The Crest-Wave Of Evolution Part 7

Then there were some few who, influenced (consciously or not) by H.P. Blavatsky, that great dawn-herald, caught glimpses of the splendor of a dawn--which yet we wait for.

Euripides, with the Soul stirring within and behind him, "broke himself on the bars of life and poetry," as Professor Murray says. He was so hemmed in by the emanations of the time that he could never clearly enunciate the Soul. Not, at any rate, in an unmixed way, and with his whole energies. Perhaps his favorite device of a _Deus ex Machina_--like Hercultes in the _Alcestis_ --is a symbolical enunciation of it, and intended so to be.

Perhaps the cause of the unrest he makes us feel is this: he knew that the highest artistic method was the old Aeschylean symbolic one, and tried to use it; but at the same time was compelled by the gross emanations of the age, which he was not quite strong enough to rise above, to treat his matter not symbolically, but realistically. He could not help saying: "Here is the epos you Athenians want me to treat,--that my artist soul forces me to treat; here are the ideas that make up your conventional religion;--now look at them!" And forth-with he showed them, in there exoteric side, sordid, ugly and b.l.o.o.d.y;-- and then, on the top of that showing, tried to twist them round to the symbolic impersonal plane again; and so left a discord not properly solved, an imperfect harmony; a sense of loss rather than gain; of much torn down, and nothing built up to take its place. The truth was that the creative forces had flowed downward until the organs of spiritual vision were no longer open; and poetry and art, the proper vehicles of the higher teaching in any age approximately golden, could no longer act as efficient channels for the light.

To turn to England again: Tennyson was, generally speaking, most successful when most he was content to be merely the artist in words, and least so when he a.s.sumed the office of Teacher; because almost all he found to teach was brain-mind scientific stuff; which was what the age called for, and the desired diet of Mid-Victorian England. Carlyle, who was a far greater poet essentially, and a far greater teacher actually, fitted himself to an age when materialism had made unpoetic; and eschewed poetry and had no use for it; and would have had others eschew it also. In our own time we have realists like Mr. Masefield.

They are called realists because they work on the plane which has come, in the absence of anything spiritual, to seem that of the realities; the region of outside happenings, of the pa.s.sions in all their ugly nakedness, of sorrow, misery, and despair. Such men may be essentially n.o.ble; we may read in them, under all the ugliness and misery they write down, just one quality of the Soul;--its unrest in and distaste for those conditions; but the mischief of it is that they make the sordidness seem the reality; and the truth about them is that their outlook and way of writing are simply the result of the blindness of the Soul;--its temporary blindness, not its essential glory. But the true business of Poetry never changes; it is to open paths into the inner, the beautiful, the spiritual world.

Just when things were coming to this pa.s.s H. P. Blavatsky went to England; and though she did not touch the field of creative literature herself, brought back as you know a gleam of light and beauty into poetry that may yet broaden out and redeem it. She was born when the century was thirty-one years old; and, curiously enough, there was a man born in Attica about 469, or when _his_ century was thirty-one years old, who, though he did not himself touch the field of literature, was the cause why that light rose to shine in it which has shone most brilliantly since all down the ages; that light which we could not afford to exchange even for the light of Aeschylus. If one of the two were about to be taken from us, and we had our choice which it should be, we should have to cry, _Take Aeschylus, but leave us this!_ --Ay, and take all other Greek literature into the bargain!--But to return to the man born in 469.

He was the son of humble people; his father was a stone-cutter in a small way of business; his mother a midwife. He himself began life as a sculptor,--a calling, in its lower reaches, not so far above that of his father. A group of the Graces carved by him was still to be seen on the road to the Acropolis two hundred years after; and they did not adorn Athens with mean work, one may guess; the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias. But, successful or not, he seems soon to have given it up. Of his youth we know very little. Spintharus, one of the few that knew him then and also when he had become famous, said that he was a man of terrible pa.s.sions: anger hardly to be governed, and vehement desires; "though," he added, "he never did anything unfair." *

By 'unfair' you may understand 'not fitting'--a transgression of right action. He set out to master himself: a tremendous and difficult realm to master.

