Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers Part 1

Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers.

by Elbert Hubbard.

SOCRATES

I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by a worse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the G.o.ds.

--_The Republic_

[Ill.u.s.tration: SOCRATES]

It was four hundred seventy years before Christ that Socrates was born.

He never wrote a book, never made a formal address, held no public office, wrote no letters, yet his words have come down to us sharp, vivid and crystalline. His face, form and features are to us familiar--his goggle eyes, bald head, snub nose and bow-legs! The habit of his life--his goings and comings, his arguments and wrangles, his infinite leisure, his sublime patience, his perfect faith--all these things are plain, lifting the man out of the commonplace and setting him apart.

The "Memorabilia" of Xenophon and the "Dialogues" of Plato give us Boswellian pictures of the man.

Knowing the man, we know what he would do; and knowing what he did, we know the man.

Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, a stonecutter, and his wife Phaenarete. In boyhood he used to carry dinner to his father, and sitting by, he heard the men, in their free and easy way, discuss the plans of Pericles. These workmen didn't know the plans--they were only privates in the ranks, but they exercised their prerogatives to criticize, and while working to a.s.sist, did right royally disparage and condemn. Like sailors who love their ship, and grumble at grub and grog, yet on sh.o.r.e will allow no word of disparagement to be said, so did these Athenians love their city, and still condemn its rulers--they exercised the laborer's right to d.a.m.n the man who gives him work.

Little did the workmen guess--little did his father guess--that this pug-nosed boy, making pictures in the sand with his big toe, would also leave his footprints on the sands of time, and a name that would rival that of Phidias and Pericles!

Socrates was a product of the Greek renaissance. Great men come in groups, like comets sent from afar. Athens was seething with thought and feeling: Pericles was giving his annual oration--worth thousands of weekly sermons--and planning his dream in marble; Phidias was cutting away the needless portions of the white stone of Pentelicus and liberating wondrous forms of beauty; Sophocles was revealing the possibilities of the stage; aeschylus was pointing out the way as a playwright; and the pa.s.sion for physical beauty was everywhere an adjunct of religion.

Prenatal influences, it seems, played their part in shaping the destiny of Socrates. His mother followed the profession of Sairy Gamp, and made her home with a score of families, as she was needed. The trained nurse is often untrained, and is a regular encyclopedia of esoteric family facts. She wipes her mouth on her ap.r.o.n and is at home in every room of the domicile from parlor to pantry. Then as now she knew the trials and troubles of her clients, and all domestic underground happenings requiring adjustment she looked after as she was "disposed."

Evidently Phaenarete was possessed of considerable personality, for we hear of her being called to Mythaeia on a professional errand shortly before the birth of Socrates; and in a month after his birth, a similar call came from another direction, and the bald little philosopher was again taken along--from which we a.s.sume, following in the footsteps of Conan Doyle, that Socrates was no bottle-baby. The world should be grateful to Phaenarete that she did not honor the Sairy Gamp precedents and observe the Platonic maxim, "Sandal-makers usually go barefoot": she gave her customers an object-lesson in well-doing as well as teaching them by precept. None of her clients did so well as she--even though her professional duties were so exacting that domesticity to her was merely incidental.

It was only another case of the amateur distancing the professional.

From babyhood we lose sight of Socrates until we find him working at his father's trade as a sculptor. Certainly he had a goodly degree of skill, for the "Graces" which he carved were fair and beautiful and admired by many. This was enough: he just wanted to reveal what he could do; and then to show that to have no ambition was his highest ambition, he threw down his tools and took off his ap.r.o.n for good. He was then thirty-five years old. Art is a jealous mistress, and demands that "thou shalt have no other G.o.ds before me." Socrates did not concentrate on art. His mind went roaming the world of philosophy, and for his imagination the universe was hardly large enough.

