullness and wakeful
weariness; and you are to go on with it for twenty more years at the
least, you tell me, to take your place when you are eighty--always
assuming some one to assure you that length of days--in the ranks of the
not yet Happy. Or perhaps you reckon on being the exception; you are to
crown your pursuit by attaining what many a good man before you, swifter
far, has pursued and never overtaken.
Well, overtake it, if that is your plan, grasp it and have it whole, this
something, mysterious to me, of which the possession is sufficient reward
for such toils; this something which I wonder how long you will have the
enjoyment of, old man that you will be, past all pleasure, with one foot
in the grave; ah, but perhaps, like a brave soul, you are getting ready
for another life, that you may spend it the better when you come to it,
having learned how to live: as though one should take so long preparing
and elaborating a superlative dinner that he fainted with hunger and
exhaustion!
However, there is another thing I do not think you have observed: Virtue
is manifested, of course, in action, in doing what is just and wise and
manly; but you--and when I say you, I mean the most advanced
philosophers--you do not seek these things and ensue them, but spend the
greater part of your life conning over miserable sentences and
demonstrations and problems; it is the man who does best at these that
you hail a glorious victor. And I believe that is why you admire this
experienced old professor of yours: he nonplusses his associates, knows
how to put crafty questions and inveigle you into pitfalls; so you pay no
attention to the fruit--which consists in action--, but are extremely
busy with the husks, and smother each other with the leaves in your
debates; come now, Hermotimus, what else are you about from morning to
night?
_Her_. Nothing; that is what it comes to.
_Ly_. Is it wronging you to say that you hunt the shadow or the snake's
dead slough, and neglect the solid body or the creeping thing itself? You
are no better than a man pouring water into a mortar and braying it with
an iron pestle; he thinks he is doing a necessary useful job, whereas, let
him bray till all's blue (excuse the slang), the water is as much water as
ever it was.
And here let me ask you whether, putting aside his discourse, you would
choose to resemble your master, and be as passionate, as sordid, as
quarrelsome, ay, and as addicted to pleasure (though that trait of his is
not generally known). Why no answer, Hermotimus? Shall I tell you a plea
for philosophy which I lately heard? It was from the mouth of an old, old
man, who has quite a company of young disciples. He was angrily demanding
his fees from one of these; they were long overdue, he said; the day
stated in the agreement was the first of the month, and it was now the
fifteenth.
The youth's uncle was there, a rustic person without any notion of your
refinements; and by way of stilling the storm, _Come, come, sir_, says he,
_you need not make such a fuss because we have bought words of you and not
yet settled the bill. As to what you have sold us, you have got it still;
your stock of learning is none the less; and in what I really sent the boy
to you for, you have not improved him a bit; he has carried off and
seduced neighbour Echecrates's daughter, and there would have been an
action for assault, only Echecrates is a poor man; but the prank cost me a
couple of hundred. And the other day he struck his mother; she had tried
to stop him when he was smuggling wine out of the house, for one of his
club-dinners, I suppose. As to temper and conceit and impudence and brass
and lying, he was not half so bad twelve months ago as he is now. That is
where I should have liked him to profit by your teaching; and we could
have done, without his knowing the stuff he reels of at table every day:
'a crocodile [Footnote: See _Puzzles_ in Notes. ] seized hold of a baby,'
says he, 'and promised to give it back if its father could answer'--the
Lord knows what; or how, 'day [Footnote: See _Puzzles_ in Notes. ] being,
night cannot be'; and sometimes his worship twists round what we say
somehow or other, till there we are with horns [Footnote: See _Puzzles_ in
Notes. ] on our heads! We just laugh at it--most of all when he stuffs up
his ears and repeats to himself what he calls temperaments and conditions
and conceptions and impressions, and a lot more like that. And he tells us
God is not in heaven, but goes about in everything, wood and stone and
animals--the meanest of them, too; and if his mother asks him why he talks
such stuff, he laughs at her and says if once he gets the 'stuff' pat off,
there will be nothing to prevent him from being the only rich man, the
only king, and counting every one else slaves and offscourings. _
When he had finished, mark the reverend philosopher's answer. _You should
consider_, he said, _that if he had never come to me, he would have
behaved far worse--very possibly have come to the gallows. As it is,
philosophy and the respect he has for it have been a check upon him, so
that you find he keeps within bounds and is not quite unbearable; the
philosophic system and name tutor him with their presence, and the
thought of disgracing them shames him. I should be quite justified in
taking your money, if not for any positive improvement I have effected,
yet for the abstentions due to his respect for philosophy; the very
nurses will tell you as much: children should go to school, because, even
if they are not old enough to learn, they will at least be out of
mischief there. My conscience is quite easy about him; if you like to
select any of your friends who is acquainted with Stoicism and bring him
here to-morrow, you shall see how the boy can question and answer, how
much he has learnt, how many books he has read on axioms, syllogisms,
conceptions, duty, and all sorts of subjects. As for his hitting his
mother or seducing girls, what have I to do with that? am I his keeper? _
A dignified defence of philosophy for an old man! Perhaps _you_ will say
too that it is a good enough reason for pursuing it, if it will keep us
from worse employments. Were our original expectations from philosophy
at all of a different nature, by the way? did they contemplate anything
beyond a more decent behaviour than the average? Why this obstinate
silence?