------ * Gilbert Murray: _Ancient Greek Literature_ ------

We hardly begin to know him till he was growing old; and then he was absolute monarch of that realm. We do not know when he abandoned his art; or how long it was before he had won some fame as a public teacher. We catch glimpse of him as a soldier: from 432 to 429 he served at the siege of Potidaea; at Delium in 424; and at Amphipolis in 422. Thus to do the hoplite, carrying a great weight of arms, at forty-seven, he needed to have some const.i.tution; and indeed he had;--furthermore, he played the part with distinguished bravery--though wont to fall at times into inconvenient fits of abstraction. Beyond all this, for the outside of the man, we may say that he was of fascinating, extreme and satyr-like ugliness and enormous sense of humor; that he was a perpetual joke to the comic poets, and to himself; an old fellow of many and lovable eccentricities; and that you cannot pick one little hole in his character, or find any respect in which he does not call for love.

And men did love him; and he them. He saw in the youth of Athens, whose lives so often were being wasted, Souls with all the beautiful possibilities of Souls; and loved them as such, and drew them towards their soulhood. Such love and insight is the first and strongest weapon of the Teacher: who sees divinity within the rough-hewn personalities of men as the sculptor sees the G.o.d within the marble; and calls it forth. He was wont to joke over his calling; his mother, said he, had been a midwife, a.s.sisting at the birth of men's bodies; he himself was a midwife of souls. How he drew men to him--of the power he had--let Alcibiades bear witness. "As for myself," says Alcibiades, "were I not afraid you would think me more drunk than I am, I would tell you on oath how his words have moved me--ay, and how they move me still. When I listen to him my heart beats with a more than Corybantic excitement; he has only to speak and my tears flow. Orators, such as Pericles, never moved me in this way-- never roused my soul to the thought of my servile condition: but this man makes me think that life is not worth living so long as I am what I am. Even now, if I were to listen, I could not resist. So there is nothing for me but to stop my ears against this siren's song and fly for my life, that I may not grow old sitting at his feet. No one would ever think that I had shame in me; but I am ashamed in the presence of Socrates."

Poor Alciabes! whom Socrates loved so well, and tried so hard to save; and who could only preserve his lower nature for its own and for his city's destruction by stopping his ears against his Teacher! Alcibiades, whose genius might have saved Athens...

only Athens would not be saved... and he could not have saved her, because he had stopped his ears against the man who made him ashamed; and because his treacherous lower nature was always there to thwart and overturn the efficacy of his genius;--what a picture of duality it is!

Socrates gave up his art; because art was no longer useful as an immediate lever for the age. He knew poetry well, but insisted, as Professor Murray I think says, on always treating it as the baldest of prose. There was poetry about, galore; and men did not profit by it: something else was needed. His mission was to the Athens of his day; he was going to save Athens if he could.

So he went into the marketplace, the agora, and loafed about (so to say), and drew groups of young men and old about him, and talked to them. The Delphic Oracle had made p.r.o.nouncement: _Sophocles is wise; Euripides is wiser; but Socrates is the wisest of mankind._ Sometimes, you see, the Delphic Oracle could get off a distinctly good thing. But Socrates, with his usual sense of humor, had never considered himself in that light at all; oldish, yes; and funny, and ugly, by all means;--but wise!

He thought at first, he used to say, that the Oracle must be mistaken, or joking; for Athens was full of reputed wise men, sophists and teachers of philosophy like Prodicus and Protagoras; whereas he himself, heaven knew--. Well, he would go out and make a trial of it. So he went, and talked, and probed the wisdom of his fellow-citizens; and slowly came round to the belief that after all the Delphic Oracle might not have been such a fool. For he knew his ignorance; but the rest were ignorant without knowing it. This was his own way of telling the story; and you can never be sure how much camouflage was in it;--and yet, too, he was a giant humorist. Anyhow, he did show men their ignorance; and you all know his solemn way of doing it. He drew them on with sly questionings to see what idiots they were; and then drew them on with more sly questionings to perceive at least a few sound ethical truths.

