Criticism of Criticism of Criticism (by H.L. Mencken)

Criticism of Criticism of Criticism
by H.L. Mencken
from Prejudices: First Series [1919, Alfred A. Knopf]

Every now and then, a sense of the futility of their daily endeavors falling suddenly upon them, the critics of Christendom turn to a somewhat sour and depressing consideration of the nature and objects of their own craft. That is to say, they turn to criticizing criticism. What is it in plain words? What is its aim, exactly stated in legal terms? How far can it go? What good can it do? What is its normal effect upon the artist and the work of art?

        Such a spell of self-searching has been in progress for several years past, and the critics of various countries have contributed theories of more or less lucidity and plausibility to the discussion. Their views of their own art, it appears, are quite as divergent as their views of the arts they more commonly deal with. One group argues, partly by direct statement and partly by attacking all other groups, that the one defensible purpose of the critic is to encourage the virtuous and oppose the sinful – in brief, to police the fine arts and so hold them in tune with the moral order of the world. Another group, repudiating this constabulary function, argues hotly that the arts have nothing to do with morality whatsoever – that their concern is solely with pure beauty. A third group holds that the chief aspect of a work of art, particularly in the field of literature, is its aspect as psychological document – that if it doesn’t help men to know themselves it is nothing. A fourth group reduces the thing to an exact science, and sets up standards that resemble algebraic formulæ – this is the group of metrists, of contrapuntists and of those who gabble of light-waves. And so, in order, follow groups five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, each with its theory and its proofs.

        Against the whole corps, moral and æsthetic, psychological and algebraic, stands Major J. E. Spingarn, U.S.A. Major Spingarn lately served formal notice upon me that he had abandoned the life of the academic grove for that of the armed array, and so I give him his military title, but at the time he wrote his “Creative Criticism” he was a professor in Columbia University, and I still find myself thinking of him, not as a soldier extraordinarily literate, but as a professor in rebellion. For his notions, whatever one may say in opposition to them, are at least magnificently unprofessorial – they fly violently in the face of the principles that distinguish the largest and most influential group of campus critics. As witness: “To say that poetry is moral or immoral is as meaningless as to say that an equilateral triangle is moral and an isosceles triangle immoral.” Or, worse: “It is only conceivable in a world in which dinner-table conversation runs after this fashion: ‘This cauliflower would be good if it had only been prepared in accordance with international law.'” One imagines, on hearing such atheism flying about, the amazed indignation of Prof. Dr. William Lyon Phelps, with his discovery that Joseph Conrad preaches “the axiom of the moral law”; the “Hey, what’s that!” of Prof. Dr. W. C. Brownell, the Amherst Aristotle, with his eloquent plea for standards as iron-clad as the Westminster Confession; the loud, patriotic alarm of the gifted Prof. Dr. Stuart P. Sherman, of Iowa, with his maxim that Puritanism is the official philosophy of America, and that all who dispute it are enemy aliens and should be deported. Major Spingarn, in truth, here performs a treason most horrible upon the reverend order he once adorned, and having achieved it, he straightway performs another and then another. That is to say, he tackles all the antagonistic groups of orthodox critics seriatim, and knocks them about unanimously – first the aforesaid agents of the sweet and pious; then the advocates of unities, meters, all rigid formulæ; then the experts in imaginary psychology; then the historical comparers, pigeonholers and makers of categories; finally, the professors of pure æsthetic. One and all, they take their places upon his operating table, and one and all they are stripped and anatomized.

        But what is the anarchistic ex-professor’s own theory? – for a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas. In brief, what he offers is a doctrine borrowed from the Italian, Benedetto Croce, and by Croce filched from Goethe – a doctrine anything but new in the world, even in Goethe’s time, but nevertheless long buried in forgetfulness – to wit, the doctrine that it is the critic’s first and only duty, as Carlyle once put it, to find out “what the poet’s aim really and truly was, how the task he had to do stood before his eye, and how far, with such materials as were afforded him, he has fulfilled it.” For poet, read artist, or, if literature is in question, substitute the Germanic word Dichter – that is, the artist in words, the creator of beautiful letters, whether in verse or in prose. Ibsen always called himself a Digter, not a Dramatiker or Skuespiller. So, I daresay, did Shakespeare…. Well, what is this generalized poet trying to do? asks Major Spingarn, and how has he done it? That, and no more, is the critic’s quest. The morality of the work does not concern him. It is not his business to determine whether it heeds Aristotle or flouts Aristotle. He passes no judgment on its rhyme scheme, its length and breadth, its iambics, its politics, its patriotism, its piety, its psychological exactness, its good taste. He may note these things, but he may not protest about them – he may not complain if the thing criticized fails to fit into a pigeonhole. Every sonnet, every drama, every novel is sui generis; it must stand on its own bottom; it must be judged by its own inherent intentions. “Poets,” says Major Spingarn, “do not really write epics, pastorals, lyrics, however much they may be deceived by these false abstractions; they express themselves, and this expression is their only form. There are not, therefore, only three or ten or a hundred literary kinds; there are as many kinds as there are individual poets.” Nor is there any valid appeal ad hominem. The character and background of the poet are beside the mark; the poem itself is the thing. Oscar Wilde, weak and swine-like, yet wrote beautiful prose. To reject that prose on the ground that Wilde had filthy habits is as absurd as to reject “What Is Man?” on the ground that its theology is beyond the intelligence of the editor of the New York Times.

        This Spingarn-Croce-Carlyle-Goethe theory, of course, throws a heavy burden upon the critic. It presupposes that he is a civilized and tolerant man, hospitable to all intelligible ideas and capable of reading them as he runs. This is a demand that at once rules out nine-tenths of the grown-up sophomores who carry on the business of criticism in America. Their trouble is simply that they lack the intellectual resilience necessary for taking in ideas, and particularly new ideas. The only way they can ingest one is by transforming it into the nearest related formula – usually a harsh and devastating operation. This fact accounts for their chronic inability to understand all that is most personal and original and hence most forceful and significant in the emerging literature of the country. They can get down what has been digested and re-digested, and so brought into forms that they know, and carefully labeled by predecessors of their own sort – but they exhibit alarm immediately they come into the presence of the extraordinary. Here we have an explanation of Brownell’s loud appeal for a tightening of standards – i.e., a larger respect for precedents, patterns, rubber-stamps – and here we have an explanation of Phelps’s inability to comprehend the colossal phenomenon of Dreiser, and of Boynton’s childish nonsense about realism, and of Sherman’s effort to apply the Espionage Act to the arts, and of More’s querulous enmity to romanticism, and of all the fatuous pigeon-holing that passes for criticism in the more solemn literary periodicals.

        As practiced by all such learned and diligent but essentially ignorant and unimaginative men, criticism is little more than a branch of homiletics. They judge a work of art, not by its clarity and sincerity, not by the force and charm of its ideas, not by the technical virtuosity of the artist, not by his originality and artistic courage, but simply and solely by his orthodoxy. If he is what is called a “right thinker,” if he devotes himself to advocating the transient platitudes in a sonorous manner, then he is worthy of respect. But if he lets fall the slightest hint that he is in doubt about any of them, or, worse still, that he is indifferent, then he is a scoundrel, and hence, by their theory, a bad artist. Such pious piffle is horribly familiar among us. I do not exaggerate its terms. You will find it running through the critical writings of practically all the dull fellows who combine criticism with tutoring; in the words of many of them it is stated in the plainest way and defended with much heat, theological and pedagogical. In its baldest form it shows itself in the doctrine that it is scandalous for an artist – say a dramatist or a novelist – to depict vice as attractive. The fact that vice, more often than not, undoubtedly is attractive – else why should it ever gobble any of us? – is disposed of with a lofty gesture. What of it? say these birchmen. The artist is not a reporter, but a Great Teacher. It is not his business to depict the world as it is, but as it ought to be.

        Against this notion American criticism makes but feeble headway. We are, in fact, a nation of evangelists; every third American devotes himself to improving and lifting up his fellow-citizens, usually by force; the messianic delusion is our national disease. Thus the moral Privatdozenten have the crowd on their side, and it is difficult to shake their authority; even the vicious are still in favor of crying vice down. “Here is a novel,” says the artist. “Why didn’t you write a tract?” roars the professor – and down the chute go novel and novelist. “This girl is pretty,” says the painter. “But she has left off her undershirt,” protests the head-master – and off goes the poor dauber’s head. At its mildest, this balderdash takes the form of the late Hamilton Wright Mabie’s “White List of Books”, at its worst, it is comstockery, an idiotic and abominable thing. Genuine criticism is as impossible to such inordinately narrow and cocksure men as music is to a man who is tone-deaf. The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion; as Major Spingarn says, “æsthetic judgment and artistic creation are instinct with the same vital life.” This is why all the best criticism of the world has been written by men who have had within them, not only the reflective and analytical faculty of critics, but also the gusto of artists – Goethe, Carlyle, Lessing, Schlegel, Saint-Beuve, and, to drop a story or two, Hazlitt, Hermann Bahr, Georg Brandes and James Huneker. Huneker, tackling “ Also sprach Zarathustra,” revealed its content in illuminating flashes. But tackled by Paul Elmer More, it became no more than a dull student’s exercise, ill-naturedly corrected….

        So much for the theory of Major J. E. Spingarn, U.S.A., late professor of modern languages and literatures in Columbia University. Obviously, it is a far sounder and more stimulating theory than any of those cherished by the other professors. It demands that the critic be a man of intelligence, of toleration, of wide information, of genuine hospitality to ideas, whereas the others only demand that he have learning, and accept anything as learning that has been said before. But once he has stated his doctrine, the ingenious ex-professor, professor-like, immediately begins to corrupt it by claiming too much for it. Having laid and hatched, so to speak, his somewhat stale but still highly nourishing egg, he begins to argue fatuously that the resultant flamingo is the whole mustering of the critical Aves . But the fact is, of course, that criticism, as humanly practiced, must needs fall a good deal short of this intuitive recreation of beauty, and what is more, it must go a good deal further. For one thing, it must be interpretation in terms that are not only exact but are also comprehensible to the reader, else it will leave the original mystery as dark as before – and once interpretation comes in, paraphrase and transliteration come in. What is recondite must be made plainer; the transcendental, to some extent at least, must be done into common modes of thinking. Well, what are morality, trochaics, hexameters, movements, historical principles, psychological maxims, the dramatic unities – what are all these save common modes of thinking, short cuts, rubber stamps, words of one syllable? Moreover, beauty as we know it in this world is by no means the apparition in vacuo that Dr. Spingarn seems to see. It has its social, its political, even its moral implications. The finale of Beethoven’s C minor symphony is not only colossal as music, it is also colossal as revolt; it says something against something. Yet more, the springs of beauty are not within itself alone, nor even in genius alone, but often in things without. Brahms wrote his Deutsches Requiem, not only because he was a great artist, but also because he was a good German. And in Nietzsche there are times when the divine afflatus takes a back seat, and the spirochaetae have the floor.

        Major Spingarn himself seems to harbor some sense of this limitation on his doctrine. He gives warning that “the poet’s intention must be judged at the moment of the creative act” – which opens the door enough for many an ancient to creep in. But limited or not, he at least clears off a lot of moldy rubbish, and gets further toward the truth than any of his former colleagues. They waste themselves upon theories that only conceal the poet’s achievement the more, the more diligently they are applied; he, at all events, grounds himself upon the sound notion that there should be free speech in art, and no protective tariffs, and no a priori assumptions, and no testing of ideas by mere words. The safe ground probably lies between the contestants, but nearer Spingarn. The critic who really illuminates starts off much as he starts off, but with a due regard for the prejudices and imbecilities of the world. I think the best feasible practice is to be found in certain chapters of Huneker, a critic of vastly more solid influence and of infinitely more value to the arts than all the prating pedagogues since Rufus Griswold. Here, as in the case of Poe, a sensitive and intelligent artist recreates the work of other artists, but there also comes to the ceremony a man of the world, and the things he has to say are apposite and instructive too. To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment. To dispute the categories is to set up a new anti-categorical category. And to admire the work of Shakespeare is to be interested in his handling of blank verse, his social aspirations, his shot-gun marriage and his frequent concessions to the bombastic frenzy of his actors, and to have some curiosity about Mr. W. H. The really competent critic must be an empiricist. He must conduct his exploration with whatever means lie within the bounds of his personal limitation. He must produce his effects with whatever tools will work. If pills fail, he gets out his saw. If the saw won’t cut, he seizes a club….

        Perhaps, after all, the chief burden that lies upon Major Spingarn’s theory is to be found in its label. The word “creative” is a bit too flamboyant; it says what he wants to say, but it probably says a good deal more. In this emergency, I propose getting rid of the misleading label by pasting another over it. That is, I propose the substitution of “catalytic” for “creative,” despite the fact that “catalytic” is an unfamiliar word, and suggests the dog-Latin of the seminaries. I borrow it from chemistry, and its meaning is really quite simple. A catalyzer, in chemistry, is a substance that helps two other substances to react. For example, consider the case of ordinary cane sugar and water. Dissolve the sugar in the water and nothing happens. But add a few drops of acid and the sugar changes into glucose and fructose. Meanwhile, the acid itself is absolutely unchanged. All it does is to stir up the reaction between the ureter and the sugar. The process is called catalysis. The acid is a catalyzer.

        Well, this is almost exactly the function of a genuine critic of the arts. It is his business to provoke the reaction between the work of art and the spectator. The spectator, untutored, stands unmoved; he sees the work of art, but it fails to make any intelligible impression on him; if he were spontaneously sensitive to it, there would be no need for criticism. But now comes the critic with his catalysis. He makes the work of art live for the spectator; he makes the spectator live for the work of art. Out of the process comes understanding, appreciation, intelligent enjoyment – and that is precisely what the artist tried to produce.

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The New Poetry Movement (by H.L. Mencken)

The New Poetry Movement
by H.L. Mencken
from Prejudices: First Series [1919, Alfred A. Knopf]

        The current pother about poetry, now gradually subsiding, seems to have begun about seven years ago – say in 1912. It was during that year that Harriet Monroe established Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, in Chicago, and ever since then she has been the mother superior of the movement. Other leaders have occasionally disputed her command – the bombastic Braithwaite, with his annual anthology of magazine verse; Amy Lowell, with her solemn pronunciamentos in the manner of a Harvard professor; Vachel Lindsay, with his nebulous vaporings and Chautauqua posturings; even such cheap jacks as Alfred Kreymborg, out of Greenwich Village. But the importance of Miss Monroe grows more manifest as year chases year. She was, to begin with, clearly the pioneer. Poetry was on the stands nearly two years before the first Braithwaite anthology, and long before Miss Lowell had been lured from her earlier finishing-school doggerels by the Franco-British Imagists. It antedated, too, all the other salient documents of the movement – Master’s “Spoon River Anthology,” Frost’s “North of Boston,” Lindsay’s “General William Booth Enters Heaven,” the historic bulls of the Imagists, the frantic balderdash of the “Others” group. Moreover, Miss Monroe has always managed to keep on good terms with all wings of the heaven-kissed host, and has thus managed to exert a ponderable influence both to starboard and to port. This, I daresay, is because she is a very intelligent woman, which fact is alone sufficient to give her an austere eminence in a movement so beset by mountebanks and their dupes. I have read Poetry since the first number, and find it constantly entertaining. It has printed a great deal of extravagant stuff, and not a little downright nonsensical stuff, but in the main it has steered a safe and intelligible course, with no salient blunders. No other poetry magazine – and there have been dozens of them – has even remotely approached it in interest, or, for that matter, in genuine hospitality to ideas. Practically all of the others have been operated by passionate enthusiasts, often extremely ignorant and always narrow and humorless. But Miss Monroe has managed to retain a certain judicial calm in the midst of all the whooping and clapper-clawing, and so she has avoided running amuck, and her magazine has printed the very best of the new poetry and avoided much of the worst.