I said that he deliberately threw down his tools; but possibly this was by request, for he had acquired a habit of engaging in much wordy argument and letting the work slide. He went out upon the streets to talk, and in the guise of a learner he got in close touch with all the wise men of Athens by stopping them and asking questions. In physique he was immensely strong--hard work had developed his muscles, plain fare had made him oblivious of the fact that he had a stomach, and as for nerves, he had none to speak of.

Socrates did not marry until he was about forty. His wife was scarcely twenty. Of his courtship we know nothing, but sure it is Socrates did not go and sue for the lady's hand in the conventional way, nor seek to gain the consent of her parents by proving his worldly prospects. His apparel was costly as his purse could buy, not gaudy nor expressed in fancy. It consisted of the one suit that he wore, for we hear of his repairing beyond the walls to bathe in the stream, and of his washing his clothing, hanging it on the bushes and waiting for it to dry before going back to the city. As for shoes, he had one pair, and since he never once wore them, going barefoot Summer and Winter, it is presumed that they lasted well. One can not imagine Socrates in an opera-hat--in fact, he wore no hat, and he was bald. I record the fact so as to confound those zealous ones who badger the bald as a business, who have recipes concealed on their persons, and who a.s.sure us that baldness has its rise in headgear.

Socrates belonged to the leisure cla.s.s. His motto was, "Know Thyself."

He considered himself of much more importance than any statue he could make, and to get acquainted with himself as being much more desirable than to know physical phenomena. His plan of knowing himself was to ask everybody questions, and in their answers he would get a true reflection of his own mind. His intellect would reply to theirs, and if his questions dissolved their answers into nothingness, the supremacy of his own being would be apparent; and if they proved his folly he was equally grateful--if he was a fool, his desire was to know it. So sincere was Socrates in this wish to know himself that never did he show the slightest impatience nor resentment when the argument was turned upon him.

He looked upon his mind as a second party, and sat off and watched it work. Should it become confused or angered, it would be proof of its insufficiency and littleness. If Socrates ever came to know himself, he knew this fact: as an economic unit he was an absolute failure; but as a gadfly, stinging men into thinking for themselves, he was a success. A specialist is a deformity contrived by Nature to get the work done.

Socrates was a thought-specialist, and the laziest man who ever lived in a strenuous age. The desire of his life was to live without desire--which is essentially the thought of Nirvana. He had the power never to exercise his power except in knowing himself.

He accepted every fact, circ.u.mstance and experience of life, and counted it gain. Life to him was a precious privilege, and what were regarded as unpleasant experiences were as much a part of life as the pleasant ones.

He who succeeds in evading unpleasant experiences cheats himself out of so much life. You know yourself by watching yourself to see what you do when you are thwarted, crossed, contradicted, or deprived of certain things supposed to be desirable. If you always get the desirable things, how do you know what you would do if you didn't have them? You exchange so much life for the thing, that's all, and thus do we see Socrates antic.i.p.ating Emerson's Essay on Compensation.

Everything is bought with a price--all things are of equal value--no one can cheat you, for to be cheated is a not undesirable experience, and in the act, if you are really filled with the thought, "Know Thyself," you get the compensation by increase in mental growth.

However, to deliberately go in search of experience, Socrates said, would be a mistake, because then you would so multiply impressions that none would be of any avail and your life would be burned out. To clutch life by the throat and demand that it shall stand and deliver is to place yourself so out of harmony with your environment that you will get nothing.

Above all things, we must be calm, self-centered, never anxious, and be always ready to accept whatever the G.o.ds may send. The world will come to us if we only wait. It will be seen that Socrates is at once the oldest and most modern of thinkers. He was the first to express the New Thought. A thought, to Socrates, was more of a reality than a block of marble--a moral principle was just as persistent as a chemical agent.

The silken-robed and perfumed Sophist was sport and game for Socrates.

For him Socrates recognized no closed season. If Socrates ever came near losing his temper, it was in dealing with this Edmund Russell of Athens.

