Chương Chương 11 · Many things pleased me in the order of our State, but there was（2）

In the Tenth Book Plato introduces a new series of objections. First,

he says that the poet or painter is an imitator, and in the third

degree removed from the truth. His creations are not tested by rule and

measure; they are only appearances. In modern times we should say that

art is not merely imitation, but rather the expression of the ideal in

forms of sense. Even adopting the humble image of Plato, from which his

argument derives a colour, we should maintain that the artist may

ennoble the bed which he paints by the folds of the drapery, or by the

feeling of home which he introduces; and there have been modern

painters who have imparted such an ideal interest to a blacksmith’s or

a carpenter’s shop. The eye or mind which feels as well as sees can

give dignity and pathos to a ruined mill, or a straw-built shed

(Rembrandt), to the hull of a vessel ‘going to its last home’ (Turner).

Still more would this apply to the greatest works of art, which seem to

be the visible embodiment of the divine. Had Plato been asked whether

the Zeus or Athene of Pheidias was the imitation of an imitation only,

would he not have been compelled to admit that something more was to be

found in them than in the form of any mortal; and that the rule of

proportion to which they conformed was ‘higher far than any geometry or

arithmetic could express?’ (Statesman.)

Again, Plato objects to the imitative arts that they express the

emotional rather than the rational part of human nature. He does not

admit Aristotle’s theory, that tragedy or other serious imitations are

a purgation of the passions by pity and fear; to him they appear only

to afford the opportunity of indulging them. Yet we must acknowledge

that we may sometimes cure disordered emotions by giving expression to

them; and that they often gain strength when pent up within our own

breast. It is not every indulgence of the feelings which is to be

condemned. For there may be a gratification of the higher as well as of

the lower—thoughts which are too deep or too sad to be expressed by

ourselves, may find an utterance in the words of poets. Every one would

acknowledge that there have been times when they were consoled and

elevated by beautiful music or by the sublimity of architecture or by

the peacefulness of nature. Plato has himself admitted, in the earlier

part of the Republic, that the arts might have the effect of

harmonizing as well as of enervating the mind; but in the Tenth Book he

regards them through a Stoic or Puritan medium. He asks only ‘What good

have they done?’ and is not satisfied with the reply, that ‘They have

given innocent pleasure to mankind.’

He tells us that he rejoices in the banishment of the poets, since he

has found by the analysis of the soul that they are concerned with the

inferior faculties. He means to say that the higher faculties have to

do with universals, the lower with particulars of sense. The poets are

on a level with their own age, but not on a level with Socrates and

Plato; and he was well aware that Homer and Hesiod could not be made a

rule of life by any process of legitimate interpretation; his ironical

use of them is in fact a denial of their authority; he saw, too, that

the poets were not critics—as he says in the Apology, ‘Any one was a

better interpreter of their writings than they were themselves. He

himself ceased to be a poet when he became a disciple of Socrates;

though, as he tells us of Solon, ‘he might have been one of the

greatest of them, if he had not been deterred by other pursuits’ (Tim.)

Thus from many points of view there is an antagonism between Plato and

the poets, which was foreshadowed to him in the old quarrel between

philosophy and poetry. The poets, as he says in the Protagoras, were

the Sophists of their day; and his dislike of the one class is

reflected on the other. He regards them both as the enemies of

reasoning and abstraction, though in the case of Euripides more with

reference to his immoral sentiments about tyrants and the like. For

Plato is the prophet who ‘came into the world to convince men’—first of

the fallibility of sense and opinion, and secondly of the reality of

abstract ideas. Whatever strangeness there may be in modern times in

opposing philosophy to poetry, which to us seem to have so many

elements in common, the strangeness will disappear if we conceive of

poetry as allied to sense, and of philosophy as equivalent to thought

and abstraction. Unfortunately the very word ‘idea,’ which to Plato is

expressive of the most real of all things, is associated in our minds

with an element of subjectiveness and unreality. We may note also how

he differs from Aristotle who declares poetry to be truer than history,

for the opposite reason, because it is concerned with universals, not

like history, with particulars (Poet).

The things which are seen are opposed in Scripture to the things which

are unseen—they are equally opposed in Plato to universals and ideas.

To him all particulars appear to be floating about in a world of sense;

they have a taint of error or even of evil. There is no difficulty in

seeing that this is an illusion; for there is no more error or

variation in an individual man, horse, bed, etc., than in the class

man, horse, bed, etc.; nor is the truth which is displayed in

individual instances less certain than that which is conveyed through

the medium of ideas. But Plato, who is deeply impressed with the real

importance of universals as instruments of thought, attributes to them

an essential truth which is imaginary and unreal; for universals may be

often false and particulars true. Had he attained to any clear

conception of the individual, which is the synthesis of the universal

and the particular; or had he been able to distinguish between opinion

and sensation, which the ambiguity of the words (Greek) and the like,

tended to confuse, he would not have denied truth to the particulars of

sense.