        As I say, the movement shows signs of having spent its strength. The mere bulk of the verse that it produces is a great deal less than it was three or four years ago, or even one or two years ago, and there is a noticeable tendency toward the conservatism once so loftily disdained. I daresay the Knish-Morgan burlesque of Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke was a hard blow to the more fantastic radicals. At all events, they subsided after it was perpetrated, and for a couple of years nothing has been heard from them. These radicals, chiefly collected in what was called the “Others” group, rattled the slapstick in a sort of side-show to the main exhibition. They attracted, of course, all the more credulous and uninformed partisans of the movement, and not a few advanced professors out of one-building universities began to lecture upon them before bucolic women’s clubs. They committed hari-kari in the end by beginning to believe in their own buncombe. When their leaders took to the chautauquas and sought to convince the peasantry that James Whitcomb Riley was a fraud the time was ripe for the lethal buffoonery of MM. Bynner and Ficke. That buffoonery was enormously successful – perhaps the best hoax in American literary history. It was swallowed, indeed, by so many magnificoes that it made criticism very timorous thereafter, and so did damage to not a few quite honest bards. To-day a new poet, if he departs ever so little from the path already beaten, is kept in a sort of literary delousing pen until it is established that he is genuinely sincere, and not merely another Bynner in hempen whiskers and a cloak to go invisible.

        Well, what is the net produce of the whole uproar? How much actual poetry have all these truculent rebels against Stedman’s Anthology and McGuffey’s Sixth Reader manufactured? I suppose I have read nearly all of it – a great deal of it, as a magazine editor, in manuscript – and yet, as I look back, my memory is lighted up by very few flashes of any lasting brilliance. The best of all the lutists of the new school, I am inclined to think, are Carl Sandburg and James Oppenheim, and particularly Sandburg. He shows a great deal of raucous crudity, he is often a bit uncertain and wobbly, and sometimes he is downright banal – but, taking one bard with another, he is probably the soundest and most intriguing of the lot. Compare, for example, his war poems – simple, eloquent and extraordinarily moving – to the humorless balderdash of Amy Lowell, or, to go outside the movement, to the childish gush of Joyce Kilmer, Hermann Hagedorn and Charles Hanson Towne. Often he gets memorable effects by astonishingly austere means, as in his famous “Chicago” rhapsody and his “Cool Tombs.” And always he is thoroughly individual, a true original, his own man. Oppenheim, equally eloquent, is more conventional. He stands, as to one leg, on the shoulders of Walt Whitman, and, as to the other, on a stack of Old Testaments. The stuff he writes, despite his belief to the contrary, is not American at all; it is absolutely Jewish, Levantine, almost Asiatic. But here is something criticism too often forgets: the Jew, intrinsically, is the greatest of poets. Beside his gorgeous rhapsodies the highest flights of any western bard seem feeble and cerebral. Oppenheim, inhabiting a brick house in New York, manages to get that sonorous Eastern note into his dithyrambs. They are often inchoate and feverish, but at their best they have the gigantic gusto of Solomon’s Song.

        Miss Lowell is the schoolmarm of the movement, and vastly more the pedagogue than the artist. She has written perhaps half a dozen excellent pieces in imitation of Richard Aldington and John Gould Fletcher, and a great deal of highfalutin bathos. Her “A Dome of Many-Colored Glass” is full of infantile poppycock, and though it is true that it was first printed in 1912, before she joined the Imagists, it is not to be forgotten that it was reprinted with her consent in 1915, after she had definitely set up shop as a foe of the cliché. Her celebrity, I fancy, is largely extra-poetical; if she were Miss Tilly Jones, of Fort Smith, Ark., there would be a great deal less rowing about her, and her successive masterpieces would be received less gravely. A literary craftsman in America, as I have already said once or twice, is never judged by his work alone. Miss Lowell has been helped very much by her excellent social position. The majority, and perhaps fully nine-tenths of the revolutionary poets are of no social position at all – newspaper reporters, Jews, foreigners of vague nationality, school teachers, lawyers, advertisement writers, itinerant lecturers, Greenwich Village posturers, and so on. I have a suspicion that it has subtly flattered such denizens of the demi-monde to find the sister of a president of Harvard in their midst, and that their delight has materially corrupted their faculties. Miss Lowell’s book of exposition, “Tendencies in Modern American Poetry,” is commonplace to the last degree. Louis Untermeyer’s “The New Era in American Poetry” is very much better. And so is Prof. Dr. John Livingston Lowes’ “Convention and Revolt in Poetry.”

        As for Edgar Lee Masters, for a short season the undisputed Homer of the movement, I believe that he is already extinct. What made the fame of “The Spoon River Anthology” was not chiefly any great show of novelty in it, nor any extraordinary poignancy, nor any grim truthfulness unparalleled, but simply the public notion that it was improper. It fell upon the country at the height of the last sex wave – a wave eternally ebbing and flowing, now high, now low. It was read, not as work of art, but as document; its large circulation was undoubtedly mainly among persons to whom poetry qua poetry was as sour a dose as symphonic music. To such persons, of course, it seemed something new under the sun. They were unacquainted with the verse of George Crabbe; they were quite innocent of E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost; they knew nothing of the Ubi sunt formula; they had never heard of the Greek Anthology. The roar of his popular success won Masters’ case with the critics. His undoubted merits in detail – his half-wistful cynicism, his capacity for evoking simple emotions, his deft skill at managing the puny difficulties of vers libre – were thereupon pumped up to such an extent that his defects were lost sight of. Those defects, however, shine blindingly in his later books. Without the advantage of content that went with the anthology, they reveal themselves as volumes of empty doggerel, with now and then a brief moment of illumination. It would be difficult, indeed, to find poetry that is, in essence, less poetical. Most of the pieces are actually tracts, and many of them are very bad tracts.

        Lindsay? Alas, he has done his own burlesque. What was new in him, at the start, was an echo of the barbaric rhythms of the Jubilee Songs. But very soon the thing ceased to be a marvel, and of late his elephantine college yells have ceased to be amusing. His retirement to the chautauquas is self-criticism of uncommon penetration. Frost? A standard New England poet, with a few changes in phraseology, and the substitution of sour resignationism for sweet resignationism. Whittier without the whiskers. Robinson? Ditto, but with a politer bow. He has written sound poetry, but not much of it. The late Major-General Roosevelt ruined him by praising him, as he ruined Henry Bordeaux, Pastor Wagner, Francis Warrington Dawson and many another. Giovannitti? A forth-rate Sandburg. Ezra Pound? The American in headlong flight from America – to England, to Italy, to the Middle Ages, to ancient Greece, to Cathay and points East. Pound, it seems to me, is the most picturesque man in the whole movement – a professor turned fantee, Abelard in grand opera. His knowledge is abysmal; he has it readily on tap; moreover, he has a fine ear, and has written many an excellent verse. But now all the glow and gusto of the bard have been transformed into the rage of the pamphleteer: he drops the lute for the bayonet. One sympathizes with him in his choler. The stupidity he combats is actually almost unbearable. Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. But this business, alas, is fatal to the placid moods and fine other-worldliness of the poet. Pound gives a thrilling show, but – …. The remaining stars of the liberation need not detain us. They are the streetboys following the calliope. They have labored with diligence, but they have produced no poetry….

        Miss Monroe, if she would write a book about it, would be the most competent historian of the movement, and perhaps also its keenest critic. She has seen it from the inside. She knows precisely what it is about. She is able, finally, to detach herself from its extravagances, and to estimate its opponents without bile. Her failure to do a volume about it leaves Untermeyer’s “The New Era in American Poetry” the best in the field. Prof. Dr. Lowes’ treatise is very much more thorough, but it has the defect of stopping with the fundamentals – it has too little to say about specific poets. Untermeyer discusses all of them, and then throws in a dozen or two orthodox bards, wholly untouched by Bolshevism, for good measure. His criticism is often trenchant and always very clear. He thinks he knows what he thinks he knows, and he states it with the utmost address – sometimes, indeed, as in the case of Pound, with a good deal more address than its essential accuracy deserves. But the messianic note that gets into the bulls and ukases of Pound himself, the profound solemnity of Miss Lowell, the windy chautauqua-like nothings of Lindsay, the contradictions of the Imagists, the puerilities of Kreymborg et al – all these things are happily absent. And so it is possible to follow him amiably even when he is palpably wrong.

        That is not seldom. At the very start, for example, he permits himself a lot of highly dubious rumble-bumble about the “inherent Americanism” and soaring democracy of the movement. “Once,” he says, “the most exclusive and aristocratic of the arts, appreciated and fostered only by little salons and erudite groups, poetry has suddenly swung away from its self-imposed strictures and is expressing itself once more in terms of democracy.” Pondering excessively, I can think of nothing that would be more untrue than this. The fact is that the new poetry is neither American nor democratic. Despite its remote grounding on Whitman, it started, not in the United States at all, but in France, and its exotic color is still its most salient characteristic. Practically every one of its practitioners is palpably under some strong foreign influence, and most of them are no more Anglo-Saxon than a samovar or a toccata. The deliberate strangeness of Pound, his almost fanatical anti-Americanism, is a mere accentuation of what is in every other member of the fraternity. Many of them, like Frost, Fletcher, H. D. and Pound, have exiled themselves from the republic. Others, such as Oppenheim, Sandburg, Giovannitti, Benét and Untermeyer himself, are palpably Continental Europeans, often with Levantine traces. Yet others, such as Miss Lowell and Masters, are little more, at their best, than translators and adapters – from the French, from the Japanese, from the Greek. Even Lindsay, superficially the most national of them all, has also his exotic smear, as I have shown. Let Miss Lowell herself be a witness. “We shall see them,” she says at the opening of her essay on E. A. Robinson, “ceding more and more to the influence of other, alien, peoples….” A glance is sufficient to show the correctness of this observation. There is no more “inherent Americanism” in the new poetry than there is in the new American painting and music. It lies, in fact, quite outside the main stream of American culture.

        Nor is it democratic, in any intelligible sense. The poetry of Whittier and Longfellow was democratic. It voiced the elemental emotions of the masses of the people; it was full of their simple, rubber-stamp ideas; they comprehended it and cherished it. And so with the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley, and with that of Walt Mason and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. But the new poetry, grounded firmly upon novelty of form and boldness of idea, is quite beyond their understanding. It seems to them to be idiotic, just as the poetry of Whitman seemed to them to be idiotic, and if they could summon up enough interest in it to examine it at length they would undoubtedly clamor for laws making the confection of it a felony. The mistake of Untermeyer, and of others who talk to the same effect, lies in confusing the beliefs of poets and the subject matter of their verse with its position in the national consciousness. Oppenheim, Sandburg and Lindsay are democrats, just as Whitman was a democrat, but their poetry is no more a democratic phenomenon than his was, or than, to go to music, Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was. Many of the new poets, in truth, are ardent enemies of democracy, for example, Pound. Only one of them has ever actually sought to take his strophes to the vulgar. That one is Lindsay – and there is not the slightest doubt that the yokels welcomed him, not because they were interested in his poetry, but because it struck them as an amazing, and perhaps even a fascinatingly obscene thing, for a sane man to go about the country on any such bizarre and undemocratic business.

        No sound art, in fact, could possibly be democratic. Tolstoi wrote a whole book to prove the contrary, and only succeeded in making his case absurd. The only art that is capable of reaching the Homo Boobus is art that is already debased and polluted – band music, official sculpture, Pears’ Soap painting, the popular novel. What is honest and worthy of praise in the new poetry is Greek to the general. And, despite much nonsense, it seems to me that there is no little in it that is honest and worthy of praise. It has, for one thing, made an effective war upon the cliché, and so purged the verse of the nation of much of its old banality in subject and phrase. The elegant album pieces of Richard Henry Stoddard and Edmund Clarence Stedman are no longer in fashion – save, perhaps, among the democrats that Untermeyer mentions. And in the second place, it has substituted for this ancient conventionality an eager curiosity in life as men and women are actually living it – a spirit of daring experimentation that has made poetry vivid and full of human interest, as it was in the days of Elizabeth. The thing often passes into the grotesque, it is shot through and through with héliogabalisme, but at its high points it has achieved invaluable pioneering. A new poet, emerging out of the Baptist night of Peoria or Little Rock to-day, comes into an atmosphere charged with subtle electricities. There is a stimulating restlessness; ideas have a welcome, the art he aspires to is no longer a merely formal exercise, like practicing Czerny. When a Henry Van Dyke arises at some college banquet and begins to discharge an old-fashioned ode to alma mater there is a definite snicker, it is almost as if he were to appear in Congress gaiters or a beaver hat. An audience for such things, of course, still exists. It is, no doubt, an enormously large audience. But it has changed a good deal qualitatively, if not quantitatively. The relatively civilized reader has been educated to something better. He has heard a music that has spoiled his ear for the old wheezing of the melodeon. He weeps no more over what wrung him yesteryear.

        Unluckily, the new movement, in America even more than in England, France and Germany, suffers from a very crippling lack, and that is the lack of a genuinely first-rate poet. It has produced many talents, but it has yet to produce any genius, or even the shadow of genius. There has been a general lifting of the plain, but no vasty and melodramatic throwing up of new peaks. Worse still, it has had to face hard competition from without – that is, from poets who, while also emerged from platitude, have yet stood outside it, and perhaps in some doubt of it. Untermeyer discusses a number of such poets in his book. There is one of them, Lizette Woodworth Reese, who has written more sound poetry, more genuinely eloquent and beautiful poetry, than all the new poets put together – more than a whole posse of Masterses and Lindsays, more than a hundred Amy Lowells. And there are others, Neihardt and John McClure among them – particularly McClure. Untermeyer, usually anything but an ass, once committed the unforgettable asininity of sneering at McClure. The blunder, I daresay, is already lamented; it is not embalmed in his book. But it will haunt him on Tyburn Hill. For this McClure, attempting the simplest thing in the simplest way, has done it almost superbly. He seems to be entirely without theories. There is no pedagogical passion in him. He is no reformer. But more than any of the reformers now or lately in the arena, he is a poet.

Theory and Play Of The Duende (by Federico García Lorca)

Theory and Play Of The Duende
by Federico García Lorca

Ladies and Gentlemen,

          Between 1918 when I entered the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, and 1928 when I left, having completed my study of Philosophy and Letters, I listened to around a thousand lectures, in that elegant salon where the old Spanish aristocracy went to do penance for its frivolity on French beaches.

          Longing for air and sunlight, I was so bored I used to feel as though I was covered in fine ash, on the point of changing into peppery sneezes.

          So, no, I don’t want that terrible blowfly of boredom to enter this room, threading all your heads together on the slender necklace of sleep, and setting a tiny cluster of sharp needles in your, my listeners’, eyes.

          In a simple way, in the register that, in my poetic voice, holds neither the gleams of wood, nor the angles of hemlock, nor those sheep that suddenly become knives of irony, I want to see if I can give you a simple lesson on the buried spirit of saddened Spain.