_Her_. Oh, why but that I could cry like a baby? It cuts me to the
heart, it is all so true; it is too much for me, when I think of my
wretched, wasted years--paying all that money for my own labour, too! I
am sober again after a debauch, I see what the object of my maudlin
affection is like, and what it has brought upon me.
_Ly_. No need for tears, dear fellow; that is a very sensible fable
of Aesop's. A man sat on the shore and counted the waves breaking;
missing count, he was excessively annoyed. But the fox came up and said
to him: 'Why vex yourself, good sir, over the past ones? you should let
them go, and begin counting afresh. ' So you, since this is your mind, had
better reconcile yourself now to living like an ordinary man; you will
give up your extravagant haughty hopes and put yourself on a level with
the commonalty; if you are sensible, you will not be ashamed to unlearn
in your old age, and change your course for a better.
Now I beg you not to fancy that I have said all this as an anti-Stoic,
moved by any special dislike of your school; my arguments hold against
all schools. I should have said just the same if you had chosen Plato or
Aristotle, and condemned the others unheard. But, as Stoicism was your
choice, the argument has seemed to be aimed at that, though it had no
such special application.
_Her_. You are quite right. And now I will be off to metamorphose
myself. When we next meet, there will be no long, shaggy beard, no
artificial composure; I shall be natural, as a gentleman should. I may go
as far as a fashionable coat, by way of publishing my renunciation of
nonsense. I only wish there were an emetic that would purge out every
doctrine they have instilled into me; I assure you, if I could reverse
Chrysippus's plan with the hellebore, and drink forgetfulness, not of the
world but of Stoicism, I would not think twice about it. Well, Lycinus, I
owe you a debt indeed; I was being swept along in a rough turbid torrent,
unresisting, drifting with the stream; when lo, you stood there and
fished me out, a true _deus ex machina_. I have good enough reason,
I think, to shave my head like the people who get clear off from a wreck;
for I am to make votive offerings to-day for the dispersion of that thick
cloud which was over my eyes. Henceforth, if I meet a philosopher on my
walks (and it will not be with my will), I shall turn aside and avoid him
as I would a mad dog.
HERODOTUS AND AETION
I devoutly wish that Herodotus's other characteristics were imitable; not
all of them, of course--that is past praying for--, but any one of them:
the agreeable style, the constructive skill, the native charm of his
Ionic, the sententious wealth, or any of a thousand beauties which he
combined into one whole, to the despair of imitators. But there is one
thing--the use he made of his writings, and the speed with which he
attained the respect of all Greece; from that you, or I, or any one else,
might take a hint. As soon as he had sailed from his Carian home for
Greece, he concentrated his thoughts on the quickest and easiest method
of winning a brilliant reputation for himself and his works. He might
have gone the round, and read them successively at Athens, Corinth,
Argos, and Sparta; but that would be a long toilsome business, he
thought, with no end to it; so he would not do it in detail, collecting
his recognition by degrees, and scraping it together little by little;
his idea was, if possible, to catch all Greece together. The great
Olympic Games were at hand, and Herodotus bethought him that here was the
very occasion on which his heart was set. He seized the moment when the
gathering was at its fullest, and every city had sent the flower of its
citizens; then he appeared in the temple hall, bent not on sight-seeing,
but on bidding for an Olympic victory of his own; he recited his
_Histories_, and bewitched his hearers; nothing would do but each
book must be named after one of the Muses, to whose number they
corresponded.
He was straightway known to all, better far than the Olympic winners.
There was no man who had not heard his name; they had listened to him at
Olympia, or they were told of him by those who had been there; he had
only to appear, and fingers were pointing at him: 'There is the great
Herodotus, who wrote the Persian War in Ionic, and celebrated our
victories. ' That was what he made out of his _Histories_; a single
meeting sufficed, and he had the general unanimous acclamation of all
Greece; his name was proclaimed, not by a single herald; every spectator
did that for him, each in his own city.
The royal road to fame was now discovered; it was the regular practice of
many afterwards to deliver their discourses at the festival; Hippias the
rhetorician was on his own ground there; but Prodicus came from Ceos,
Anaximenes from Chios, Polus from Agrigentum; and a rapid fame it
brought, to them and many others.
However, I need not have cited ancient rhetoricians, historians, and
chroniclers like these; in quite recent times the painter Aetion is said
to have brought his picture, _Nuptials of Roxana and Alexander_, to
exhibit at Olympia; and Proxenides, High Steward of the Games on the
occasion, was so delighted with his genius that he gave him his daughter.