Grant Allen used to say, "The spores of everything are everywhere, and a certain condition breeds a certain microbe." A period of prosperity always warms into life this social paragon, who lives in a darkened room hung with maroon drapery where incense is burned and a turbaned Hindu carries your card to the master, who faces the sun and exploits a prie-dieu when the wind blows east. Athens had these men of refined elegance, Rome evolved them, London has had her day, New York knows them, and Chicago--I trust I will not be contradicted when I say that Chicago understands her business! And so we find these folks who cultivate a pellucid pa.s.sivity, a phthisicky whisper, a supercilious smirk, and who win our smothered admiration and give us gooseflesh by imparting a taupe tinge of mystery to all their acts and words, thus proving to the a.s.sembled guests that they are the Quality and Wisdom will die with them.

This lingo of meaningless words and high-born phrases always set Socrates by the ears, and when he could corner a Sophist, he would very shortly p.r.i.c.k his pretty toy balloon, until at last the tribe fled him as a pestilence. Socrates stood for sanity. The Sophist represented moonshine gone to seed, and these things, proportioned ill, drive men transverse.

Extremes equalize themselves: the pendulum swings as far this way as it does that. The saponaceous Sophist who renounced the world and yet lived wholly in a world of sense, making vacuity pa.s.s legal tender for spirituality, and the priest who, mystified with a mumble of words, evolved a Diogenes who lived in a tub, wore regally a robe of rags, and once went into the temple, and cracking a louse on the altar-rail, said solemnly, "Thus does Diogenes sacrifice to all the G.o.ds at once!" are but two sides of the same shield.

In Socrates was a little jollity and much wisdom pickled in the scorn of Fortune; but the Sophists inwardly bowed down and worshiped the fickle dame on idolatrous knees. Socrates won immortality because he did not want it, and the Sophists secured oblivion because they deserved it.

We hear of Socrates going to Aspasia, and holding long conversations with her "to sharpen his mind." Aspasia did not go out in society much: she and Pericles lived very simply. It is worth while to remember that the most intellectual woman of her age was democratic enough to be on friendly terms with the barefoot philosopher who went about regally wrapped in a table-spread. Socrates did not realize the flight of time when making calls--he went early and stayed late. Possibly prenatal influences caused him often to call before breakfast and remain until after supper.

Just imagine Pericles, Aspasia and Socrates sitting at table--with Walter Savage Landor behind the arras making notes! Doubtless Socrates and Mrs. Pericles did most of the talking, while the First Citizen of Athens listened and smiled indulgently now and then as his mind wandered to construction contracts and walking delegates. Pericles, the builder of a city--Pericles, first among practical men since time began, and Socrates, who jostles history for first place among those who have done nothing but talk--imagine these two eating melons together, while Aspasia, gentle and kind, talks of spirit being more than matter and love being greater than the Parthenon!

Socrates is usually spoken of as regarding women with slight favor, but I have noticed that your genus woman-hater holds the balance true by really being a woman-lover. If a man is enough interested in women to hate them, note this: he is only searching for the right woman, the woman who compares favorably with the ideal woman in his own mind. He measures every woman by this standard, just as Ruskin compared all modern painters with Turner and discarded them with fitting adjectives as they receded from what he regarded as the perfect type. If Ruskin had not been much interested in painters, would he have written scathing criticisms about them?

In several instances we hear of Socrates reminding his followers that they are "weak as women," and he was the first to say "woman is an undeveloped man." But Socrates was a great admirer of human beauty, whether physical or spiritual, and his abrupt way of stopping beautiful women on the streets and bluntly telling them they were beautiful, doubtless often confirmed their suspicions. And thus far he was pleasing, but when he went on to ask questions so as to ascertain whether their mental estate compared with their physical, why, that was slightly different. It is good to hear him say, "There is no s.e.x in intellect," and also, "I have long held the opinion that the female s.e.x is nothing inferior to ours, save only in strength of body and possibly in steadiness of judgment." And Xenophon quotes him thus: "It is more delightful to hear the virtue of a good woman described than if the painter Zeuxis were to show me the portrait of the fairest woman in the world."