          Whoever travels the bull’s hide that stretches between the Júcar, Guadalfeo, Sil and Pisuerga rivers (not to mention the tributaries that meet those waves, the colour of a lion’s mane, that stir the Plata) frequently hears people say: ‘This has much duende’. Manuel Torre, great artist of the Andalusian people, said to someone who sang for him: ‘You have a voice, you understand style, but you’ll never ever succeed because you have no duende.’

          All through Andalusia, from the rock of Jaén to the snail’s-shell of Cadiz, people constantly talk about the duende and recognise it wherever it appears with a fine instinct. That wonderful singer El Lebrijano, creator of the Debla, said: ‘On days when I sing with duende no one can touch me.’: the old Gypsy dancer La Malena once heard Brailowsky play a fragment of Bach, and exclaimed: ‘Olé! That has duende!’ but was bored by Gluck, Brahms and Milhaud. And Manuel Torre, a man who had more culture in his veins than anyone I’ve known, on hearing Falla play his own Nocturno del Generalife spoke this splendid sentence: ‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there’s no deeper truth than that.

          Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’

          So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation.

          This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzche’s heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding it, and without seeing that the duende he pursued had leapt from the Greek mysteries to the dancers of Cadiz and the headless Dionysiac scream of Silverio’s siguiriya.

          So, then, I don’t want anyone to confuse the duende with the theological demon of doubt at whom Luther, with Bacchic feeling, hurled a pot of ink in Eisenach, nor the Catholic devil, destructive and of low intelligence, who disguised himself as a bitch to enter convents, nor the talking monkey carried by Cervantes’ Malgesi in his comedy of jealousies in the Andalusian woods.

          No. The duende I mean, secret and shuddering, is descended from that blithe daemon, all marble and salt, of Socrates, whom it scratched at indignantly on the day when he drank the hemlock, and that other melancholy demon of Descartes, diminutive as a green almond, that, tired of lines and circles, fled along the canals to listen to the singing of drunken sailors.

          For every man, every artist called Nietzsche or Cézanne, every step that he climbs in the tower of his perfection is at the expense of the struggle that he undergoes with his duende, not with an angel, as is often said, nor with his Muse. This is a precise and fundamental distinction at the root of their work.

          The angel guides and grants, like St. Raphael: defends and spares, like St. Michael: proclaims and forewarns, like St. Gabriel.

          The angel dazzles, but flies over a man’s head, high above, shedding its grace, and the man realises his work, or his charm, or his dance effortlessly. The angel on the road to Damascus, and that which entered through the cracks in the little balcony at Assisi, or the one that followed in Heinrich Suso’s footsteps, create order, and there is no way to oppose their light, since they beat their wings of steel in an atmosphere of predestination.

          The Muse dictates, and occasionally prompts. She can do relatively little since she’s distant and so tired (I’ve seen her twice) that you’d think her heart half marble. Muse poets hear voices and don’t know where they’re from, but they’re from the Muse who inspires them and sometimes makes her meal of them, as in the case of Apollinaire, a great poet destroyed by the terrifying Muse, next to whom the divine angelic Rousseau once painted him.

          The Muse stirs the intellect, bringing a landscape of columns and an illusory taste of laurel, and intellect is often poetry’s enemy, since it limits too much, since it lifts the poet into the bondage of aristocratic fineness, where he forgets that he might be eaten, suddenly, by ants, or that a huge arsenical lobster might fall on his head – things against which the Muses who inhabit
monocles, or the roses of lukewarm lacquer in a tiny salon, have no power.

          Angel and Muse come from outside us: the angel brings light, the Muse form (Hesiod learnt from her). Golden bread or fold of tunic, it is her norm that the poet receives in his laurel grove. While the duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood.

          Reject the angel, and give the Muse a kick, and forget our fear of the scent of violets that eighteenth century poetry breathes out, and of the great telescope in whose lenses the Muse, made ill by limitation, sleeps.

          The true struggle is with the duende.

          The roads where one searches for God are known, whether by the barbaric way of the hermit or the subtle one of the mystic: with a tower, like St. Teresa, or by the three paths of St. John of the Cross. And though we may have to cry out, in Isaiah’s voice: Truly you are a hidden God,’ finally, in the end, God sends his primal thorns of fire to those who seek Him.

          Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya, master of the greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art, paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks, or strips Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer stark naked in the cold of the Pyrenees, or sends Jorge Manrique to wait for death in the wastes of Ocaña, or clothes Rimbaud’s delicate body in a saltimbanque’s costume, or gives the Comte de Lautréamont the eyes of a dead fish, at dawn, on the boulevard.

          The great artists of Southern Spain, Gypsy or flamenco, singers dancers, musicians, know that emotion is impossible without the arrival of the duende. They might deceive people into thinking they can communicate the sense of duende without possessing it, as authors, painters, and literary fashion-makers deceive us every day, without possessing duende: but we only have to attend a little, and not be full of indifference, to discover the fraud, and chase off that clumsy artifice.

          Once, the Andalusian ‘Flamenco singer’ Pastora Pavon, La Niña de Los Peines, sombre Spanish genius, equal in power of fancy to Goya or Rafael el Gallo, was singing in a little tavern in Cadiz. She played with her voice of shadows, with her voice of beaten tin, with her mossy voice, she tangled it in her hair, or soaked it in manzanilla or abandoned it to dark distant briars. But, there was nothing there: it was useless. The audience remained silent.

          In the room was Ignacio Espeleta, handsome as a Roman tortoise, who was once asked: ‘Why don’t you work?’ and who replied with a smile worthy of Argantonius: ‘How should I work, if I’m from Cadiz?’

          In the room was Elvira, fiery aristocrat, whore from Seville, descended in line from Soledad Vargos, who in ’30 didn’t wish to marry with a Rothschild, because he wasn’t her equal in blood. In the room were the Floridas, whom people think are butchers, but who in reality are millennial priests who still sacrifice bulls to Geryon, and in the corner was that formidable breeder of bulls, Don Pablo Murube, with the look of a Cretan mask. Pastora Pavon finished her song in silence. Only, a little man, one of those dancing midgets who leap up suddenly from behind brandy bottles, sarcastically, in a very soft voice, said: ‘Viva, Paris!’ as if to say: ‘Here ability is not important, nor technique, nor skill. What matters here is something other.’

          Then La Niña de Los Peines got up like a madwoman, trembling like a medieval mourner, and drank, in one gulp, a huge glass of fiery spirits, and began to sing with a scorched throat, without voice, breath, colour, but…with duende. She managed to tear down the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious, burning duende, friend to those winds heavy with sand, that make listeners tear at their clothes with the same rhythm as the Negroes of the Antilles in their rite, huddled before the statue of Santa Bárbara.

          La Niña de Los Peines had to tear apart her voice, because she knew experts were listening, who demanded not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air. She had to rob herself of skill and safety: that is to say, banish her Muse, and be helpless, so her duende might come, and deign to struggle with her at close quarters. And how she sang! Her voice no longer at play, her voice a jet of blood, worthy of her pain and her sincerity, opened like a ten-fingered hand as in the feet, nailed there but storm-filled, of a Christ by Juan de Juni.

          The arrival of the duende presupposes a radical change to all the old kinds of form, brings totally unknown and fresh sensations, with the qualities of a newly created rose, miraculous, generating an almost religious enthusiasm.

          In all Arab music, dance, song or elegy, the arrival of duende is greeted with vigorous cries of ‘Allah! Allah!’ so close to the ‘Olé!’ of the bullfight, and who knows whether they are not the same? And in all the songs of Southern Spain, the appearance of the duende is followed by sincere cries of: ‘Viva Dios!’ deep, human, tender cries of communication with God through the five senses, thanks to the duende that shakes the voice and body of the dancer, a real, poetic escape from this world, as pure as that achieved by that rarest poet of the seventeenth century Pedro Soto de Rojas with his seven gardens, or John Climacus with his trembling ladder of tears.

          Naturally when this escape is perfected, everyone feels the effect: the initiate in seeing style defeat inadequate content, and the novice in sensing authentic emotion. Years ago, an eighty year old woman came first in a dance contest in Jerez de la Frontera, against lovely women and girls with liquid waists, merely by raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping with her foot on the floor: but in that crowd of Muses and angels with lovely forms and smiles, who could earn the prize but her moribund duende sweeping the earth with its wings made of rusty knives.

          All the arts are capable of duende, but where it naturally creates most space, as in music, dance and spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed to interpre
t them, since they have forms that are born and die, perpetually, and raise their contours above the precise present.

          Often the composer’s duende fills the performers, and at other times, when a poet or composer is no such thing, the performer’s duende, interestingly, creates a new wonder that has the appearance of, but is not, primitive form. This was the case with the duende-haunted Eleonara Duse, who searched out failed plays to make triumphs of them through her inventiveness, and the case with Paganini, explained by Goethe, who made one hear profound melody in vulgar trifles, and the case of a delightful young girl in Port St. Marys, whom I saw singing and dancing that terrible Italian song ‘O Mari!’ with such rhythm, pauses and intensity that she turned Italian dross into a brave serpent of gold. What happened was that each effectively found something new that no one had seen before, that could give life and knowledge to bodies devoid of expression.

          Every art and every country is capable of duende, angel and Muse: and just as Germany owns to the Muse, with a few exceptions, and Italy the perennial angel, Spain is, at all times, stirred by the duende, country of ancient music and dance, where the duende squeezes out those lemons of dawn, a country of death, a country open to death.

          In every other country death is an ending. It appears and they close the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them. Many Spaniards live indoors till the day they die and are carried into the sun. A dead man in Spain is more alive when dead than anywhere else on earth: his profile cuts like the edge of a barber’s razor. Tales of death and the silent contemplation of it are familiar to Spaniards. From Quevedo’s dream of skulls, to Valdés Leal’s putrefying archbishop, and from Marbella in the seventeenth century, dying in childbirth, in the middle of the road, who says:

The blood of my womb
Covers the stallion.
The stallion’s hooves
Throw off sparks of black pitch…

to the youth of Salamanca, recently killed by a bull, who cried out:

Friends, I am dying:
Friends I am done for.
I’ve three scarves inside me,
And this one makes four…

stretches a rail of saltpetre flowers, where a nation goes to contemplate death, with on the side that’s more bitter, the verses of Jeremiah, and on the more lyrical side with fragrant cypress: but a country where what is most important of all finds its ultimate metallic value in death.

          The hut, the wheel of a cart, the razor, and the prickly beards of shepherds, the barren moon, the flies, the damp cupboards, the rubble, the lace-covered saints, the wounding lines of eaves and balconies, in Spain grow tiny weeds of death, allusions and voices, perceptible to an alert spirit, that fill the memory with the stale air of our own passing. It’s no accident that all Spanish art is rooted in our soil, full of thistles and sharp stones: it’s no isolated example that lamentation of Pleberio’s, or the dances of that maestro Josef María de Valdivielso: it isn’t chance that among all the ballads of Europe this Spanish one stands out:

If you’re my pretty lover,
why don’t you gaze at me? 

The eyes I gazed at you with
I’ve given to the dark. 

If you’re my pretty lover
why aren’t you kissing me? 

The lips I kissed you with
I’ve given to earth below. 

If you’re my pretty lover,
why aren’t you hugging me? 

The arms I hugged you with
Are covered with worms, you see.

Nor is it strange that this song is heard at the dawn of our lyrical tradition:

In the garden
I shall die,
in the rose-tree
they will kill me,
Mother I went
to gather roses,
looking for death
within the garden.
Mother I went
cutting roses,
looking for death
within the rose-tree.
In the garden
I shall die.
In the rose-tree
they’ll kill me.

          Those moon-frozen heads that Zurbarán painted, the yellows of butter and lightning in El Greco, Father Sigüenza’s prose, the whole of Goya’s work, the apse of the Escorial church, all polychrome sculpture, the crypt in the Duke of Osuna’s house, the ‘death with a guitar’ in the Chapel of the Benaventes in Medina de Rioseco, equate culturally to the processions of San Andrés de Teixido, in which the dead take their places: to the dirges that the women of Asturias sing, with their flame-bright torches, in the November night: to the dance and chanting of the Sibyl in the cathedrals of Mallorca and Toledo: to the dark In recort of Tortosa: and to the endless Good Friday rituals which with the highly refined festival of the bulls, form the popular ‘triumph’ of death in Spain. In all the world only Mexico can grasp my country’s hand.

          When the Muse sees death appear she closes the door, or builds a plinth, or displays an urn and writes an epitaph with her waxen hand, but afterwards she returns to tending her laurel in a silence that shivers between two breezes. Beneath the broken arch of the ode, she binds, in funereal harmony, the precise flowers painted by fifteenth century Italians and calls up Lucretius’ faithful cockerel, by whom unforeseen shadows are dispelled.

          When the angel sees death appear he flies in slow circles, and with tears of ice and narcissi weaves the elegy we see trembling in the hands of Keats, Villasandino, Herrera, Bécquer, and Juan Ramón Jiménez. But how it horrifies the angel if he feels a spider, however tiny, on his tender rosy foot!

          The duende, by contrast, won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death, if he doesn’t know he can haunt death’s house, if he’s not certain to shake those branches we all carry, that do not bring, can never bring, consolation.

          With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work.

          The magic power of a poem consists in it always being filled with duende, in its baptising all who gaze at it with dark water, since with duende it is easier to love, to understand, and be certain of being loved, and being understood, and this struggle for expression and the communication of that expression in poetry sometimes acquires a fatal character.

          Remember the example of the flamenca, duende-filled St. Teresa. Flamenca not for entangling an angry bull, and passing it magnificently three times, which she did: not because she thought herself pretty before Brother Juan de la Miseria: nor for slapping His Holiness’s Nuncio: but because she was one of those few creatures whose duende (not angel, for the angel never attacks anyone) pierced her with an arrow and wanted to kill her for having stolen his ultimate secret, the subtle link that joins the five senses to what is core to the living flesh, the living cloud, the living ocean of love liberated from time.

          Most valiant vanquisher of the duende and the counter-example to Philip of Austria, who sought anxiously in Theology for Muse and angel, and was imprisoned by a duende of icy ardour in the Escorial Palace, where geometry borders on dream, and where the duende wears the mask of the Muse for the eternal punishment of that great king.

          We have said that the duende loves the edge, the wound, and draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression.

          In Spain (as among Oriental races, where the dance is religious expression) the duende has a limitless hold over the bodies of the dancers of Cadiz, praised by Martial, the breasts of those who sing, praised by Juvenal, and over all the liturgies of the bullring, an authentic religious drama, where in the same manner as in the Mass, a God is sacrificed to, and adored.

          It seems as if all the duende of the Classical world is concentrated in this perfect festival, expounding the culture and the great sensibility of a nation that reveals the finest anger, bile and tears of mankind. Neither in Spanish dance nor in the bullfight does anyone enjoy himself: the duende charges itself with creating suffering by means of a drama of living forms, and clears the way for an escape from the reality that surrounds us.

          The duende works on the dancer’s body like wind on sand. It changes a girl, by magic power, into a lunar paralytic, or covers the cheeks of a broken old man, begging for alms in the wine-shops, with adolescent blushes: gives a woman’s hair the odour of a midnight sea-port: and at every instant works the arms with gestures that are the mothers of the dances of all the ages.

          But it’s impossible for it ever to repeat itself, and it’s important to underscore this. The duende never repeats itself, any more than the waves of the sea do in a storm.

          Its most impressive effects appear in the bullring, since it must struggle on the one hand with death, which can destroy it, and on the other with geometry, measure, the fundamental basis of the festival.