He took that humble patient means of saving Athens: by breaking down false opinions and instilling true ones. It was beginning quite at the bottom of things. Where we advertise a public lecture, he b.u.t.ton-holed a pa.s.ser-by; and by the great power of his soul won a following presently. To rouse up a desire for right living in the youth of Athens: if he could do that, thought he, he might save Athens for the world. I wonder what the cycles of national glory would come to, how long they might last, if only the Teachers that invade to save them could have their way. Always we see the same picture: the tremendous effort of the G.o.ds to redeem these nations in the times of their creative greatness; to lift them on to a spiritual plane, that the greatness may not wane and become ineffective. There is the figure that stands before the world, about whose perfection or whose qualities you may wrangle if you will; he is great; he is wonderful; he stirs up love and animosity;--but behind him are the Depths, the Hierarchies, the Pantheons. Socrates' warning Voice, the Daimon that counseled him in every crisis, has always been a hard nut for critics to crack. He was an impostor, was he? Away with you for a double fool! His life meets you so squarely at every point; there was no atom in his being that knew how to fear or lie.... Well, no; but he was deluded; he mistook--. Man, there is more value in the light word of Socrates affirming, than in a whole world full of evidence denying, of such maunderers as you! See here; he was the most sensible of men; balanced; keeping his head always;--a mind no mood or circ.u.mstances could deflect from rational self-control, either towards pa.s.sion or ecstasy. One explanation remains--as in the case of Joan, or of H.P. Blavatsky;--he was neither deceiving nor deceived, but what he claimed to hear, he did hear; and it was the voice of One that stood behind him, and might not appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all: a greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else. How dare we pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a crucible, that we know the limits of natural and spiritual law?

It is a strange figure to find in Greece; drawn thither, one would say, by the attraction of opposites. He must have owed some of his power to his being such a contrast to all things familiar. Personal beauty was extremely common, and he was comically ugly. The Athenians were one of the best-educated populations of ancient or modern times--far ahead of ourselves; and he was ill-educated, and acted as a public teacher. He was hen-pecked at home, in an age when the place of woman was a very subordinate and submissive one; and he was the b.u.t.t of all joke-lovers abroad, and himself enjoyed the joke most of all.

And he quietly stood alone, against the mob and his fellow-judges, for the hapless victors of Arginusae in 406; and he quietly stood alone against the Thirty Tyrants during their reign of terror in 404, disobeying them at peril of his life. But Strip him of the "thing of sinews and muscles," as he called his outer self; forget the queer old personality that appears in the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes, or for that matter in the _Memorabilia_ of Xenophon--and what kind of picture of Socrates should we see?

The humor would not go, for it is a universal quality; it has been said no Adept was ever without it; could you draw aside the veil of Mother Isis herself, and draw it suddenly, I suspect you should surprise a laugh vanishing from her face. So the humor would remain; and with it there would be ... something calm, aloof, unshakable, yet vitally affectioned towards Athens, the Athenians, humanity; something unsurprised at, far less hoping or fearing anything from, life or death; in possession of "the peace which pa.s.seth understanding"; native to "the eternity that baffles all faculty of computation";--something that drew all sorts and conditions of Athenians to him, good and bad, Plato and Alcibiades, by "that diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn."--In point of fact, to get a true portrait of Socrates you have to look at the Memnon's head. The Egyptian artists carved it to be the likeness of the Perfect Man, the Soul, always in itself sublime, absolute master of its flesh and personality. That was what Socrates was.

Well; the century ended, with that last quarter of it in which the Lodge makes always its outward effort. Socrates for the Lodge had left no stone unturned; he had made his utmost effort dally.

The democracy had been reinstated, and he was understood to be a moderate in politics. And the democracy was conventional-minded in religion; and he was understood to be irreligious, a disturber and innovator. And the democracy was still smarting from the wound; imposed on it by Critias and Charmides, understood to have been his disciples; and could not forget the treacheries of Alcibiades, another. And there were vicious youths besides, whom he had tried and failed to save; they had ruined themselves, and their reputable parents blamed and hated him for the ruin, not understanding the position. And he himself had seen so many of his efforts come to nothing: Alcibiades play the traitor; Critias and Charmides, the b.l.o.o.d.y tyrant;--he had seen many he had labored for frustrate his labors; he had seen Athens fallen. He had done all he could, quietly, unfailingly and without any fuss; now it was time for him to go. But going, he might yet strike one more great blow for the Light.

So with quiet zest and humor he entered upon the plans of his adversaries, accepting his trial and sentence like--_like Socrates;_ for there is no simile for him, outside himself. He turned it all masterfully to the advantage of the Light he loved.

