6: THE GENIUS OF PLATO

For we must remind ourselves just here, that, quite naturally also, instinctively, and apart from the austere influences which claimed and kept his allegiance later, Plato, with a kind of unimpassioned passion, was a lover in particular of temperance; of temperance too, as it may be seen, as a visible thing--seen in Charmides, say! in that subdued and grey-eyed loveliness, "clad in sober grey"; or in those youthful athletes which, in ancient marble, reproduce him and the like of him with sound, firm outlines, such as temperance secures. Still, that some more luxurious sense of physical beauty had at one time greatly disturbed him, divided him against himself, we may judge from his own words in a famous passage of the Phaedrus concerning the management, the so difficult management, of [137] those winged steeds of the body, which is the chariot of the soul.

Puzzled, in some degree, Plato seems to remain, not merely in regard to the higher love and the lower, Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemus, as he distinguishes them in the Symposium; nor merely with the difficulty of arbitrating between some inward beauty, and that which is outward; with the odd mixture everywhere, save in its still unapprehended but eternal essence, of the beautiful with what is otherwise; but he is yet more harassed by the experience (it is in this shape that the world-old puzzle of the existence of evil comes to him) that even to the truest eyesight, to the best trained faculty of soul, the beautiful would never come to seem strictly concentric with the good. That seems to have taxed his understanding as gravely as it had tried his will,--and he was glad when in the mere natural course of years he was become at all events less ardent a lover. 'Tis he is the authority for what Sophocles had said on the happy decay of the passions as age advanced: it was "like being set free from service to a band of madmen." His own distinguishing note is tranquil afterthought upon this conflict, with a kind of envy of the almost disembodied old age of Cephalus, who quotes that saying of Sophocles amid his placid sacrificial doings. Connect with this quiet scene, and contrast with the luxuriant power of the Phaedrus and the Symposium, what, [138] for a certain touch of later mysticism in it, we might call Plato's evening prayer, in the ninth book of The Republic.--

     When any one, being healthfully and temperately disposed
     towards himself, turns to sleep, having stirred the reasonable
     part of him with a feast of fair thoughts and high problems,
     being come to full consciousness, himself with himself; and
     has, on the other hand, committed the element of desire neither
     to appetite, nor to surfeiting, to the end that this may slumber
     well, and, by its pain or pleasure, cause no trouble to that
     part which is best in him, but may suffer it, alone by itself,
     in its pure essence, to behold and aspire towards some object,
     and apprehend what it knows not--some event, of the past, it may
     be, or something that now is, or will be hereafter; and in like
     manner has soothed hostile impulse, so that, falling to no angry
     thoughts against any, he goes not to rest with a troubled spirit,
     but with those two parts at peace within, and with that third
     part, wherein reason is engendered, on the move:--you know, I
     think, that in sleep of this sort he lays special hold on truth,
     and then least of all is there lawlessness in the visions of his
     dreams.  Republic, 571.

For Plato, being then about twenty-eight years old, had listened to the "Apology" of Socrates; had heard from them all that others had heard or seen of his last hours; himself perhaps actually witnessed those last hours. "Justice itself "--the "absolute" Justice--had then become almost a visible object, and had greatly solemnised him. The rich young man, rich also in intellectual gifts, who might have become (we see this in the adroit management of his written work) the most brilliant and effective of Sophists; who might have developed dialogues into plays, tragedy, perhaps comedy, as he cared; [139] whose sensuous or graphic capacity might have made him the poet of an Odyssey, a Sappho, or a Catullus, or, say! just such a poet as, just because he was so attractive, would have been disfranchised in the Perfect City; was become the creature of an immense seriousness, of a fully adult sense, unusual in Greek perhaps even more than in Roman writers, "of the weightiness of the matters concerning which he has to discourse, and of the frailty of man." He inherits, alien as they might be to certain powerful influences in his own temper, alike the sympathies and the antipathies of that strange, delightful teacher, who had given him (most precious of gifts!) an inexhaustible interest in himself. It is in this way he inherits a preference for those trying severities of thought which are characteristic of the Eleatic school; an antagonism to the successful Sophists of the day, in whom the old sceptical "philosophy of motion" seemed to be renewed as a theory of morals; and henceforth, in short, this master of visible things, this so ardent lover, will be a lover of the invisible, with--Yes! there it is constantly, in the Platonic dialogues, not to be explained away--with a certain asceticism, amid all the varied opulence, of sense, of speech and fancy, natural to Plato's genius.

The lover, who is become a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, and therefore, literally, a seer, of it, carrying an elaborate cultivation of the bodily senses, of eye and ear, their natural [140] force and acquired fineness--gifts akin properly to ta erôtika,+ as he says, to the discipline of sensuous love--into the world of intellectual abstractions; seeing and hearing there too, associating for ever all the imagery of things seen with the conditions of what primarily exists only for the mind, filling that "hollow land" with delightful colour and form, as if now at last the mind were veritably dealing with living people there, living people who play upon us through the affinities, the repulsion and attraction, of persons towards one another, all the magnetism, as we call it, of actual human friendship or love:--There, is the formula of Plato's genius, the essential condition of the specially Platonic temper, of Platonism. And his style, because it really is Plato's style, conforms to, and in its turn promotes in others, that mental situation. He breaks as it were visible colour into the very texture of his work: his vocabulary, the very stuff he manipulates, has its delightful aesthetic qualities; almost every word, one might say, its figurative value. And yet no one perhaps has with equal power literally sounded the unseen depths of thought, and, with what may be truly called "substantial" word and phrase, given locality there to the mere adumbrations, the dim hints and surmise, of the speculative mind. For him, all gifts of sense and intelligence converge in one supreme faculty of theoretic vision, theôria,+ the imaginative reason.

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