          The bull has its own orbit: the toreador his, and between orbit and orbit lies the point of danger, where the vertex of terrible play exists.

          You can own to the Muse with the muleta, and to the angel with the banderillas, and pass for a good bullfighter, but in the work with the cape, while the bull is still free of wounds, and at the moment of the kill, the aid of the duende is required to drive home the nail of artistic truth.

          The bullfighter who terrifies the public with his bravery in the ring is not fighting bulls, but has lowered himself to a ridiculous level, to doing what anyone can do, by playing with his life: but the toreador who is bitten by the duende gives a lesson in Pythagorean music and makes us forget that his is constantly throwing his heart at the horns.

          Lagartijo, with his Roman duende, Joselito with his Jewish duende, Belmonte with his Baroque duende, and Cagancho with his Gypsy duende, showed, from the twilight of the bullring, poets, painters and composers the four great highways of Spanish tradition.

          Spain is unique, a country where death is a national spectacle, where death sounds great bugle blasts on the arrival of Spring, and its art is always ruled by a shrewd duende which creates its different and inventive quality.

          The duende who, for the first time in sculpture, stains with blood the cheeks of the saints of that master, Mateo de Compostela, is the same one who made St. John of the Cross groan, or burns naked nymphs in Lope’s religious sonnets.

          The duende that raises the towers of Sahagún or bakes hot bricks in Calatayud, or Teruel, is the same as he who tears apart El Greco’s clouds, and kicks out at Quevedo’s bailiffs, and Goya’s chimeras, and drives them away.

          When he rains he brings duende-haunted Velasquez, secretly, from behind his monarchic greys. When he snows he makes Herrera appear naked to show that cold does not kill: when he burns he pushes Berruguete into the flames and makes him invent new dimensions for sculpture.

          Gongora’s Muse and Garcilaso’s angel must loose their laurel wreaths when St. John of the Cross’s duende passes by, when: 

The wounded stag
appears, over the hill.

Gonzalo de Berceo’s Muse and the Archpriest of Hita’s angel must depart to give way to Jorge Manrique, wounded to death at the door of the castle of Belmonte. Gregorio Hernández’ Muse, and José de Mora’s angel must bow to the passage of de Mena’s duende weeping tears of blood, and Martínez Montañéz’ duende with the head of an Assyrian bull, just as the melancholic Muse of Catalonia, and the damp angel of Galicia, gaze in loving wonder at the duende of Castile, so far from their warm bread and gentle grazing cattle, with its norms of sweeping sky and dry sierra.

Quevedo’s duende and Cervantes’, the one with green anemones of phosphorus, the other with flowers of Ruidera gypsum, crown the altarpiece of Spain’s duende.

Each art, as is natural, has a distinct mode and form of duende, but their roots unite at the point from which flow the dark sounds of Manuel Torre, the ultimate matter, and uncontrollable mutual depth and extremity of wood, sound, canvas, word.

Dark sounds, behind which in tender intimacy exist volcanoes, ants, zephyrs, and the vast night pressing its waist against the Milky Way.

          Ladies and Gentlemen, I have raised three arches and with clumsy hands placed within them the Muse, the angel and the duende.

          The Muse remains motionless: she can have a finely pleated tunic or cow eyes like those which gaze out in Pompeii, at the four-sided nose her great friend Picasso has painted her with. The angel can disturb Antonello da Messina’s heads of hair, Lippi’s tunics, or the violins of Masolino or Rousseau.

          The duende….Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.

Translated by A. S. Kline © 2007 All Rights Reserved.

This work may be freely reproduced, stored, and transmitted, electronically or otherwise, for any non-commercial purpose.

   

State of Man (by Russell Salamon)

STATE OF MAN

 

The
state of god is the state of man. I want to make god in you. Hello,
hello, our resurrection devices, we lift each other into the hosanna,
hallelujah, en-theos-iasm of who we mean by Life. Visible Life can be
cared for, loved, set free, appreciated. Something can be done about the
invisible state of god by looking at visible life forms and their
conditions. The promised later states of heaven and hell are ways to say
how we are doing now. At Christmas
time (or your holiday) the good will, care, appreciation, the raised
emotional tones, the hints of heaven in your eyes, that is where we live
from. The Origin Point of good will is the divine point. It is not much
to do: one assumes the state of original Faith and breathes in and
out.. Make sure of the out. Holding your breath of Faith might turn you
into a winter scene with forty foot snowdrifts that reach up to the
power lines. I want to find the obvious divinity. You
smile–aha–paydirt, pay angel breath, payload. Repayment for all the
other flows of good wishes among the lives, children, women, returning
servicemen whose daughters have been longing for the moment of
astonishment of your return. Reconnection–the completed state of god.
We are doing well today. The future world is here for at least a few
days. Then the past may come with its baggage, will try to sell you a
disease or murder, but today, in this blue morning air cool as dreams,
spills all our good wishes across the land. Merry future world, merry
freedom across the lands and minds. We have been waiting to find each
other. We are found. You are so beautiful. You too, tough guy.

 
—Russell Salamon

December 25, 2010

* * *

Recommended Russell Salamon works include Descent into Cleveland (1994, Words & Pictures Press), Woodsmoke & Green Tea (2006, deep cleveland press), and Ascent from Cleveland: Wild Heart / Steel Phoenix (2008, Freedonia Press).  You may contact the author at thesalamons@earthlink.net.

Discourse on Plato and His Associations with Socrates (by Irene Brodsky)

DISCOURSE ON PLATO AND HIS ASSOCIATIONS WITH SOCRATES

                                                           Submitted by Irene Brodsky

                                                           Instructor of Philosophy/Literature

                                                           Brooklyn  College/Adult Education Program

    

 

     Discourse on Plato and his associations with Socrates will reveal that regardless of many public accusations made against Socrates, Plato was his loyal student, friend, witness to his trial  (399 B.C ) and documented four dialogues (Plato: Trial and Death  of Socrates).  For those of you who may not be familiar with Plato, Socrates , his trial and death,  let me begin by properly introducing  Plato and Socrates.

 

     Plato  (429 – 347 B.C),) son of Ariston and Perictione, was one of the most brilliant writers in the Western literary tradition as well as the most penetrating, wide-ranging  and influential authors in the history of Philosophy.  He was an Athenian citizen of high status who displayed his works in the political events and intellectual  movements of his time.  The profound questions raised by Plato are suggestive and provocative.  Educated readers of nearly every period have, in some way, been influenced by him.  In practically every age, there have been Philosophers who counted themselves Platonists in some important respects. 

 

     Plato was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “Philosopher” should be applied but he was self-conscious about how Philosophy should be conceived. He transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled and concluded the subject of  Philosophy is a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, metaphysical, political and epistemological issues.  It was his invention.

                                                                           

      After pursuing the liberal studies of his day (407  B.C.) , Plato became a friend and student of  Socrates and lived at the court of Dionysius the Elder, Tyrant of Syracuse.  On his return to Athens, he founded a school where he taught Mathematics and Philosophy for the remainder of his life (until age 80).  And yet, he called himself a student of Socrates, a student of the philosophical teachings and discussions of Socrates which led to their becoming friends. 

 

     Plato’s early works include a group of dialogues called “Socratic”.  These dialogues  include “The Apology” (the defense of Socrates), “The Meno” (which asks if virtue can be taught) and “The Gorgias” (concerning the absolute nature of right and wrong).  Plato’s group of dialogues  present  Socrates in conversations that illustrate his main ideas, the unity of virtue and knowledge of  happiness.  However, each dialogue treats a particular problem without resolving the issues raised. 

 

     Influenced by Socrates, Plato was concerned with the fundamental philosophical problem of working out a theory of the art of “living and knowing”.  Like Socrates, he was convinced of the harmonious structure of the universe.  His goal was to show the rational relationship between the soul, the state and the cosmos. In this respect, Plato went one step further than his mentor & friend Socrates in trying  to construct a comprehensive philosophical scheme.

                                                                                                               

        Socrates  (C.469 BC – 399 BC), son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete, was a Classical Greek Philosopher.   Credited as one of the founders of Western Philosophy, he was an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of  later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato (and Xenophon) and the plays of his contemporary Aristophanes.  Aristophanes may be best known today for his play “Clouds”….a spoof of Socrates .  He was also a poet, dramatist, comic and playwrite of 40 plays.  However, his own personal life remains private.

 

     Through his portrayal in Plato’s dialogues, Socrates has become renowned for his contribution to the field of Ethics, and it is this platonic Socrates who also lends his name to the concepts of Socratic irony and the Socrates method (elenchus).  The latter remains a commonly used tool in a wide range of Discussions, is a type of pedagogy in which a series of questions are asked to draw individual answers  and to encourage fundamental insight into the issue at hand.  It is Plato’s Socrates that also made important and lasting contributions  to the fields of  Epistemology and logic.  The influence of his ideas and approach remains strong in providing a foundation for much Western Philosophy that followed.

 

     Plato claimed to be a student of Socrates.  Socrates stated that he was not a teacher because he never accepted any payment for what he described as  discussion of  Philosophy.  This led to the issue of how did Socrates earn a living for himself and his family?  There was some talk of Socrates taking over his father’s stonemasonry business and creating “The Three Graces”  which stood near the Acropolis until the 2^nd century AD.

 

     The friendship of Plato and Socrates is evident by Plato’s attendance at his trial.  But less known is another student, Xenophon, who was also present.  “The Trial and Death of Socrates” by Plato includes some accounts by Xenophon.  To date, there are three translated editions and one revision of what is known as one of the most famous trials in all history.  It is said that Xenophon continued to preserve the sayings of Socrates which was surely one of the reasons he was exiled from Athens.   Other possible reasons include Xenophon’s taking service with the Persians and not believing in the political morals of the Athenians.

 

     Xenophon (431 BC – 354 BC), son of Gryllus, was a Greek Historian, soldier and admirer of Socrates.  In his writings, he noted that he had asked Socrates for advice on whether to go  with Cyrus The Younger on an expedition against his older brother (the Emporor Antaxerxes of Persia)  in 401 BC.  He claims that Socrates  referred  him to the divinely inspired Delphic Oracle.  Xenophon was more concerned  who he should pray to and do sacrifice; and not if he should actually go with Cyrus. The oracle told him which Gods to pray to and do sacrifice but when Xenophon told this to Socrates, he was chastised. 

 

     The Trial and Death of Socates  refers to the trial and the subsequent execution of Socrates in 399 B.C..  On his way to his trial, Socrates  encounters Euthyphro.   Euthyphro, a religious expert, was  there for problems of his own but found  time to have a brief  conversation with Socrates regarding definition of piety and Socrates’ universal search for  the definition of ethical terms.  As usual, nothing was resolved.

 

     Socrates was tried on the basis of two alleged charges:

1.  For corrupting the youth and impiety

1.  For failing to acknowledge the Gods by introducing new deities .

 

A jury of 50l Anthenian citizens were chosen by lot to serve.   The majority voted  to convict Socrates.  He had choices to go to prison, be exiled to another country or to die by drinking  hemlock in liquid form..  Socrates chose to die.  It was a most unusual choice considering that he had a wife and three sons, was obviously in good health to have lived 70 years and could have chosen to be exiled.

 

     Plato gave great detail to the events of Socrates’ trial and death.  His words have been painstakingly translated by George M. A Grube and revised by Professor John M. Cooper, Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.  He begins with Socrates’ Apology which was actually a defense speech made by Socrates who had no public defender or legal experience.  Socrates chose to defend himself against those who would make accusations against him.  Considering  his lack of legal assistance and training , he effectively held his own for the duration of the long  trial.

 

      In the courtroom, it is rumored that his students/followers were there to show their support.   501 men from Athens were called as Jurors.   Many of them were said to probably be farmers.  And it is uncertain how many of these men might have been friends of Socrates.  In his many years of wandering the streets  and countryside to get answers  to his questions,  he approached endless men.  This attracted students to follow Socrates to see how he did this and what were the results.   But somewhere along the line, such devotion was seen as something bad.   It was said that Socrates was corrupting the young minds of these students.   

 

     In today’s world, Socrates would probably be seen as a pest…someone who talks  too much…someone who thinks he is smarter than everyone else…but certainly not a bad person.  However, 3 major accusers had a different view of Socrates. Sad to say, there are those who would want to harm  someone they envy.  Socrates was a very brilliant man and such qualities  are  said to be envied by  others.   Perhaps the most envious man was Meletus…..the main accuser at Socrates’ Trial.

 

     Meletus’ motivation to bring charges against Socrates remains a topic to be debated.  One opinion is that, as a poet, he was upset with Socrates’ low opinion of poets…..saying poetry was “only for women, children and slaves”.  However, Plato did not seem familiar with Meletus or his poetry.  It is also interesting to note that there were no official records of Meletus’  trial speech.  There is also no official record of the Jury being so remorse after the trial that they banished Meletus  from the City.   This “rumor” is often questioned and said to be inconsistent with earlier writings which offer no such indications of such widespread regret over the actions of the jury. 

 

     The other accusers at the trial were Anytus and Lycon .  Anytus, son of  Anthenian, was a middle-class powerful politician who was the driving force of Socrates.  Prior to his political career in Athens, he served as a general in the Peloponnesian War.  His motivation to prosecute Socrates is rumored to be his concern that  Socrates’ criticism of Athenian institutions could be harmful to the democrary that Athens has so recently gained.  Socrates was associated with persons allegedly responsible for the 404 B.C. overthrow of Athenian democracy, and disdain of  politicians such as Anytus.   

 

     Plato offers some clues to the animosity between Anytus and Socrates.   He refers to  Socrates’ argument that the great statesmen of Athenian history have nothing to offer in terms of an understanding of virtue. Plato quotes Anytus as warning  Socrates , “Socrates, I think that you are too ready to speak evil of men, and if you will take my advice, I would recommend you to be much more careful!”

 

     It is alleged by Plato that Anytus had an additional personal gripe with Socrates. Plato quotes Socrates as saying “I had a brief association with Alcibiades, the son of  Anytus and I found him to be lacking in spirit”. It is not sure if this association included  sex but Socrates, as were many men of that time, was  bisexual and slept with some of his younger students.  Anytus did not approve of his son’s relationship with Socrates.  According to Xenophon, Socrates encouraged the son of Anytus “to not continue working in his father’s family tanning of hides business.”  Socrates predicted to continue doing so would cause the son to fall into disgrace. 

 

    In regard to the third accuser, Lycon, he was alleged to be an orator, a profession seen as low regard by Socrates.  Socrates claimed such careers were less concerned with truth and more interested in power/influence.   Lycon was also said to be a demagogue who made necessary preparations for trials and may have been a supporter of the common man (i.e. a rabble-rouser).  It is rumored Lycon also saw Socrates as a threat to the democracy he highly valued.
 

     And so, the trial went on as scheduled and Socrates bravely faced his  accusers and jurors.  His speech and defense was eloquent.  But the majority of the vote was  guilty as charged.  At this time, Socrates was quoted to say “Now the hour to part has come.  I go to die.  You go to live.  Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one except the Gods”.

 

    Socrates is said to have spent the next 30 days in prison due to  an annual religious mission on the Agean Aisle.  No executions were allowed until the ship returned.  At this time, yet another friend, Crito,  came to visit Socrates in Prison.  However, Crito had the ulterior motive and wealthy means to help Socrates to be able to escape from prison, and take his wife and sons to another country.   By now it is quite obvious to the reader of this paper that Socrates will not do so.  He will stay and die as the verdict predicted.  But his wish to die was falling on “deaf” ears of his friend, Crito. 