You all know how he cracked his grand solemn joke when the death sentence was pa.s.sed on him. By Athenian law, he might suggest an alternative sentence; as, to pay a fine, or banishment. Well, said he; death was not certainly an evil; it might be a very good thing; whereas banishment was certainly an evil, and so was paying a fine. And besides, he had no money to pay it. So the only alternative he could suggest was that Athens should support him for the rest of his life in the Prytaneum as a public benefactor. Not a smile from him; not a tremor. He elected deliberately; he chose death; knowing well that, as things stood, he could serve humanity in no other way so well. So he put aside Crito's very feasible plan for his escape, and at the last gathered his friends around him, and discoursed to them.

On Reincarnation. It was an old tradition, said he; and what could be more reasonable than that the soul, departing to Hades, should return again in its season:--the living born from the dead, as the dead are from the living? Did not experience show that opposites proceed from opposites? Then life must proceed from, and follow, death. If the dead came from the living, and not the living from the dead, the universe would at last be consumed in death. Then, too, there was the doctrine that knowledge comes from recollection; what is recollected must have been previously known. Our souls must have existed then, before birth. . . .

Why did he talk like that: thus _reasoning_ about reincarnation, and not stating it as a positive teaching? Well; there would be nothing new and startling about it, to the Greeks. They knew of it as a teaching both of Pythagoras and of the Orphic Mysteries: that is, those did who were initiates or Pythagoreans. But it was not public teaching, known to the mult.i.tude; and except among the Pythagoreans, sophistry and speculation had impaired its vitality as a matter of faith or knowledge. (So scientific discovery and the spread of education have impaired the vitality now of Christian presentations of ethics.) So that to have announced it positively, at that time, would have served his purpose but little: men would have said, "We have heard all that before; had he nothing better to give us than stale ideas from the Mysteries or Pythagoras?" What he wanted to do was to take it out of the region of religion, where familiarity with it had bread an approach to contempt; and restate it robbed of that familiarity, and clothed anew in a garb of sweet reasonableness.

So once more, and as ususal, he a.s.sumed ignorance, and approached the whole subject in a quiet and rational way, thus: I do not say that this is positively so; I do not announce it as a dogma.

Dogmas long since have lost their efficacy, and you must stand or fall now by the perceptions of your own souls, not by what I or any authority may tell you. But as reasoning human beings, does it not appeal to you?

And the very spirit in which he approached it and approached his death was precisely the one to engrave his last spoken ideas on the souls of his hearers as nothing else could. No excitement; no uplift or ecstasy of the martyr; quiet reasoning only; full, serene, and, for him, common-place command of the faculties of his mind. The shadow of death made no change in Socrates; how then should they misunderstand or magnify the power of the shadow of death?--"How shall we bury you?" asks Crito. Socrates turns to the others present, and says: "I cannot persuade Crito that I here am Socrates--I who am now reasoning and ordering discourse.

He imagines Socrates to be that other, whom he will see by and by, a corpse."--So the scene went on until the last moment, when "Phaedo veiled his face, and Crito started to his feet, and Apollodorus, who had never ceased weeping all the time, burst out into a loud and angry cry which broke down everyone but Socrates."

Someone has said that there is nothing in tragedy or history so moving as this death of Socrates, as Plato tells it. And yet its tragic interest, its beauty, is less important, to my thinking, than the insight it gives us into the methods and mental workings of an Adept. Put ourselves into the mind of Socrates. He is going to his death; which to him is about the same as, to us, going to South Ranch or San Diego. You say I am taking the beauty and n.o.bility out of it; but no; I am only trying to see what beauty and n.o.bility look like from within. To him, then, his death is in itself a matter of no personal moment. But the habit of his lifetime has been to turn every moment into a blow struck for the Soul, for the Light, for the Cause of Sublime Perfection.

And here now is the chance to strike the most memorable blow of all. With infinite calmness he arranges every detail, and proceeds to strike it. He continues to play the high part of Socrates,--that is all. You might go to death like a poet, in love with Death's solemn beauty, you might go to her like a martyr, forgetting the awe of her in forevision of the splendor that lies beyond. But this man broadly and publicly goes to her like Socrates. He will allow her no fascination, no mystery; not even, nor by any means, equality with the Soul of Man. . . . And Apollodorus might weep then, and burst into an angry cry; and Crito and Phaedo and the rest might all break down--_then;_ but what were they to think afterwards? When they remembered how they had seen Death and Socrates, those two great ones, meet; and how the meeting had been as simple, as unaffected, as any meeting between themselves and Socrates, any morning in the past, in the Athenian _agora?_ And when Death should come to them, what should they say but this: 'There is nothing about you that can impress me; formerly I conversed with one greater than you are, and I saw you pay your respects to Socrates.'

