Dialogues

paintings, but we seem to have lost the gift of creating them. Can we wonder that few of them “come sweetly from nature,” while ten thousand reviewers (μάλα μυρίοι) are engaged in dissecting them? Young men, like Phaedrus, are enamoured of their own literary clique and have but a feeble sympathy with the masterminds of former ages. They recognize “a poetical necessity in the writings of their favourite author, even when he boldly wrote off just what came in his head.” They are beginning to think that Art is enough, just at the time when Art is about to disappear from the world. And would not a great painter, such as Michelangelo, or a great poet, such as Shakespeare, returning to earth, “courteously rebuke” us⁠—would he not say that we are putting “in the place of Art the preliminaries of Art,” confusing Art the expression of mind and truth with Art the composition of colours and forms; and perhaps he might more severely chastise some of us for trying to invent “a new shudder” instead of bringing to the birth living and healthy creations? These he would regard as the signs of an age wanting in original power.

Turning from literature and the arts to law and politics, again we fall under the lash of Socrates. For do we not often make “the worse appear the better cause”; and do not “both parties sometimes agree to tell lies”? Is not pleading “an art of speaking unconnected with the truth”? There is another text of Socrates which must not be forgotten in relation to this subject. In the endless maze of English law is there any “dividing the whole into parts or reuniting the parts into a whole”⁠—any semblance of an organized being “having hands and feet and other members”? Instead of a system there is the Chaos of Anaxagoras (ὁμοῦ πάντα χρήματα) and no Mind or Order. Then again in the noble art of politics, who thinks of first principles and of true ideas? We avowedly follow not the truth but the will of the many (compare Republic 493). Is not legislation too a sort of literary effort, and might not statesmanship be described as the “art of enchanting” the house? While there are some politicians who have no knowledge of the truth, but only of what is likely to be approved by “the many who sit in judgment,” there are others who can give no form to their ideal, neither having learned “the art of persuasion,” nor having any insight into the “characters of men.” Once more, has not medical science become a professional routine, which many “practise without being able to say who were their instructors”⁠—the application of a few drugs taken from a book instead of a lifelong study of the natures and constitutions of human beings? Do we see as clearly as Hippocrates “that the nature of the body can only be understood as a whole”? (270 C; Compare “Charmides” 156 E) And are not they held to be the wisest physicians who have the greatest distrust of their art? What would Socrates think of our newspapers, of our theology? Perhaps he would be afraid to speak of them;⁠—the one vox populi, the other vox Dei, he might hesitate to attack them; or he might trace a fanciful connection between them, and ask doubtfully, whether they are not equally inspired? He would remark that we are always searching for a belief and deploring our unbelief, seeming to prefer popular opinions unverified and contradictory to unpopular truths which are assured to us by the most certain proofs: that our preachers are in the habit of praising God “without regard to truth and falsehood, attributing to Him every species of greatness and glory, saying that He is all this and the cause of all that, in order that we may exhibit Him as the fairest and best of all” (“Symposium” 198) without any consideration of His real nature and character or of the laws by which He governs the world⁠—seeking for a “private judgment” and not for the truth or “God’s judgment.” What would he say of the Church, which we praise in like manner, “meaning ourselves” (258 A), without regard to history or experience? Might he not ask, whether we “care more for the truth of religion, or for the speaker and the country from which the truth comes”? or, whether the “select wise” are not “the many” after all? (“Symposium” 194 C) So we may fill up the sketch of Socrates, lest, as Phaedrus says, the argument should be too “abstract and barren of illustrations.” (Compare “Symposium,” “Apology,” “Euthyphro.”)

He next proceeds with enthusiasm to define the royal art of dialectic as the power of dividing a whole into parts, and of uniting the parts in a whole, and which may also be regarded (compare “Sophist”) as the process of the mind talking with herself. The latter view has probably led Plato to the paradox that speech is superior to writing, in which he may seem also to be doing an injustice to himself. For the two cannot be fairly compared in the manner which Plato suggests. The contrast of the living and dead word, and the example of Socrates, which he has represented in the form of the Dialogue, seem to have misled him. For speech and writing have really different functions; the one is more transitory, more diffuse, more elastic and capable of adaptation to moods and times; the other is more permanent, more concentrated, and is uttered not to this or that person or audience, but to all the world. In the “Politicus” the paradox is carried further; the mind or will of the king is preferred to the written law; he is supposed to be the Law personified, the ideal made Life.

Yet in both these statements there is also contained a truth; they may be compared with one another, and also with the