 

     Crito arrived with a long list of reasons & excuses for Socrates to get up and let Crito and his friends (waiting outside) to help him escape to another country.  It is rumored, by Plato, that the guards and warden were quite willing to look the other way.  And yet, it is said that Socrates quoted “It would not be fitting at my age to resent the fact that I must die now.” 

 

     This brings us to the death scene of Socrates as depicted in the famous painting of “Socrates Death Bed’ hanging on the wall today at the landmark New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5^th Avenue & E. 81 Street.  Friends came forward to be with Socrates on his death bed but his wife, Xanthippe  & sons, Lamprocles, Menexnus and Sophroniscus were encouraged not to stay for Socrates did not want to see tears.    However, he did not count on the tears of his friends.  He had to explain that “one should die in silence.  So it was best for all to be silent and controlled” since the last moment on earth was so near for Socrates.    According to Plato, the main topic was the nature of the soul and the argument of its immortality and  dwelling  places after death.  To this very day, this remains biggest issues  for debate amoung scholars, religious leaders, mystics, nay-sayers, Doctors,  and writers.

                                                                                                

     The argument of if there is life after death, if there is a soul, and do we have a spirit is  the most sensitive topics for it applies to all of us.  Rich, poor, sick, healthy, educated, ignorant, etc…, it affects us all.  For no one is promised tomorrow.  Some say “live life to the fullest”.  “Live for today”  But it does not seem that this was of vital importance to Plato or Socrates.  They seemed to be sure there was a better life waiting for them after death.  Socrates  did not seem to have very much advice for his wife and children regarding how they were supposed to survive after he was gone….except to know how he wished to be buried.

 

     Finally, the officer arrived with the hemlock.  He tried to speak to Socrates but was in tears because he liked Socrates, found him to be a kind and gentle person.  At this time, Socrates offered a prayer to the Gods “That his journey from here to yonder be fortunate”.  He was interrupted by noisy tears and expressed his anger over a bunch of men crying.  It is very obvious that Socrates expected such behavior only of women and children.   He had to remind them to control themselves.  Such a sign of caring, human feelings, friendship and sorrow for this truly misunderstood man named Socrates. At this point, it is rumored that Plato became ill and left the Prison.

 

     The Trial and death of Socrates is yet puzzling to historians.  Why, in a Society enjoying more freedom and democracy  than any the world has ever seen, would  a 70 year old Philosopher  be put to death because of his teachings.  Considering his age, he could have died in a few years of a natural death.  
 

     To this very day, the precise association between Plato and Socrates remains an area of contention among  Scholars.  Plato makes it clear that he was Socrates’ most devoted student.  Other students & friends such as Eurthyphro, Crito, and Xenothon were loyal as well. 

     Such was the end of Socrates, a man who we would surely agree was the best of all men we knew, the wisest and the  most upright.  And for those who remain unsure, perhaps they should go out and ask everyone else.  In conclusion, Plato has effectively shown his associations with Socrates as a loyal, devoted student, friend and witness to his trial and death.  Plato went on to live another ten years  until age 80.  Considering the fact that probably the only thing both men agreed upon was the possibility of a better life after death,  what if  there was also the possibility of  reincarnation of Plato and Socrates?   In that case, Plato and Socrates could perhaps come back to life as Professors of Math and Philosophy in a most likely place…New York University…an area filled with poets, artists, creative people, scholars, famous faces, protestors, believers, weirdos, and  people too weird to describe.

 

     In this manner, Plato and Socrates could solve the mystery of “is there life after death?”  They could tell us if it was a better life as hoped or something to dread.  But, would you really want to know?  Could you take it?  Socrates spent his entire  life searching for the truth.   Plato spent many hours discussing such issues as a student of Socrates.  If the truth were to be known, what would you do? 

 

     Another issue is how  would Plato and Socrates deal with today’s ultra modern world filled with technology, airplanes, fast cars, trains, sneakers, jeans, dyed hair, heavy-metal  music, rap-singers, television, radio, telephones, ipods, kindles, nooks,  street lights, condominiums, penthouses, skyscrapers, etc.?

 

     I could just imagine Plato and Socrates holding rallies in Central Park and Washington Square Park to get their message  across.  They would be seen either as the new gurus of society or taken away by the authorities for causing a riot.  If that sounds somewhat familiar, think of how Socrates was forever walking along in search of finding someone who could give him the right answer, the best answer  the truth…and look how he wound up being arrested for corrupting the  young  minds of those who chose to follow him. 

 

     Perhaps the world will never be ready to know the truth!

 

* * *
    

                             BIBLIOGRAPHY                                     

PLATO – TRIAL AND APOLOGY OF SOCRATES  3^RD EDITION

OXFORD HANDBOOK OF PLATO

OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ANCIENT GREECE

GREAT DIALOGUE OF PLATO – COMPLETE TEXT OF THE APOLOGY, CRITO AND PHAEDO

PLATO’S SOCRATES’ AS EDUCATOR

PLATO AND SOCRATES – BRISBORNE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

PLATO – DEFENSE OF SOCRATES: EUTHYPRO AND CRITO

PLATO – TALKS WITH SOCRATES ABOUT LIFE

PLATO’S PROGENY= HOW PLATO AND SOCRATES STILL CAPTIVATE THE MODERN MIND

* * *

by Irene Brodsky – Teacher of Poetry
Brooklyn College City University of N.Y.
Former nightclub singer
Poetry lover
Music collector
etc.

Find more by Irene Brodsky at www.outskirtspress.com/PoetryUnplugged 
and www.sharingbooks.com (look for Silly Kitty)

The Essays of Montaigne – preface by William Carew Hazlitt

The Essays of Montaigne
by Michel de Montaigne, translated into English by Charles Cotton
[first published in 1686 – this text comes from the edition published in 1877 by William Carew Hazlitt]

Preface

The present publication is intended to supply a recognised deficiency in our literature–a library edition of the Essays of Montaigne. This great French writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the land of his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures. His Essays, which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of Bacon and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, as Hallam observes, the Frenchman’s literary importance largely results from the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval and subsequent. But, at the same time, estimating the value and rank of the essayist, we are not to leave out of the account the drawbacks and the circumstances of the period: the imperfect state of education, the comparative scarcity of books, and the limited opportunities of intellectual intercourse. Montaigne freely borrowed of others, and he has found men willing to borrow of him as freely. We need not wonder at the reputation which he with seeming facility achieved. He was, without being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals. His book was different from all others which were at that date in the world. It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new channels. It told its readers, with unexampled frankness, what its writer’s opinion was about men and things, and threw what must have been a strange kind of new light on many matters but darkly understood. Above all, the essayist uncased himself, and made his intellectual and physical organism public property. He took the world into his confidence on all subjects. His essays were a sort of literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of the writer’s mind, made by himself at different levels and under a large variety of operating influences.

Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most truthful. What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what relation it bore to external objects. He investigated his mental structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations abounding with originality and force, he delivered to his fellow-men in a book.

Eloquence, rhetorical effect, poetry, were alike remote from his design. He did not write from necessity, scarcely perhaps for fame. But he desired to leave France, nay, and the world, something to be remembered by, something which should tell what kind of a man he was–what he felt, thought, suffered–and he succeeded immeasurably, I apprehend, beyond his expectations.

It was reasonable enough that Montaigne should expect for his work a certain share of celebrity in Gascony, and even, as time went on, throughout France; but it is scarcely probable that he foresaw how his renown was to become world-wide; how he was to occupy an almost unique position as a man of letters and a moralist; how the Essays would be read, in all the principal languages of Europe, by millions of intelligent human beings, who never heard of Perigord or the League, and who are in doubt, if they are questioned, whether the author lived in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century. This is true fame. A man of genius belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature, which is always everywhere the same.

The text of these volumes is taken from the first edition of Cotton’s version, printed in 3 vols. 8vo, 1685-6, and republished in 1693, 1700, 1711, 1738, and 1743, in the same number of volumes and the same size. In the earliest impression the errors of the press are corrected merely as far as page 240 of the first volume, and all the editions follow one another. That of 1685-6 was the only one which the translator lived to see. He died in 1687, leaving behind him an interesting and little-known collection of poems, which appeared posthumously, 8vo, 1689.

It was considered imperative to correct Cotton’s translation by a careful collation with the ‘variorum’ edition of the original, Paris, 1854, 4 vols. 8vo or 12mo, and parallel passages from Florin’s earlier undertaking have occasionally been inserted at the foot of the page. A Life of the Author and all his recovered Letters, sixteen in number, have also been given; but, as regards the correspondence, it can scarcely be doubted that it is in a purely fragmentary state. To do more than furnish a sketch of the leading incidents in Montaigne’s life seemed, in the presence of Bayle St. John’s charming and able biography, an attempt as difficult as it was useless.

The besetting sin of both Montaigne’s translators seems to have been a propensity for reducing his language and phraseology to the language and phraseology of the age and country to which they belonged, and, moreover, inserting paragraphs and words, not here and there only, but constantly and habitually, from an evident desire and view to elucidate or strengthen their author’s meaning. The result has generally been unfortunate; and I have, in the case of all these interpolations on Cotton’s part, felt bound, where I did not cancel them, to throw them down into the notes, not thinking it right that Montaigne should be allowed any longer to stand sponsor for what he never wrote; and reluctant, on the other hand, to suppress the intruding matter entirely, where it appeared to possess a value of its own.

Nor is redundancy or paraphrase the only form of transgression in Cotton, for there are places in his author which he thought proper to omit, and it is hardly necessary to say that the restoration of all such matter to the text was considered essential to its integrity and completeness.

My warmest thanks are due to my father, Mr Registrar Hazlitt, the author of the well-known and excellent edition of Montaigne published in 1842, for the important assistance which he has rendered to me in verifying and retranslating the quotations, which were in a most corrupt state, and of which Cotton’s English versions were singularly loose and inexact, and for the zeal with which he has co-operated with me in collating the English text, line for line and word for word, with the best French edition.

By the favour of Mr F. W. Cosens, I have had by me, while at work on this subject, the copy of Cotgrave’s Dictionary, folio, 1650, which belonged to Cotton. It has his autograph and copious MSS. notes, nor is it too much to presume that it is the very book employed by him in his translation.

W. C. H.

KENSINGTON, November 1877.

[Crisis Chronicles editor’s note: Until I have time to proofread and add the rest of the text of The Essays of Montaigne to the Online Library, you may read said text at Wikisource: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne.]

Castles in the Air (by Thomas Love Peacock)

Thomas Love Peacock, 1785-1866
Castles in the Air
by Thomas Love Peacock

My thoughts by night are often filled
  With visions false as fair:
For in the past alone I build
  My castles in the air.

I dwell not now on what may be:
  Night shadows o’er the scene:
But still my fancy wanders free
  Through that which might have been.

* * *

   

Uses of Great Men (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Uses of Great Men
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850.

It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn
out to be heroes, and their condition regal it would not surprise us. All mythology opens
with demigods, and the circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is
paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth and found it
deliciously sweet.

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the veracity of good
men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and
nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society; and, actually
or ideally, we manage to live with superiors. We call our children and our lands by their
names. Their names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies are in
our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them.

The search after the great man is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of
manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his works,- if possible, to get a glimpse of
him. But we are put off with fortune instead. You say, the English are practical; the
Germans are hospitable; in Valencia the climate is delicious; and in the hills of the
Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I do not travel to find comfortable,
rich and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots that cost too much. But if there were
any magnet that would point to the countries and houses where are the persons who are
intrinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on the road
today.

The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge that in the city is a man who
invented the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. But enormous populations, if
they be beggars, are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas,- the
more, the worse.

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of fable are the
shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal
theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural
action of the human mind. The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to
buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall
find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the
interior walls of the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human
mind. Man can paint, or make, or think, nothing but man. He believes that the great
material elements had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy finds one essence
collected or distributed.

If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of service we derive from others, let us be
warned of the danger of modern studies, and begin low enough. We must not contend against
love, or deny the substantial existence of other people. I know not what would happen to
us. We have social strengths. Our affection toward others creates a sort of vantage or
purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I
can say to you what I cannot first say to myself. Other men are lenses through which we
read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as
are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest. The stronger the
nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality pure. A little genius let us
leave alone. A main difference betwixt men is, whether they attend their own affair or
not. Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within outward.
His own affair, though impossible to others, he can open with celerity and in sport. It is
easy to sugar to be sweet and to nitre to be salt. We take a great deal of pains to waylay
and entrap that which of itself will fall into our hands. I count him a great man who
inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty;
he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, whilst
they must make painful corrections and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error. His
service to us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image
on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey
his quality to other men. And every one can do his best thing easiest. “Peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effet.” He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never
reminds us of others.

But he must be related to us, and our life receive from him some promise of
explanation. I cannot tell what I would know; but I have observed there are persons who,
in their character and actions, answer questions which I have not skill to put. One man
answers some question which none of his contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past and
passing religions and philosophies answer some other questions. Certain men affect us as
rich possibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their times,- the sport perhaps of
some instinct that rules in the air;- they do not speak to our want. But the great are
near; we know them at sight. They satisfy expectation and fall into place. What is good is
effective, generative; makes for itself room, food and allies. A sound apple produces
seed,- a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, he is constructive, fertile, magnetic,
inundating armies with his purpose, which is thus executed. The river makes its own
shores, and each legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome,- harvests for food,
institutions for expression, weapons to fight with and disciples to explain it. The true
artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing
broader than his own shoes.

Our common discourse respects two kinds of use or service from superior men. Direct
giving is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct giving of material or metaphysical
aid, as of health, eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical power and
prophecy. The boy believes there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches believe in
imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much cognizant of direct serving. Man is
endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical
compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the
doing, and the effect remains. Right ethics are central and go from the soul outward. Gift
is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving us. I must absolve me to
myself. “Mind thy affair,” says the spirit:- “coxcomb, would you meddle
with the skies, or with other people?” Indirect service is left. Men have a pictorial
or representative quality, and serve us in the intellect. Behmen (*1)
and Swedenborg saw that things were representative. Men are also representative; first, of
things, and secondly, of ideas.

As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man converts some raw
material in nature to human use. The inventors of fire, electricity, magnetism, iron,
lead, glass, linen, silk, cotton; the makers of tools; the inventor of decimal notation;
the geometer; the engineer; the musician,- severally make an easy way for all, through
unknown and impossible confusions. Each man is by secret liking connected with some
district of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is; as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of
bees; Fries, of lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines;
Newton, of fluxions.

A man is a centre for nature, running out threads of relation through every thing,
fluid and solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls; every clod and stone comes to
the meridian: so every organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to
the brain. It waits long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each
created thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to iron, to
wood, to coal, to loadstone, to iodine, to corn and cotton; but how few materials are yet
used by our arts The mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It
would seem as if each waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined
human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted and walk forth to the day in human shape. In
the history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth seems to have fashioned a brain for
itself. A magnet must be made man in some Gilbert (*2) or
Swedenborg, or Oerstad, before the general mind can come to entertain its powers.

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages, a sober grace adheres to the mineral and
botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes up as the charm of nature,- the
glitter of the spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness,
heat and cold, hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas, circle us round in
a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye
repeats every day the first eulogy on things,- “He saw that they were good.” We
know where to find them; and these performers are relished all the more, after a little
experience of the pretending races. We are entitled also to higher advantages. Something
is wanting to science until it has been humanized. The table of logarithms is one thing,
and its vital play in botany, music, optics and architecture, another. There are
advancements to numbers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first,
when, by union with intellect and will, they ascend into the life and reappear in
conversation, character and politics.