Could he, could any man have proclaimed the Divinity in Man, its real and eternal existence, in any drama, in any poem, in any glorious splendor of rhetoric with what fervor soever of mystical ecstasy endued--with such deadly effectiveness, such inevitable success, as in this simple way he elected? There are men whose actions seem to spring from a source super-ethical: it is cheap to speak of them as good, great, beautiful or sublime: these are but the appearances they a.s.sume as we look upwards at them. What they are in themselves is: (1) Compa.s.sionate;--it is the law of their being to draw men upwards towards the Spirit; (2) Impersonal;--there is a non-being or vacuity in them where we have our pa.s.sions, likings, preferences, dislikes and desires.

They are, in the Chinese phrase, "the equals of Heaven and Earth";

"Earth, heaven, and time, death, life and they Endure while they shall be to be."

So Socrates, having failed in his life-attempt to save Athens, entered with some gusto on that great _coup de main_ of his death: to make it a thing which first a small group of his friends should see; then that Greece should see; then that thirty coming centuries and more should see; presented it royally to posterity, for what, as a manifestation of the Divine in man, it might be worth.

And look! what is the result? Scarcely is the 'thing of muscles and sinews' cold: scarcely has high Socrates forgone his queer satyr-like embodiment: when a new luminary has risen into the firmament,--one to shine through thirty centuries certainly,

"Brighter than Jupiter--a blazing star Brighter than Hesper shining out to sea"

--one that is still to be splendid in the heavens wherever in Europe, wherever in America, wherever in the whole vast realm of the future men are to arise and make question and peer up into the beautiful skies of the Soul. A Phoenix in time has arisen from the ashes of Socrates: from the glory and solemnity of his death a Voice is mystically created that shall go on whispering _The Soul_ wherever men think and strive towards spirituality.

--Ah indeed, you were no failure, Socrates--you who were disappointed of your Critias, your Charmides, your Alcibiades, your whole Athens; you were not anything in the very least like a failure; for there was yet one among your disciples--

He says, that one, that he was absent through illness during that last scene of his Teacher's life. I do not know; it has been thought that may have been merely a pretense, an artistic convention, to give a heightened value of impersonality to his marvelous prose:--for it was he who wrote down the account of the death of Socrates for us: that tragedy so transcendent in its beauty and lofty calm. But this much is certain: that day he was born again: became, from a gilded youth of Athens, an eternal luminary in the heavens, and that which he has remained these three-and-twenty hundred years: the Poet-Philosopher of the Soul, the Beacon of the Spirit for the western world....

He had been a brilliant young aristocrat among the crowd that loved to talk with Socrates: the very best thing that Athens could produce in the way of birth, charm, talent, and attainments;--it is a marvel to see one so worshiped of Fortune in this world, turn so easily to become her best adored in the heaven of the Soul. On his father's side he was descended from Codrus, last king of Athens; on his mother's, from Solon: you could get nothing higher in the way of family and descent. In himself, he was an accomplished athlete; a brilliant writer of light prose; a poet of high promise when the mood struck him-- and he had ideas of doing the great thing in tragedy presently; trained unusually well in music, and in mathematics; deeply read; with a taste for the philosophies; a man, in short, of culture as deep and balanced as his social standing was high. But it seemed as though the Law had brought all these excellencies together mainly to give the fashionable Athenian world a.s.surance of a man; for here he was in his thirty-first year with nothing much achieved beyond--his favorite pursuit--the writing of _mimes_ for the delectation of his set: "close studies of little social scenes and conversations, seen mostly in the humorous aspect." * He had consorted much with Socrates; at the trial, when it was suggested that a fine might be paid, and the hemlock evitated, it was he who had first subscribed and gone about to raise a sum. But now the death of his friend and Teacher struck him like a great gale amidships; and he was transformed, another man; and the great Star Plato rose, that shines still; the great Voice Plato was lifted to speak for the Soul and to be unequaled in that speaking, in the west, until H.P. Blavatsky came.

------ * Murray: _Ancient Greek Literature:_--whence all this as to Plato's youth.