Perhaps Thackeray is right when he says, "The men who appreciate woman most are those who have felt the sharpness of her claws." That is to say, things show up best on the darkest background. If so, let us give Xantippe due credit. She tested the temper of the sage by railing on him and deluging him with Socratic propositions, not waiting for the answers; she often broke in with a broom upon his introspective efforts to know himself; if this were not enough, she dashed buckets of scrubbing-water over him; presents that were sent him by admiring friends she used as targets for her mop and wit; if he invited friends with faith plus to dine, she upset the table, dishes and all, before them--not much to their loss; she occasionally elbowed her way through a crowd where her husband was entertaining the listeners upon the divine harmonies, and would tear off his robe and lead him home by the ear. But these things never ruffled Socrates--he might roll his eyes in comic protest at the audiences as he was being led away captive, but no resentment was shown. He had the strength of a Hercules, but he was a far better non-resistant than Tolstoy, because he took his medicine with a wink, while Fate is obliged to hold the nose of the author of "Anna Karenina," who never sees the comedy of an inward struggle and an outward compliance, any more than does the benedict, safely entrenched under the bed, who shouts out, "I defy thee, I defy thee!" as did Mephisto when Goethe thrust him into Tophet.

The popular belief is that Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, was a shrew, and had she lived in New England in Cotton Mather's time would have been a candidate for the ducking-stool. Socrates said he married her for discipline. A man in East Aurora, however, has recently made it plain to himself that Xantippe was possessed of a great and acute intellect. She knew herself, and she knew her liege as he never did--he was too close to his subject to get the perspective. She knew that under right conditions his name would live as one of the world's great teachers, and so she set herself to supply the conditions. She deliberately sacrificed herself and put her character in a wrong light before the world in order that she might benefit the world. Most women have a goodly grain of ambition for themselves, and if their husbands have genius, their business is not to prove it, but to show that they themselves are not wholly commonplace.

Not so Xantippe--she was quite willing to be misunderstood that her husband might live.

What the world calls a happy marriage is not wholly good--ease is bought with a price. Suppose Xantippe and Socrates had settled down and lived in a cottage with a vine growing over the portico, and two rows of hollyhocks leading from the front gate to the door; a pathway of coal-ashes lined off with broken crockery, and inside the house all sweet, clean and tidy; Socrates earning six drachmas a day carving marble, with double pay for overtime, and he handing the pay-envelope over to her each Sat.u.r.day night, keeping out just enough for tobacco, and she putting a tidy sum in the aegean Savings-Bank every month--why, what then?

Well, that would have been an end of Socrates. Xantippe was big enough to know this and so she supplied the domestic cantharides and drove him out upon the streets--he grew to care very little for her, not much for the children, nothing for his home. She drove him out into the world of thought, instead of allowing him to settle down and be content with her society.

I once knew a sculptor--another sculptor--an elemental bit of nature, original and, better still, aboriginal. He used to sleep out under the stars so as to wake up in the night and see the march of the Milky Way, and watch the Pleiades disappear over the brink of the western horizon.

He wore a flannel shirt, thick-soled shoes, and overalls, no hat, and his hair was thick and coa.r.s.e as a horse's mane. This man had talent, and he had sublime conceptions, great dreams, and splendid aspirations.

His soul was struggling to find expression. "Leave him alone," I said.

"He needs time to ripen. He is a Michelangelo in embryo!"

Did he ripen? Not he. He married a Wellesley girl of good family. She, too, had ideas about art--she painted china-b.u.t.tons for shirtwaists, embroidered chasubles and sang "The Rosary" in a raucous Quinsigamond voice. The big barbarian became respectable, and the last time I saw him he wore a Tuxedo and was pa.s.sing out plat.i.tudes and raspberry-shrub at a lawn-party. The Wellesley girl had tamed her bear--they were very happy, he a.s.sured me, and she was preparing a course of lectures for him which he was to give at Mrs. Jack Gardner's. A Xantippe might have saved him.