But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them in their own
sphere and the way in which they seem to fascinate and draw to them some genius who
occupies himself with one thing, all his life long. The possibility of interpretation lies
in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial
side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere where
it plays a part as indestructible as any other. And to these, their ends, all things
continually ascend. The gases gather to the solid firmament: the chemic lump arrives at
the plant, and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks.
But also the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only
representative, but participant. Like can only be known by like. The reason why he knows
about them is that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of
that thing. Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their
quality makes his career; and he can variously publish their virtues, because they compose
him. Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet
inanimate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret
told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von
Buchs and Beaumonts, and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution I know not
what Berzeliuses and Davys?

Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the poles of the earth. This quasi
omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In one of those celestial days when
heaven and earth meet and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it
once: we wish for a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense
beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied by
our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors! Every ship that comes to America got its
chart from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a
fore-plane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all round with a
zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light
to our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every man,
inasmuch as he has any science,- is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and
longitudes of our condition. These roadmakers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the
area of life and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new property
in the old earth as by acquiring a new planet.

We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material aids. We must
not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step,- we are better served through our sympathy.
Activity is contagious. Looking where others look, and conversing with the same things, we
catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon said, “You must not fight too often with
one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.” Talk much with any man of
vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of looking at things in the same light,
and on each occurrence we anticipate his thought.

Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help I find a false
appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive that I pay for it the full
price, and at last it leaves me as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental
and moral force is a positive good. It goes out from you, whether you will or not, and
profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of personal vigor of any kind,
great power of performance, without fresh resolution. We are emulous of all that man can
do. Cecil’s saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, “I know that he can toil terribly,” is
an electric touch. So are Clarendon’s portraits,- of Hampden, “who was of an industry
and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not to be
imposed on by the most subtle and sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best
parts”;- of Falkland, “who was so severe an adorer of truth, that he could as
easily have given himself leave to steal, as to dissemble.” We cannot read Plutarch
without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius: “A
sage is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid
become intelligent, and the wavering, determined.”

This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to touch the quick like
our own companions, whose names may not last as long. What is he whom I never think of?
Whilst in every solitude are those who succor our genius and stimulate us in wonderful
manners. There is a power in love to divine another’s destiny better than that other can,
and, by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signal as its
sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us? We will never more think cheaply of
ourselves, or of life. We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on
the railroad will not again shame us.

Under this head too falls that homage, very pure as I think, which all ranks pay to the
hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington,
Webster, Lamartine. Hear the shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They
delight in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! what eyes! Atlantean
shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to guide the great
machine! This pleasure of full expression to that which, in their private experience, is
usually cramped and obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the secret of the reader’s
joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the mountain of
ore. Shakespeare’s principal merit may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best
understands the English language, and can say what he will. Yet these unchoked channels
and floodgates of expression are only health or fortunate constitution. Shakespeare’s name
suggests other and purely intellectual benefits.

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords and armorial
coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out of a certain height, and
presupposing his intelligence. This honor, which is possible in personal intercourse
scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpetually pays; contented if now and then in a
century the proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded to a
sort of cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the indicators of ideas. Genius is
the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by
acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at
once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and beauty of the body;
there is the like pleasure and a higher benefit from witnessing intellectual feats of all
kinds; as feats of memory, of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility and concentration,- as these acts expose
the invisible organs and members of the mind, which respond, member for member, to the
parts of the body. For we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their
truest marks, taught, with Plato, “to choose those who can, without aid from the eyes
or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being.” Foremost among these activities
are the summersaults, spells and resurrections wrought by the imagination. When this
wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the
delicious sense of indeterminate size and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as
elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in
conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and
our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this benefit is real because we are entitled to
these enlargements, and once having passed the bounds shall never again be quite the
miserable pedants we were.

The high functions of the intellect are so allied that some imaginative power usually
appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the first class, but especially in
meditative men of an intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they have
the perception of identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare,
Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception of these laws is a
kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little through failure to see them.

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates into idolatry
of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method has instructed men, we find the
examples of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of
Luther, of Bacon, of Locke;- in religion the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the
sects which have taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas! every man is such a
victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. It is the delight
of vulgar talent to dazzle and to blind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us
from itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a
wise man should appear in our village he would create, in those who conversed with him, a
new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would
establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be
cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The rich would
see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes and their resources.

But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy. The soul is
impatient of masters and eager for change. Housekeepers say of a domestic who has been
valuable, “She had lived with me long enough.” We are tendencies, or rather,
symptoms, and none of us complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives.
Rotation is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon
for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In
some other and quite different field the next man will appear; not Jefferson, not
Franklin, but now a great salesman, then a road-contractor, then a student of fishes, then
a buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage Western general. Thus we make a stand against
our rougher masters; but against the best there is a finer remedy. The power which they
communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but
to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life is a scale of
degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide intervals. Mankind have in all
ages attached themselves to a few persons who either by the quality of that idea they
embodied or by the largeness of their reception were entitled to the position of leaders
and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary nature,- admit us to the
constitution of things. We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions and are effectually
amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is
a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, “Let there be an entrance opened for me into
realities; (*3) I have worn the fool’s cap too long.” We
will know the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and if persons
and things are scores of a celestial music, let us read off the strains. We have been
cheated of our reason; yet there have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related
existence. What they know, they know for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature
transpires; nor can the Bible be closed until the last great man is born. These men
correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us considerate and engage us to new aims
and powers. The veneration of mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the
multitude of statues, pictures and memorials which recall their genius in every city,
village, house and ship:-

“Ever their phantoms arise before us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
At bed and table they lord it o’er us
With looks of beauty and words of good.”

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered by those who
introduce moral truths into the general mind?- I am plagued, in all my living, with a
perpetual tariff of prices. If I work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, I am well
enough entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes
to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious nothing done. I go to Boston or
New York and run up and down on my affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed
by the recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I remember the
peau d’ane on which whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece of the skin was gone for
every wish. I go to a convention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes
off the clock. But if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little
of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these
particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player,
bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of
country, or time, or human body,- that man liberates me; I forget the clock. I pass out of
the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am made immortal by apprehending
my possession of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live
in a market, where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much more,
every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good without breach of good manners.
Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious
superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our
system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies and hatreds of his
competitors. But in these new fields there is room: here are no self-esteems, no
exclusions.

I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and for thoughts; I like
rough and smooth, “Scourges of God,” and “Darlings of the human race.”
I like the first Caesar; and Charles V, of Spain; and Charles XII, of Sweden; Richard
Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal to his
office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs of iron,
wellborn, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination
into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or
staff-like, carry on the work of the world. But I find him greater when he can abolish
himself and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons,
this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our thought, destroying individualism;
the power so great that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a
constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of souls and releases his
servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor who can spare his empire.

But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three points of service.
Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe, but wherever she mars her creature with some
deformity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes
joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin and incapable of seeing it, though all the
world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and offensive members of society,
whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people
alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their
contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and archangels,
but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in
every creature, the conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each is the pride of opinion, the
security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses what
spark of perception and faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over
the absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one
has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that made things cohere with
this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation,
some figure goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should
marshal us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato we should
almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to want but one,
but we want one. We love to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is
unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all
wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in a company and
all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism and enable us to see
other people and their works. But there are vices and follies incident to whole
populations and ages. Men resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors.
It is observed in old couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of
years, that they grow like, and if they should live long enough we should not be able to
know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which threaten to melt the world into a
lump, and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on
between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the time
are in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any high point, this city of
New York, yonder city of London, the Western civilization, would seem a bundle of
insanities. We keep each other in countenance and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of
the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience is the universal practice, or our
contemporaries. Again, it is very easy to be as wise and good as your companions. We learn
of our contemporaries what they know without effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife arrives at the intellectual and moral
elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very hardly can we take another
step. The great, or such as hold of nature and transcend fashions by their fidelity to
universal ideas, are saviors from these federal errors, (*4) and
defend us from our contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all grows
like. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation with our
mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in which he leads us. What
indemnification is one great man for populations of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a
genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of
influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have become
underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help;- other great
men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each
peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not
bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, “I pray you, let me never hear that
man’s name again.” They cry up the virtues of George Washington,- “Damn George
Washington!” is the poor Jacobin’s whole speech and confutation. But it is human
nature’s indispensable defence. The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We balance
one man with his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.

There is however a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius is defended from
approach by quantities of unavailableness. They are very attractive, and seem at a
distance our own: but we are hindered on all sides from approach. The more we are drawn,
the more we are repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done for us.
The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has something unreal for his
companion until he too has substantiated it. It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul
which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men,
and sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote, “Not
transferable” and “Good for this trip only,” on these garments of the soul.
There is somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of minds. The boundaries are invisible,
but they are never crossed. There is such good will to impart, and such good will to
receive, that each threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality collects
its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain.

For nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and whilst every individual strives to
grow and exclude and to exclude and grow, to the extremities of the universe, and to
impose the law of its being on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each
against every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the power by which
individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world where every benefactor becomes so
easily a malefactor only by continuation of his activity into places where it is not due;
where children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where almost all
men are too social and interfering. We rightly speak of the guardian angels of children.
How superior in their security from infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second
thought! They shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore they
are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them they
soon come not to mind it and get a self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they
learn the limitation elsewhere.

We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is permitted. Serve the
great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou canst render. Be the limb of their
body, the breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain
aught wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may easily be
greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be another: not thyself,
but a Platonist; not a soul, but a Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a
poet, but a Shakespearean. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all the
forces of inertia, fear, or of love itself hold thee there. On, and forever onward! The
microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect among the infusories circulating in water.
Presently a dot appears on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two
perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought and in
society. Children think they cannot live without their parents. But, long before they are
aware of it, the black dot has appeared and the detachment taken place. Any accident will
now reveal to them their independence.

But great men:- the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there fate? What becomes of
the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments the superfoetation of nature.
“Generous and handsome,” he says, “is your hero; but look at yonder poor
Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies.” Why
are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea
dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make
war and death sacred;- but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of
man is every day’s tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be as low as that we
should be low; for we must have society.

Is it a reply to these suggestions to say, Society is a Pestalozzian school: all are
teachers and pupils in turn? We are equally served by receiving and by imparting. Men who
know the same things are not long the best company for each other. But bring to each an
intelligent person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from a lake by
cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and great benefit it is to each
speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to himself. We pass very fast, in our
personal moods, from dignity to dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair,
but always to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a sufficiently
long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about. As to what we call the masses,
and common men,- there are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is
only possible on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play
and an open field and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But heaven reserves an
equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto
the concave sphere and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.

The heroes of the hour are relatively great; of a faster growth; or they are such in
whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then in request. Other days
will demand other qualities. Some rays escape the common observer, and want a finely
adapted eye. Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not the
less great but the more that society cannot see them. Nature never sends a great man into
the planet without confiding the secret to another soul.

One gracious fact emerges from these studies,- that there is true ascension in our
love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its
barbarism. The genius of humanity is the real subject whose biography is written in our
annals. We must infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the
universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the procession of famous
men, is reason or illumination or that essence we were looking for; but is an exhibition,
in some quarter, of new possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which
these flagrant (*5) points compose! The study of many individuals
leads us to an elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch by
their summits. Thought and feeling that break out there cannot be impounded by any fence
of personality. This is the key to the power of the greatest men,- their spirit diffuses
itself. A new quality of mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its
origin, and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears intimate;
what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other; the smallest acquisition of
truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the
disparities of talent and position vanish when the individuals are seen in the duration
which is necessary to complete the career of each, even more swiftly the seeming injustice
disappears when we ascend to the central identity of all the individuals, and know that
they are made of the substance which ordaineth and doeth.

The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The qualities abide; the
men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on
another brow. No experience is more familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the
world is not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems turn out
to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you may still read them
transferred to the walls of the world. For a time our teachers serve us personally, as
metres or milestones of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge and their figures
touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture and limits; and they yielded
their place to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain so high that we have not been
able to read them nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But at
last we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves with
their social and delegated quality. All that respects the individual is temporary and
prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a
catholic existence. We have never come at the true and best benefit of any genius so long
as we believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to help us as a cause,
he begins to help us more as an effect. Then he appears as an exponent of a vaster mind
and will. The opaque self becomes transparent with the light of the First Cause.

Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say great men exist that
there may be greater men. The destiny of organized nature is amelioration, and who can
tell its limits? It is for man to tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to
scatter the seeds of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder,
and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied. (*6)

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(1) Jacob Behmen, or Boehme, a Silesian of humble birth in the sixteenth
century, a mystic whose writings later attracted much attention. Mr. Emerson was early
interested in his works and often mentions them.

*(2) William Gilbert (1540-1603), the greatest man of science of Queen
Elizabeth’s reign, especially noted for his discovery that the earth is a great magnet.

*(3) That is, the ideal, instead of the outward shows of things.

*(4) federal errors: a Latinism for mistakes sanctioned by custom.

*(5) flagrant: a Latinism suggesting that, in the general dimness, the
outlines of the human world may be found in its blazing beacon lights.

*(6) The constant security of Mr Emerson’s belief in Evolution in its
highest sense appears hear as elsewhere in his prose and verse, and also his belief in the
genius of mankind, which is another word for Universal Mind.

* * *

Plato; or, the Philosopher (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Plato; or, the Philosopher
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850

AMONG secular (*7) books, Plato only is entitled to Omar’s (*8) fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, “Burn
the libraries; for their value is in this book.” These sentences contain the culture
of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of
literatures. A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language,
rhetoric, ontology, morals or practical wisdom. There was never such range of speculation.
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.
Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all
these drift boulders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years,
every brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation,-
Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge,- is some reader
of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the men of
grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming
after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg,
Goethe, are likewise his debtors and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the
broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,- at once the glory and the shame of
mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. No
wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity and
are tinged with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of
night, to be his men,- Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the
Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon,
Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus and Picus
Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its
philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in
Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An
Englishman reads and says, “how English!” a German- “how Teutonic!” an
Italian- “how Roman and how Greek!” As they say that Helen of Argos had that
universal beauty that every body felt related to her, so Plato seems to a reader in New
England an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all sectional lines.

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question concerning his
reputed works,- what are genuine, what spurious. It is singular that wherever we find a
man higher by a whole head than any of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt
what are his real works. Thus Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakespeare. For these men
magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do for them what they can
never do for themselves; and the great man does thus live in several bodies, and write, or
paint or act, by many hands; and after some time it is not easy to say what is the
authentic work of the master and what is only of his school.

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a great man but one
of great affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sciences, all knowables, as his
food? He can spare nothing; he can dispose of every thing. What is not good for virtue, is
good for knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the inventor
only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the innumerable laborers who
ministered to this architect, and reserves all its gratitude for him. When we are praising
Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and
stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. And this grasping
inventor puts all nations under contribution.

