It scarcely needs to be said that the Athenian has taken hold of the conversation, and that the others are as wax in his hands. “O Athenian stranger,” Cleinias addresses him—“inhabitant of Attica I will not call you, for you seem to deserve rather the name of Athene herself, because you go back to first principles.” Thus complimented, the stranger lets himself go. Yet somehow he would seem to have lost speculative nerve.
It was all very well in the Republic, the ideal State, to be bold and declare for banishing poetry altogether. But elderly men have given up pursuing ideals; they have “seen too many leaders of revolt.” Our Athenian is driving now at practice (as we say), at a well-governed State realisable on earth; and after all it is hard to chase out the poets, especially if you yourself happen to be something of a poet at heart. Hear, then, the terms on which, after allowing that comedies may be performed, but only by slaves and hirelings, he proceeds to allow serious poetry.
And if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who write tragedy, come to us and say—“O strangers, may we go to your city and country, or may we not, and shall we bring with us our poetry? What is your will about these matters?”—how shall we answer the divine men? I think that our answer should be as follows:—
“Best of strangers,” we will say to them, “we also, according to our ability, are tragic poets, and our tragedy is the best and noblest: for our whole state is an imitation of the best and noblest life. … You are poets and we are poets, both makers of the same strains, rivals and antagonists in the noblest of dramas, which true law alone can perfect, as our hope is. Do not then suppose that we shall all in a moment allow you to erect your stage in the Agora, and introduce the fair voices of your actors, speaking above our own, and permit you to harangue our women and children and the common people in language other than our own, and very often the opposite of our own. For a State would be mad which gave you this license, until the magistrates had determined whether your poetry might be recited and was fit for publication or not. Wherefore, O ye sons and scions of the softer Muses! first of all show your songs to the Magistrates and let them compare them with our own, and if they are the same or better, we will give you a chorus; but if not, then, my friends, we cannot.”
Lame conclusion! Impotent compromise! How little applicable, at all events, to our Commonwealth! though, to be sure (you may say) we possess a relic of it in His Majesty’s Licenser of Plays. As you know, there has been so much heated talk of late over the composition of the County Magistracy; yet I give you a countryman’s word, Sir, that I have heard many names proposed for the Commission of the Peace, and on many grounds, but never one on the ground that its owner had a conservative taste in verse!
Nevertheless, as Plato saw, we must deal with these poets somehow. It is possible (though not, I think, likely) that in the ideal State there would be no Literature, as it is certain there would be no professors of it; but since its invention men have never been able to rid themselves of it for any length of time. Tamen usque recurrit. They may forbid Apollo, but still he comes leading his choir, the Nine:—
Ἂχλητος μἐν ἔγωγε μἑνοιμἱ χεν’ ἐς δἐ χαλευ’ντων
Θαρσἠσας Μοἱσαιοι σὺν ἁμετἑραισιν ἱχοἱμαν.
And he may challenge us English boldly! For since Chaucer, at any rate, he and his train have never been ἂχλητοι to us—least of all here in Cambridge.
Nay, we know that he should be welcome. Cardinal Newman, proposing the idea of a University to the Roman Catholics of Dublin, lamented that the English language had not, like the Greek, “some definite words to express, simply and generally, intellectual proficiency or perfection, such as ‘health,’ as used with reference to the animal frame, and ‘virtue,’ with reference to our moral nature.” Well, it is a reproach to us that we do not possess the term: and perhaps again a reproach to us that our attempts at it—the word “culture” for instance—have been apt to take on some soil of controversy, some connotative damage from over-preaching on the one hand and impatience on the other. But we do earnestly desire the thing. We do prize that grace of intellect which sets So-and-so in our view as “a scholar and a gentleman.” We do wish as many sons of this University as may be to carry forth that lifelong stamp from her precincts; and—this is my point—from our notion of such a man the touch of literary grace cannot be excluded. I put to you for a test Lucian’s description of his friend Demonax—
His way was like other people’s; he mounted no high horse; he was just a man