It must have been a very wonderful picture, I think I hear some one say,
to make the High Steward give his daughter to a stranger. Well, I have
seen it--it is now in Italy--, so I can tell you. A fair chamber, with
the bridal bed in it; Roxana seated--and a great beauty she is--with
downcast eyes, troubled by the presence of Alexander, who is standing.
Several smiling Loves; one stands behind Roxana, pulling away the veil on
her head to show her to Alexander; another obsequiously draws off her
sandal, suggesting bed-time; a third has hold of Alexander's mantle, and
is dragging him with all his might towards Roxana. The King is offering
her a garland, and by him as supporter and groom's-man is Hephaestion,
holding a lighted torch and leaning on a very lovely boy; this is
Hymenaeus, I conjecture, for there are no letters to show. On the other
side of the picture, more Loves playing among Alexander's armour; two are
carrying his spear, as porters do a heavy beam; two more grasp the
handles of the shield, tugging it along with another reclining on it,
playing king, I suppose; and then another has got into the breast-plate,
which lies hollow part upwards; he is in ambush, and will give the royal
equipage a good fright when it comes within reach.
All this is not idle fancy, on which the painter has been lavishing
needless pains; he is hinting that Alexander has also another love, in
War; though he loves Roxana, he does not forget his armour. And, by the
way, there was some extra nuptial virtue in the picture itself, outside
the realm of fancy; for it did Aetion's wooing for him. He departed with
a wedding of his own as a sort of pendant to that of Alexander;
_his_ groom's-man was the King; and the price of his marriage-piece
was a marriage.
Herodotus, then (to return to him), thought that the Olympic festival
would serve a second purpose very well--that of revealing to the Greeks a
wonderful historian who had related their victories as he had done. As
for me--and in Heaven's name do not suppose me so beside myself as to
intend any comparison between my works and his; I desire his favour too
much for that--but one experience I have in common with him. On my first
visit to Macedonia, _my_ thoughts too were busy with my best policy.
My darling wish was to be known to you all, and to exhibit my writings to
as many Macedonians as might be; I decided that it would be too great an
undertaking at such a time of year to go round in person visiting city by
city; but if I seized the occasion of this your meeting, appeared before
you all, and delivered my discourse, my aspirations, I thought, might be
realized that way.
And now here are you met together, the _elite_ of every city, the
true soul of Macedonia; the town which lodges you is the chief of all,
little enough resembling Pisa, with its crowding, its tents and hovels
and stifling heat; there is as great a difference between this audience
and that promiscuous crowd, mainly intent upon mere athletics, and
thinking of Herodotus only as a stop-gap; here we have orators,
historians, professors, the first in each kind--that is much in itself;
my arena, it seems, need not suffer from comparison with Olympia. And
though, if you insist on matching me with the Polydamases, Glaucuses, and
Milos of literature, you must think me a very presumptuous person, it is
open to you on the other hand to put them out of your thoughts
altogether; and if you strip and examine me independently, you may decide
that at least I need not be whipped. [Footnote: Cf. _Remarks addressed
to an Illiterate Book-fancier_, 9. ] Considering the nature of the
contest, I may well be satisfied with that measure of success.
ZEUXIS AND ANTIOCHUS
I was lately walking home after lecturing, when a number of my audience
(you are now my friends, gentlemen, and there can be no objection to my
telling you this)--these persons, then, came to me and introduced
themselves, with the air of admiring hearers. They accompanied me a
considerable way, with such laudatory exclamations that I was reduced to
blushing at the discrepancy between praise and thing praised. Their chief
point, which they were absolutely unanimous in emphasizing, was that the
substance of my work was so fresh, so crammed with novelty. I had better
give you their actual phrases: 'How new! What paradoxes, to be sure! What
invention the man has! His ideas are quite unequalled for originality. '
They said a great deal of this sort about my fascinating lecture, as they
called it; they could have had no motive for pretending, or addressing
such flatteries to a stranger who had no independent claims on their
attention.
These commendations, to be quite frank, were very far from gratifying to
me; when at length they left me to myself, my reflections took this
course:--_So the only attraction in my work is that it is unusual, and
does not follow the beaten track; good vocabulary, orthodox composition,
insight, subtlety, Attic grace, general constructive skill--these may for
aught I know be completely wanting; else indeed they would hardly have
left them unnoticed, and approved my method only as new and startling.
Fool that I was, I did indeed guess, when they jumped up to applaud, that
novelty was part of the attraction; I knew that Homer spoke truly when he
said there is favour for the new song; but I did not see that novelty was
to have so vast a share--the whole, indeed--of the credit; I thought it
gave a sort of adventitious charm, and contributed, its part to the
success, but that the real object of commendation--what extracted the
cheers--was those other qualities. Why, I have been absurdly self-
satisfied, and come very near believing them when they called me the one
and only real Greek, and such nonsense.