Plato absorbed the learning of his times,- Philolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides,
and what else; then his master, Socrates; and finding himself still capable of a larger
synthesis,- beyond all example then or since,- he traveled into Italy, to gain what
Pythagoras had for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still farther East, to import the
other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This breadth entitles him to
stand as the representative of philosophy. He says, in the Republic, “Such a genius
as philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but seldom in all its parts to meet in one
man, but its different parts generally spring up in different persons.” Every man who
would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground. A philosopher must be more
than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest
place of the poet, and (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression),
mainly is not a poet because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about
them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and
commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their
readers most resembles them. Plato especially has no external biography. If he had lover,
wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint. As a good
chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his
intellectual performances.

He was born 427 A.C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was of patrician
connection in his times and city, and is said to have had an early inclination for war,
but, in his twentieth year, meeting with Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit
and remained for ten years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to
Megara, accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius to the court of Sicily, and went
thither three times, though very capriciously treated. He traveled into Italy; then into
Egypt, where he stayed a long time; some say three,- some say thirteen years. It is said
he went farther, into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons
in the Academy to those whom his fame drew thither; and died, as we have received it, in
the act of writing, at eighty-one years.

But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the supreme elevation of
this man in the intellectual history of our race,- how it happens that in proportion to
the culture of men they become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted
itself in the tabletalk and household life of every man and woman in the European and
American nations, so the writings of Plato have preoccupied every school of learning,
every lover of thought, every church, every poet,- making it impossible to think, on
certain levels, except through him. He stands between the truth and every man’s mind, and
has almost impressed language and the primary forms of thought with his name and seal. I
am struck, in reading him, with the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. Here is
the germ of that Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms; here are
all its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato,- and in none before him. It has
spread itself since into a hundred histories, but has added no new element. This perpetual
modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art; since the author of it was not
misled by any thing short-lived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits. How Plato
came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature, is the problem for us to
solve.

This could not have happened without a sound, sincere and catholic man, able to honor,
at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, or the order of nature. The
first period of a nation, as of an individual, is the period of unconscious strength.
Children cry, scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires. As soon as they
can speak and tell their want and the reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life,
whilst the perceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently and superlatively,
blunder and quarrel: their manners are full of desperation; their speech is full of oaths.
As soon as, with culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see them no longer in
lumps and masses but accurately distributed, they desist from that weak vehemence and
explain their meaning in detail. If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man
would still be a beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher plane,
occurs daily in the education of ardent young men and women. “Ah! you don’t
understand me; I have never met with any one who comprehends me”: and they sigh and
weep, write verses and walk alone,- fault of power to express their precise meaning. In a
month or two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so related as to
assist their volcanic estate, and, good communication being once established, they are
thenceforward good citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to
truth, from blind force.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when, proceeding out of this brute
youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so
that man, at that instant, extends across the entire scale, and, with his feet still
planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and
stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the culmination of power.

Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy. Its early
records, almost perished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing with them the dreams
of barbarians; a confusion of crude notions of morals and of natural philosophy, gradually
subsiding through the partial insight of single teachers.

Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, and we have the beginnings of geometry,
metaphysics and ethics: then the partialists,- deducing the origin of things from flux or
water, or from air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic
pictures. At last comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric point, or tattoo, or
whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the vast and superlative; he is the
arrival of accuracy and intelligence. “He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly
divide and define.”

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to
itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base; the
one, and the two: 1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite all things by
perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences and the
profound resemblances. But every mental act,- this very perception of identity or oneness,
recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak or
to think without embracing both.

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the cause of that; and
again the cause, diving still into the profound: self-assured that it shall arrive at an
absolute and sufficient one,- a one that shall be all. “In the midst of the sun is
the light, in the midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of truth is the
imperishable being,” say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East and West, has the same
centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity, the mind returns from the one to that which
is not one, but other or many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence
of variety, the self-existence of both, as each is involved in the other. These
strictly-blended elements it is the problem of thought to separate and to reconcile. Their
existence is mutually contradictory and exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other
that we can never say what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as nimble in the
highest as in the lowest grounds; when we contemplate the one, the true, the good,- as in
the surfaces and extremities of matter.

In all nations there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the
fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one
Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East,
and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu
Purana. Those writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and
sublime strains in celebrating it.

The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough and the
furrow are of one stuff; and the stuff is such and so much that the variations of form are
unimportant. “You are fit” (says the supreme Krishna to a sage) “to
apprehend that you are not distinct from me. That which I am, thou art, and that also is
this world, with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men contemplate distinctions, because
they are stupefied with ignorance.” “The words I and mine constitute ignorance.
What is the great end of all, you shall now learn from me. It is soul,- one in all bodies,
pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from birth, growth and decay,
omnipresent, made up of true knowledge, independent, unconnected with unrealities, with
name, species and the rest, in time past, present and to come. The knowledge that this
spirit, which is essentially one, is in one’s own and in all other bodies, is the wisdom
of one who knows the unity of things. As one diffusive air, passing through the
perforations of a flute, is distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the
Great Spirit is single, though its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences of
acts. When the difference of the investing form, as that of god or the rest, is destroyed,
there is no distinction.” “The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who
is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as not differing from, but
as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one
place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I.” As if he had said,
“All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient
paintings; and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment;
and heaven itself a decoy.” That which the soul seeks is resolution into being above
form, out of Tartarus and out of heaven,- liberation from nature.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action
tends directly backwards to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the
second is the power of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or
reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all
things, all thought; the one, the many. One is being; the other, intellect: one is
necessity; the other, freedom: one, rest; the other, motion: one, power; the other,
distribution: one, strength; the other, pleasure: one, consciousness; the other,
definition: one, genius; the other, talent: one, earnestness; the other, knowledge: one,
possession; the other, trade: one, caste; the other, culture: one, king; the other,
democracy: and, if we dare carry these generalizations a step higher, and name the last
tendency of both, we might say, that the end of the one is escape from organization,- pure
science; and the end of the other is the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or
executive deity.

Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the second of
these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to
the many. A too rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars,
are the twin dangers of speculation.

To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country of unity, of
immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men
faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is
Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social institution of caste. On the other side,
the genius of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy
was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved
infinity, the West delighted in boundaries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system, the sharpened
understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in manifestation, in
comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece, had been working in this element with
the joy of genius not yet chilled by any foresight of the detriment of an excess. They saw
before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no Paris or London; no
pitiless subdivision of classes,- the doom of the pin-makers, the doom of the weavers, of
dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian
caste, superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it off. The understanding was in its
health and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty. They cut the Pentelican marble as if it
were snow, and their perfect works in architecture and sculpture seemed things of course,
not more difficult than the completion of a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills at
Lowell. These things are in course, and may be taken for granted. The Roman legion,
Byzantine legislation, English trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the
steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective; the town-meeting, the
ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in
which all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia and the detail of Europe; the infinitude
of the Asiatic soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking,
opera-going Europe,- Plato came to join, and, by contact, to enhance the energy of each.
The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy
expressed the genius of Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements. It is as easy to be
great as to be small. The reason why we do not at once believe in admirable souls is
because they are not in our experience. In actual life, they are so rare as to be
incredible; but primarily there is not only no presumption against them, but the strongest
presumption in favor of their appearance. But whether voices were heard in the sky, or
not; whether his mother or his father dreamed that the infant man-child was the son of
Apollo; whether a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not;- a man who could see two
sides of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the upper and
the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of impossibilities, which reappears in
every object; its real and its ideal power,- was now also transferred entire to the
consciousness of a man.

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself by propounding the
most popular of all principles, the absolute good, which rules rulers, and judges the
judge. If he made transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his
illustrations from sources disdained by orators and polite conversers; from mares and
puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks and criers; the shops of potters,
horse-doctors, butchers and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is
resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His argument and his
sentence are self-imposed and spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and become two hands,
to grasp and appropriate their own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional,
alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea seen from shore,
shore seen from sea; the taste of two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the
approach and at the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic creativeness, which is
not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in transitions from one to the
other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as
possible; this command of two elements must explain the power and the charm of Plato. Art
expresses the one or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity;
poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the two
vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both. Things
added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language
are inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the reverse of the
medal of Jove.

To take an example:- The physical philosophers had sketched each his theory of the
world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit; theories mechanical and chemical
in their genius. Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes,
feels these, as second causes, to be no theories of the world but bare inventories and
lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the dogma,- “Let us declare the
cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the universe. He was good; and
he who is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things should be
as much as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit this as the
prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world, will be in the truth.” (*9)  “All things are for the sake of the good, and it is the
cause of every thing beautiful.” This dogma animates and impersonates his philosophy.

The synthesis which makes the character of his mind appears in all his talents. Where
there is great compass of wit, we usually find excellencies that combine easily in the
living man, but in description appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not to be
exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by an original mind in the
exercise of its original power. In him the freest abandonment is united with the precision
of a geometer. His daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the
birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic
elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest
health and strength of frame. According to the old sentence, “If Jove should descend
to the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato.”

With this palatial air there is, for the direct aim of several of his works and running
through the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness, which mounts, in the Republic and in
the Phaedo, to piety. He has been charged with feigning sickness at the time of the death
of Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come down from the times attest his manly
interference before the people in his master’s behalf, since even the savage cry of the
assembly to Plato is preserved; and the indignation towards popular government, in many of
his pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native reverence for
justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the superstitions of the
people. Add to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy and the high insight are from a
wisdom of which man is not master; that the gods never philosophize, but by a celestial
mania these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim
regions, visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw the souls in pain, he hears the
doom of the judge, he beholds the penal metempsychosis, the Fates, with the rock and
shears, and hears the intoxicating hum of their spindle.

But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say he had read the inscription on
the gates of Busyrane,- “Be bold”; and on the second gate,- “Be bold, be
bold, and evermore be bold”; and then again had paused well at the third gate,-
“Be not too bold.” His strength is like the momentum of a falling planet, and
his discretion the return of its due and perfect curve,- so excellent is his Greek love of
boundary and his skill in definition. In reading logarithms one is not more secure than in
following Plato in his flights. Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings
of his imagination are playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking before he brings
it to the reader, and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master. He has that
opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon he needs. As the rich man
wears no more garments, drives no more horses, sits in no more chambers than the poor,-
but has that one dress, or equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the
need; so Plato, in his plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word. There is indeed
no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did not possess and use,- epic, analysis,
mania, intuition, music, satire and irony, down to the customary and polite. His
illustrations are poetry and his jests illustrations. Socrates’ profession of obstetric
art (*10) is good philosophy; and his finding that word
“cookery,” and “adulatory art,” for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us
a substantial service still. No orator can measure in effect with him who can give good
nicknames.

What moderation and understatement and checking his thunder in mid volley! He has
good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all that can be said against the
schools. “For philosophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly meddles with it;
but if he is conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man.” He could
well afford to be generous,- he, who from the sunlike centrality and reach of his vision,
had a faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was his speech: he plays with the doubt
and makes the most of it: he paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that
moves the sea and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, in the perfect
yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. “I, therefore, Callicles, am
persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a
healthy condition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value, and looking to
the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I can; and when I die, to
die so. And I invite all other men, to the utmost of my power; and you too I in turn
invite to this contest, which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here.” (*11)

He is a great average man; one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and
equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made
available and made to pass for what they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and
qualification to be the world’s interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and
poetic class have: but he has also what they have not,- this strong solving sense to
reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the
streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits never this graduation, but slopes his thought,
however picturesque the precipice on one side, to an access from the plain. He never
writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic raptures.

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on the earth and cover
his eyes whilst he adored that which cannot be numbered, or gauged, or known, or named:
that of which every thing can be affirmed and denied: that “which is entity and
nonentity.” He called it super-essential. He even stood ready, as in the Parmenides,
to demonstrate that it was so,- that this Being exceeded the limits of intellect. No man
ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having paid his homage, as for the human race,
to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, “And yet
things are knowable!”- that is, the Asia in his mind was first heartily honored,- the
ocean of love and power, before form, before will, before knowledge, the Same, the Good,
the One; and now, refreshed and empowered by this worship, the instinct of Europe, namely,
culture, returns; and he cries, “Yet things are knowable!” They are knowable,
because being from one, things correspond. There is a scale; and the correspondence of
heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a
science of stars, called astronomy; a science of quantities, called mathematics; a science
of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,- I call it Dialectic,-
which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true. It rests on the observation
of identity and diversity; for to judge is to unite to an object the notion which belongs
to it. The sciences, even the best,- mathematics and astronomy,- are like sportsmen, who
seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of it. Dialectic must
teach the use of them. “This is of that rank that no intellectual man will enter on
any study for its own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that one sole
science which embraces all.” (*12)

“The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend a whole; or that which in the
diversity of sensations can be comprised under a rational unity.” “The soul
which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass into the human form.” (*13)  I announce to men the Intellect. I announce the good of
being interpenetrated by the mind that made nature: this benefit, namely, that it can
understand nature, which it made and maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is better: as
the lawgiver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men! that truth is
altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what might be the very self of
everything. The misery of man is to be baulked of the sight of essence and to be stuffed
with conjectures; but the supreme good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all
virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing else
than knowledge; the fairest fortune that can befall man is to be guided by his daemon to
that which is truly his own. This also is the essence of justice,- to attend every one his
own: nay, the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at except through direct contemplation
of the divine essence. Courage then for “the persuasion that we must search that
which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison, better, braver and more
industrious than if we thought it impossible to discover what we do not know, and useless
to search for it.” He secures a position not to be commanded, by his passion for
reality; valuing philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing with real being.

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, Culture. He saw the institutions of Sparta
and recognized, more genially one would say than any since, the hope of education. He
delighted in every accomplishment, in every graceful and useful and truthful performance;
above all in the splendors of genius and intellectual achievement. “The whole of
life, O Socrates,” said Glauco, “is, with the wise, the measure of hearing such
discourses as these.” What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on the powers of
Pericles, of Isocrates, of Parmenides! What price above price on the talents themselves!
He called the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation. What value he gives
to the art of gymnastic in education; what to geometry; what to music; what to astronomy,
whose appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates! In the Timaeus he indicates the highest
employment of the eyes. “By us it is asserted that God invented and bestowed sight on
us for this purpose,- that on surveying the circles of intelligence in the heavens, we
might properly employ those of our own minds, which, though disturbed when compared with
the others that are uniform, are still allied to their circulations; and that having thus
learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we might, by
imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own wanderings and
blunders.” And in the Republic,- “By each of these disciplines a certain organ
of the soul is both purified and reanimated which is blinded and buried by studies of
another kind; an organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, since truth is
perceived by this alone.”

He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave immeasurably the first
place to advantages of nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on the distinctions of
birth. In the doctrine of the organic character and disposition is the origin of caste.
“Such as were fit to govern, into their composition the informing Deity mingled gold;
into the military, silver; iron and brass for husbandmen and artificers.” The East
confirms itself, in all ages, in this faith. The Koran is explicit on this point of caste.
“Men have their metal, as of gold and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones
in the state of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as you
embrace it.” Plato was not less firm. “Of the five orders of things, only four
can be taught to the generality of men.” In the Republic he insists on the
temperaments of the youth, as first of the first.

A happier example of the stress laid on nature is in the dialogue with the young
Theages, who wishes to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates declares that if some have
grown wise by associating with him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they
were with him they grew wise, not because of him; he pretends not to know the way of it.
“It is adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by associating with me whom the
Daemon opposes; so that it is not possible for me to live with these. With many however he
does not prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by associating with
me. Such, O Theages, is the association with me; for, if it pleases the God, you will make
great and rapid proficiency: you will not, if he does not please. Judge whether it is not
safer to be instructed by some one of those who have power over the benefit which they
impart to men, than by me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen.” As if he had
said, “I have no system. I cannot be answerable for you. You will be what you must.
If there is love between us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our intercourse
be; if not, your time is lost and you will only annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid, and
the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, beyond the will of you or me, is this secret
affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by
going about my business.”