But note what a change had taken place with the ending of the fifth century. Hitherto all the great Athenians had been great Athenians. Aeschylus, witness of eternity, had cried his message down to Athens and to his fellow-citizens; he had poured the waters of eternity into the vial of his own age and place. I speak not of Sophocles, who was well enough rewarded with the prizes Athens had to give him. Euripides again was profoundly concerned with his Athens; and though he was contemned by and held aloof from her, it was the problems of Athens and the time that ate into his soul. Socrates came to save Athens; he did not seek political advancement, but would hold office when it came his way; was enough concerned in politics to be considered a moderate-one cause of his condemnation; but above all devoted himself to raising the moral tone of the Athenian youth and clearing their minds of falsity. Finally, he gave loyalty to his city and its laws as one reason for rejecting Crito's plan for his escape. What he hoped and lived for was, to save Athens; and he was the more content to die, when he saw that this was no longer possible.

But Plato had no part nor lot in Athens. He loathed her doctrine of democracy, as knowing it could come to no good. He had affiliations, like Aeschylus, in Sicily, whither he made certain journeys; and might have stayed there among his fellow Pythagoreans, but for the irascible temper of Dionysius. But much more, and most of all, his affiliations were in the wide Cosmos and all time: as if he foresaw that on him mainly would devolve the task of upholding spiritual ideas in Europe through the millenniums to come. He dwelt apart, and taught in the Groves of Academe outside the walls. Let Athens' foolish politics go forward as they might, or backward--he would meddle with nothing.

It has been brought against him that he did nothing to help his city 'in her old age and dotage'; well, he had the business of thousands of coming years and peoples to attend to, and had no time to be accused, condemned, and executed by a parcel of obstreperous cobblers and tinkers hot-headed over the petty politics of their day. The G.o.ds had done with Athens, and were to think now of the great age of darkness that was to come. He was mindful of a light that should arise in Egypt, after some five hundred years; and must prepare wick and oil for the Neo-Platonists. He was mindful that there should be a thing called the Renaissance in Italy; and must attend to what claims Pico di Mirandola and others should make on him for spiritual food. He must consider Holland of the seventeenth century, and England: the Platonists of Cambridge and Amsterdam;--must think of Van Helmont; and of a Vaughan who 'saw eternity the other night'; of a Traherne, who should never enjoy the world aright without some illumination from his star; of a young Milton, _penseroso,_ out watching the Bear in some high lonely tower with thrice-great Hermes, who should unsphere his spirit,

"..... to unfold What worlds and what vast regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshy nook";

--no, but he must think of all times coming; and how, whenever there should be any restlessness against the tyranny of materialism and dogma, a cry should go up for _Plato._--So let Isocrates, the 'old man eloquent,'--let a many-worded not unpeculant patriotic Demosthenes who knew nothing of the G.o.d-world--attend to an Athens wherein the G.o.ds were no longer greatly interested;--the great Star Plato should rise up into mid-heaven, and shine not in, but high over Athens and quite apart from her; drawing from her indeed the external elements of his culture, but the light and substance from that which was potent in her no longer.

I said Greece served the future badly enough. Consider what might have been. The pivot of the Mediterranean world, in the sixth century, was not Athens, but in Magna Graecia: at Croton, where Pythagoras had built his school. But the mob wrecked Croton, and smashed the Pythagorean Movement as an organization; and that, I take it, and one other which we shall come to in time, were the most disastrous happenings in European history. Yes; the causes why Cla.s.sical civilization went down; why the Dark Ages were dark; why the G.o.d in Man his been dethroned, and suffered all this crucifixion and ignominy the last two thousand years.

Aeschylus, truly, received some needed backing from the relics of the Movement which he found still existent in Sicily; but what might he not have written, and what of his writings might not have come down to us, preserved there in the archives, had he had the peace and elevation of a Croton, organized, to retire to?

Whither, too, Socrates might have gone, and not to death, when Athens became impossible; where Plato might have dwelt and taught; revealing, to disciples already well-trained, much more than ever he did reveal; and engraving, oh so deeply! on the stuff of time, the truths that make men free. And there he should have had successors and successors and successors; a line to last perhaps a thousand or two thousand years; who never should have let European humanity forget such simple facts as Karma and Reincarnation. But only at certain times are such great possibilities presented to mankind; and a seed-time once pa.s.sed, there can be no sowing again until the next season comes. It is no good arguing with the Law of Cycles. Plato may not have been less than Pythagoras; yet, under the Law, he might not attempt-- it would have been folly for him to have attempted--that which Pythagoras had attempted. So he had to take another line altogether; to choose another method; not to try to prevent the deluge, which was certain now to come; not even to build an ark, in which something should be saved; but, so to say, to strew the world with tokens which, when the great waters had subsided, should still remain to remind men of those things it is of most importance they should know.