He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, “There is also the
divine.” There is no thought in any mind but it quickly tends to convert itself into
a power and organizes a huge instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, loved the
illimitable, saw the enlargement and nobility which come from truth itself and good
itself, and attempted as if on the part of the human intellect, once for all to do it
adequate homage,- homage fit for the immense soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the
intellect to render. He said then, “Our faculties run out into infinity, and return
to us thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a fact which will not be
skipped, and which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things are in a scale; and, begin
where we will, ascend and ascend. All things are symbolical; and what we call results are
beginnings.”

A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice bisected line. After he has
illustrated the relation between the absolute good and true and the forms of the
intelligible world, he says: “Let there be a line cut in two unequal parts. Cut again
each of these two main parts,- one representing the visible, the other the intelligible
world,- and let these two new sections represent the bright part and the dark part of each
of these worlds. You will have, for one of the sections of the visible world, images, that
is, both shadows and reflections;- for the other section, the objects of these images,
that is, plants, animals, and the works of art and nature. Then divide the intelligible
world in like manner; the one section will be of opinions and hypotheses, and the other
section of truths.” (*14)  To these four sections, the four
operations of the soul correspond,- conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As every
pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and
creature of the supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a million channels for his
activity. All things mount and mount.

All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that beauty is the most
lovely of all things, exciting hilarity and shedding desire and confidence through the
universe wherever it enters, and it enters in some degree into all things:- but that there
is another, which is as much more beautiful than beauty as beauty is than chaos; namely,
wisdom, which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be seen,
would ravish us with its perfect reality. He has the same regard to it as the source of
excellence in works of art. When an artificer, he says, in the fabrication of any work,
looks to that which always subsists according to the same; and, employing a model of this
kind, expresses its idea and power in his work,- it must follow that his production should
be beautiful. But when he beholds that which is born and dies, it will be far from
beautiful.

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry
and to all the sermons of the world, that the love of the sexes is initial, and symbolizes
at a distance the passion of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek.
This faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and constitutes the ground of all his
dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom;- God only. In the same mind he constantly affirms that
virtue cannot be taught; that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest
goods are produced to us through mania and are assigned to us by a divine gift.

This leads me to that central figure which he has established in his Academy as the
organ through which every considered opinion shall be announced, and whose biography he
has likewise so labored that the historic facts are lost in the light of Plato’s mind.
Socrates and Plato are the double star which the most powerful instruments will not
entirely separate. Socrates again, in his traits and genius, is the best example of that
synthesis which constitutes Plato’s extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble stem,
but honest enough; of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable as to
be a cause of wit in others:- the rather that his broad good nature and exquisite taste
for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to be paid. The players personated him on the
stage; the potters copied his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding
to his humor a perfect temper and a knowledge of his man, be he who he might whom he
talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat in any debate,- and in debate
he immoderately delighted. The young men are prodigiously fond of him and invite him to
their feasts, whither he goes for conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest head
in Athens; and after leaving the whole party under the table, goes away as if nothing had
happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody that is sober. In short, he was what our
country-people call an old one.

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of Athens, hated
trees, never willingly went beyond the walls, knew the old characters, valued the bores
and philistines, thought every thing in Athens a little better than anything in any other
place. He was plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases, and
illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-spoons, grooms and farriers,
and unnamable offices,- especially if he talked with any superfine person. He had a
Franklin-like wisdom. Thus he showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it
was no more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended, would easily
reach.

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, an immense talker,- the rumor ran that
on one or two occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he had shown a determination which had
covered the retreat of a troop; and there was some story that under cover of folly, he
had, in the city government, when one day he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced a
courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. He is very
poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and can live on a few olives; usually, in the
strictest sense, on bread and water, except when entertained by his friends. His necessary
expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he did. He wore no under
garment; his upper garment was the same for summer and winter, and he went barefooted; and
it is said that to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all day
with the most elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then return to his shop
and carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that be, it is certain that he had grown
to delight in nothing else than this conversation; and that, under his hypocritical
pretence of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all the
fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives or strangers from Asia Minor and the islands.
Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so honest and really curious to know; a man who
was willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others
asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted than when confuting; for he
thought not any evil happened to men of such a magnitude as false opinion respecting the
just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose
conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable; whose
dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless and ignorant as to disarm
the wariest and draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion.
But he always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives them
to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases with their
grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist!- Meno has discoursed
a thousand times, at length, on virtue, before many companies, and very well, as it
appeared to him; but at this moment he cannot even tell what it is,- this cramp-fish of a
Socrates has so bewitched him.

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery and bonhommie diverted the
young patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day,-
turns out, in the sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic, and to be either
insane, or at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When accused
before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul,
the future reward and punishment; and refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular
government was condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the prison and
took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a prison whilst he was there.
Crito bribed the jailer; but Socrates would not go out by treachery. “Whatever
inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be preferred before justice. These things I hear like
pipes and drums, whose sound makes me deaf to every thing you say.” The fame of this
prison, the fame of the discourses there and the drinking of the hemlock are one of the
most precious passages in the history of the world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr, the keen street
and market debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly
struck the mind of Plato, so capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates by a
necessity placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of the
intellectual treasures he had to communicate. It was a rare fortune that this Aesop of the
mob and this robed scholar should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual
faculty. The strange synthesis in the character of Socrates capped the synthesis in the
mind of Plato. Moreover by this means he was able, in the direct way and without envy to
avail himself of the wit and weight of Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt was
great; and these derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato.

It remains to say that the defect of Plato in power is only that which results
inevitably from his quality. He is intellectual in his aim; and therefore, in expression,
literary. Mounting into heaven, diving into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the
passion of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul,- he is literary, and
never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit of Plato that his writings
have not,- what is no doubt incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work,- the vital
authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews
possess. There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.

I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism but that we have come to a fact
in the nature of things: an oak is not an orange. The qualities of sugar remain with
sugar, and those of salt with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples are at
fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or
self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another that; he has said one thing in one
place, and the reverse of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to make
the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the
smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching,
or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a
known and accurate expression for the world, and it should be accurate. It shall be the
world passed through the mind of Plato,- nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic
tinge; every atom, every relation or quality you knew before, you shall know again and
find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And you shall feel that Alexander indeed
overran, with men and horses, some countries of the planet; but countries, and things of
which countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have passed
through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer bread, but body: so all this
mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the world. This is the
ambition of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good
will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets
strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes:
unconquered nature lives on and forgets him. So it fares with all: so must it fare with
Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He
argues on this side and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never
tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every
great question from him. (*15)

These things we are forced to say if we must consider the effort of Plato or of any
philosopher to dispose of nature,- which will not be disposed of. No power of genius has
ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But
there is an injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with
flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his
transcendent claims. The way to know him is to compare him, not with nature, but with
other men. How many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of
human wit, like Karnac, or the medieval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it requires
all the breath of human faculty to know it. I think it is trueliest seen when seen with
the most respect. His sense deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When we say, Here is
a fine collection of fables; or when we praise the style, or the common sense, or
arithmetic, we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I
suspect, is no better.

The criticism is like our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still
best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The great-eyed Plato
proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(7) The less usual use of “secular,” in its strict classical
sense, to mean “that live through the ages.”

*(8) Omar the Caliph was Mahomet’s cousin and second successor.

*(9) From the Timaeus.

*(10) From the Theaetetus.

*(11) From the Gorgias.

*(12) Compare the Republic, Book VII.

*(13) From the Phaedrus.

*(14) See the Republic, Book VI.

*(15) What Mr. Emerson says here of Plato, and also earlier, “He
cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two poles of thought
shall appear in his statement,” cannot but recall his own method of presenting in
turn different facets of the gem of truth. Churchman and Agnostic can easily find good
weapons for argument in his works. Dr. Holmes says of this passage, “Some will smile
at hearing him say this of another.” It illustrates the felicity of the Doctor’s
remark that Emerson holds up the mirror to his characters at just such an angle that we
see his own face as well as that of his hero.

* * *

Plato: New Readings (by Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 – 27 April 1882

Plato: New Readings
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Representative Men, 1850

The publication, in Mr. Bohn’s “Serial Library,” of the excellent
translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press has
yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few more notes of the elevation and
bearings of this fixed star; or to add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the
latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to indemnify the
student of man for the defects of individuals by tracing growth and ascent in races; and,
by the simple expedient of lighting up the vast background, generates a feeling of
complacency and hope. The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts
and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospectively beheld from
the distant brain of ox, crocodile and fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding the
geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or
six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu and Columbus, was no wise discontented with the result.
These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were a clear amelioration of
trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding. With this artist, time and
space are cheap, and she is insensible to what you say of tedious preparation. She waited
tranquilly the flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be struck when man should
arrive. Then periods must pass before the motion of the earth can be suspected; then
before the map of the instincts and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races,
so the succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the fortune in
the history of mankind to mark an epoch.

Plato’s fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of the Socratic
reasoning, or on any thesis, as for example the immortality of the soul. He is more than
an expert, or a schoolman, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar message. He
represents the privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to
successive platforms and so disclosing in every fact a germ of expansion. These expansions
are in the essence of thought. The naturalist would never help us to them by any
discoveries of the extent of the universe, but is as poor when cataloguing the resolved
nebula of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the Republic of Plato, by
these expansions, may be said to require and so to anticipate the astronomy of Laplace.
The expansions are organic. The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the
eye creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only say,
Here was a more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole scale of the senses, the
understanding and the reason. These expansions or extensions consist in continuing the
spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and by this second sight
discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction. Everywhere he stands on
a path which has no end, but runs continuously round the universe. Therefore every word
becomes an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and
ulterior senses. His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life and
life out of death,- that law by which, in nature, decomposition is recomposition, and
putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a new creation; his discernment of the little
in the large and the large in the small; studying the state in the citizen and the citizen
in the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic as an allegory on
the education of the private soul; his beautiful definitions of ideas, of time, of form,
of figure, of the line, sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of virtue,
courage, justice, temperance; his love of the apologue, and his apologues themselves; the
cave of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer and two horses; the golden, silver,
brass and iron temperaments; Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates,-
fables which have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the zodiac;
his soliform eye and his boniform soul; (*16) his doctrine of
assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the laws of return, or
reaction, which secure instant justice throughout the universe, instanced everywhere, but
specially in the doctrine, “what comes from God to us, returns from us to God,”
and in Socrates’ belief that the laws below are sisters of the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the coincidence of
science and virtue; for vice can never know itself and virtue, but virtue knows both
itself and vice. The eye attested that justice was best, as long as it was profitable;
Plato affirms that it is profitable throughout; that the profit is intrinsic, though the
just conceal his justice from gods and men; that it is better to suffer injustice than to
do it; that the sinner ought to covet punishment; that the lie was more hurtful than
homicide; and that ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more calamitous than involuntary
homicide; that the soul is unwillingly deprived of true opinions, and that no man sins
willingly; that the order or proceeding of nature was from the mind to the body, and,
though a sound body cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue,
render the body the best possible. The intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely,
the right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of tune is to make him play
in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by
a worse man; that his guards shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be instructed
that there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men willing to give them
every thing which they need.

This second sight explains the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the globe of earth
was not more lawful and precise than was the supersensible; that a celestial geometry was
in place there, as a logic of lines and angles here below; that the world was throughout
mathematical; the proportions are constant of oxygen, azote and lime; there is just so
much water and slate and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of the moral
elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing the real at
the base of the accidental; in discovering connection, continuity and representation
everywhere, hating insulation; and appears like the god of wealth among the cabins of
vagabonds, opening power and capability in everything he touches. Ethical science was new
and vacant when Plato could write thus:- “Of all whose arguments are left to the men
of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned injustice, or praised justice,
otherwise than as respects the repute, honors and emoluments arising therefrom; while, as
respects either of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power in the soul of the
possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has yet sufficiently investigated,
either in poetry or prose writings,- how, namely, that injustice is the greatest of all
the evils that the soul has within it, and justice the greatest good.”

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform and self-existent,
forever discriminating them from the notions of the understanding, marks an era in the
world. He was born to behold the self-evolving power of spirit, endless, generator of new
ends; a power which is the key at once to the centrality and the evanescence of things.
Plato is so centred that he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of knowledge and
ideas reveals to him the fact of eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as
the most probable particular explication. Call that fanciful,- it matters not: the
connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication
must be not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the scale of the mind
itself, so that all things have symmetry in his tablet. He put in all the past, without
weariness, and descended into detail with a courage like that he witnessed in nature. One
would say that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm or a district or an island, in
intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew the sphere. He domesticates the soul in
nature: man is the microcosm. All the circles of the visible heaven represent as many
circles in the rational soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual in
the action of the human mind. The names of things, too, are fatal, following the nature of
things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their names, significant of a profound sense.
The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifestation; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove,
the regal soul; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion; Calliope, the soul of the world;
Aglaia, intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and to poetic souls;
but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with command, gathers them all up
into rank and gradation, the Euclid of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature.
Before all men, he saw the intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He describes his
own ideal, when he paints, in Timaeus, a god leading things from disorder into order. He
kindled a fire so truly in the centre that we see the sphere illuminated, and can
distinguish poles, equator and lines of latitude, every arc and node: a theory so
averaged, so modulated, that you would say the winds of ages had swept through this
rhythmic structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of one short-lived
scribe. Hence it has happened that a very well-marked class of souls, namely those who
delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every truth,
by exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it,- are said to Platonize. Thus,
Michael Angelo is a Platonist in his sonnets: Shakespeare is a Platonist when he writes,-

“Nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean,”

or,-

          “He, that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place in the story.”

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and ’tis the magnitude only of Shakespeare’s proper genius
that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of this school. Swedenborg,
throughout his prose poem of “Conjugal Love,” is a Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his popular success is the
moral aim which endeared him to mankind. “Intellect,” he said, “is king of
heaven and of earth”; but in Plato, intellect is always moral. His writings have also
the sempiternal youth of poetry. For their arguments, most of them, might have been
couched in sonnets: and poetry has never soared higher than in the Timaeus and the
Phaedrus. As the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break
himself with an institution. All his painting in the Republic must be esteemed mythical,
with intent to bring out, sometimes in violent colors, his thought. You cannot institute,
without peril of charlatanism.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to make emphatic, he
expressed by community of women), as the premium which he would set on grandeur. There
shall be exempts of two kinds: first, those who by demerit have put themselves below
protection,- outlaws; and secondly, those who by eminence of nature and desert are out of
the reach of your rewards. Let such be free of the city and above the law. We confide them
to themselves; let them do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the
irregularities of Michael Angelo and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical dust in our eyes. I
am sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities, permitting the lie to governors.
Plato plays Providence a little with the baser sort, as people allow themselves with their
dogs and cats.

[Notes from the Centenary Edition of Emerson’s Complete Works, edited by his son,
Edward Waldo Emerson:]

*(16) …his soliform eye and his boniform soul: Dr. Holmes says,
“These two quaint adjectives are from the mint of Cudworth.”

* * *