This is the way he did it. He advanced no dogma, formulated no system; but what he gave out, he gave rather as hypotheses. His aim was to set in motion a method of thinking which should lead always back to the Spirit and Divine Truth. He started no world- religion; founded no church--not even such a quite unchurchly church as that which came to exist on the teachings of Confucius.

He never had the ma.s.ses practicing their superst.i.tions, nor a priesthood venting its l.u.s.t of power, in his name. Instead, he arranged things so, that wherever fine minds have aspired to the light of the Spirit, Plato has been there to guide them on their way. So you are to see Star-Plato shining, you are to hear that voice from the Spheres at song, when Sh.e.l.ley, reaching his topmost note, sang:

"The One remains, the many change and pa.s.s; Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly; Life like a dome of many-coloured gla.s.s Stains the white radiance of Eternity";--

and when Swinburne sings of Time and change that:

"Songs they can stop that earth found meet, But the Stars keep their ageless rhyme; Flowers they can slay that Spring thought sweet, But the Stars keep their Spring sublime, Actions and agonies control, And life and death, but not the Soul."

In a poetic age--in the time of Aeschylus, for example--Plato would have been a poet; and then perhaps we should have had to invent another cla.s.s of poets, one above the present highest; and reserve it solely for the splendor of Plato. Because Platonism is the very Theosophic Soul of Poetry. But he came, living when he did, to loathe the very name of poetry: as who should say: "G.o.d pity you! I give you the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and you make answer, 'Charming Plato, how exquisitely poetic is your prose!'" So his bitterness against poetry is very natural. Poetry is the inevitable vehicle of the highest truth; spiritual truth is poetry. But the world in general does not know this. Like Bacon, it looks on poetry as a kind of pleasurable lying. Plato went through the skies Mercury to the Sun of Truth, its nearest attendant planet; and therefore was, and could not help being, Very-Poet of very-poets. But Homer and others had lied loudly about the G.o.ds; and, thought Plato, the G.o.ds forbid that the truth he had to declare--a vital matter-- should be cla.s.sed with their loud lying.

He masked the batteries of his Theosophy; camouflaged his great Theosophical guns; but fired them off no less effectively, landing his splendid sh.e.l.ls at every ganglionic point in the history of European thought since. Let a man soak his soul in Plato; and it shall go hard but the fair flower Theosophy shall spring up there presently and bloom. He prepares the soil: suggesting the way to, rather than precisely formulating, the high teachings. The advantage of the grand Platonic camouflage has been twofold: on the one hand you could hardly dwarf your soul with dogmatic acceptation of Platonism, because he gave all his teachings--even Reincarnation--as hypotheses,--and men do not as a rule crucify their mental freedom on an hypothesis. On the other hand, how was any Church eager to burn out heresy and heretics to deal with him? He was not to be stamped out; because his influence depended on no continuity of discipleship, no organization; because he survived merely as a tendency of thought. No churchly fulminations might silence his batteries; because he had camouflaged them, and they were not to be seen.

Of course he did not invent his ideas; they are as old as Theosophy. The Lodge sent him to proclaim them in the way he did: the best way possible, since the Pythagorean effort had failed of its greatest success. What we owe to him--his genius and inestimable gift to the world--is precisely that matchless camouflage. It has been effective, in spite of efforts--

That, for instance, of a forward youth who came to Athens and studied under him for twenty years, and whom Plato called the intellect of the school, saying that he spurned his Teacher as colts do their mothers. A youth, it is said, who revered Plato always; and only gradually grew away from thinking of himself as a Platonist. But he never could have understood the inwardness of Plato or Platonism, for his mind turned as naturally to scientific or brain-mind methods, as Plato's did to mysticism and the illumination of the Soul. He adopted much of the teaching, but gave it a twist brain-mindwards; yet not such a twist, either, but that the Neo-Platonists in their day, and certain of the Arab and Turkish philosophers after them, could re-Platonize it to a degree and admit him thus re-Platonized into their canon.

I am not going to trouble you much with Aristotle; let this from the Encyclopedia suffice: "Philosophic differences" it says "are best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism is a philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world."