But the poets are also the representatives of falsehood and feigning in

all departments of life and knowledge, like the sophists and

rhetoricians of the Gorgias and Phaedrus; they are the false priests,

false prophets, lying spirits, enchanters of the world. There is

another count put into the indictment against them by Plato, that they

are the friends of the tyrant, and bask in the sunshine of his

patronage. Despotism in all ages has had an apparatus of false ideas

and false teachers at its service—in the history of Modern Europe as

well as of Greece and Rome. For no government of men depends solely

upon force; without some corruption of literature and morals—some

appeal to the imagination of the masses—some pretence to the favour of

heaven—some element of good giving power to evil, tyranny, even for a

short time, cannot be maintained. The Greek tyrants were not insensible

to the importance of awakening in their cause a Pseudo-Hellenic

feeling; they were proud of successes at the Olympic games; they were

not devoid of the love of literature and art. Plato is thinking in the

first instance of Greek poets who had graced the courts of Dionysius or

Archelaus: and the old spirit of freedom is roused within him at their

prostitution of the Tragic Muse in the praises of tyranny. But his

prophetic eye extends beyond them to the false teachers of other ages

who are the creatures of the government under which they live. He

compares the corruption of his contemporaries with the idea of a

perfect society, and gathers up into one mass of evil the evils and

errors of mankind; to him they are personified in the rhetoricians,

sophists, poets, rulers who deceive and govern the world.

A further objection which Plato makes to poetry and the imitative arts

is that they excite the emotions. Here the modern reader will be

disposed to introduce a distinction which appears to have escaped him.

For the emotions are neither bad nor good in themselves, and are not

most likely to be controlled by the attempt to eradicate them, but by

the moderate indulgence of them. And the vocation of art is to present

thought in the form of feeling, to enlist the feelings on the side of

reason, to inspire even for a moment courage or resignation; perhaps to

suggest a sense of infinity and eternity in a way which mere language

is incapable of attaining. True, the same power which in the purer age

of art embodies gods and heroes only, may be made to express the

voluptuous image of a Corinthian courtezan. But this only shows that

art, like other outward things, may be turned to good and also to evil,

and is not more closely connected with the higher than with the lower

part of the soul. All imitative art is subject to certain limitations,

and therefore necessarily partakes of the nature of a compromise.

Something of ideal truth is sacrificed for the sake of the

representation, and something in the exactness of the representation is

sacrificed to the ideal. Still, works of art have a permanent element;

they idealize and detain the passing thought, and are the intermediates

between sense and ideas.

In the present stage of the human mind, poetry and other forms of

fiction may certainly be regarded as a good. But we can also imagine

the existence of an age in which a severer conception of truth has

either banished or transformed them. At any rate we must admit that

they hold a different place at different periods of the world’s

history. In the infancy of mankind, poetry, with the exception of

proverbs, is the whole of literature, and the only instrument of

intellectual culture; in modern times she is the shadow or echo of her

former self, and appears to have a precarious existence. Milton in his

day doubted whether an epic poem was any longer possible. At the same

time we must remember, that what Plato would have called the charms of

poetry have been partly transferred to prose; he himself (Statesman)

admits rhetoric to be the handmaiden of Politics, and proposes to find

in the strain of law (Laws) a substitute for the old poets. Among

ourselves the creative power seems often to be growing weaker, and

scientific fact to be more engrossing and overpowering to the mind than

formerly. The illusion of the feelings commonly called love, has

hitherto been the inspiring influence of modern poetry and romance, and

has exercised a humanizing if not a strengthening influence on the

world. But may not the stimulus which love has given to fancy be some

day exhausted? The modern English novel which is the most popular of

all forms of reading is not more than a century or two old: will the

tale of love a hundred years hence, after so many thousand variations

of the same theme, be still received with unabated interest?

Art cannot claim to be on a level with philosophy or religion, and may

often corrupt them. It is possible to conceive a mental state in which

all artistic representations are regarded as a false and imperfect

expression, either of the religious ideal or of the philosophical

ideal. The fairest forms may be revolting in certain moods of mind, as

is proved by the fact that the Mahometans, and many sects of

Christians, have renounced the use of pictures and images. The

beginning of a great religion, whether Christian or Gentile, has not

been ‘wood or stone,’ but a spirit moving in the hearts of men. The

disciples have met in a large upper room or in ‘holes and caves of the

earth’; in the second or third generation, they have had mosques,

temples, churches, monasteries. And the revival or reform of religions,

like the first revelation of them, has come from within and has

generally disregarded external ceremonies and accompaniments.

But poetry and art may also be the expression of the highest truth and

the purest sentiment. Plato himself seems to waver between two opposite

views—when, as in the third Book, he insists that youth should be

brought up amid wholesome imagery; and again in Book X, when he

banishes the poets from his Republic. Admitting that the arts, which

some of us almost deify, have fallen short of their higher aim, we must

admit on the other hand that to banish imagination wholly would be

suicidal as well as impossible. For nature too is a form of art; and a

breath of the fresh air or a single glance at the varying landscape

would in an instant revive and reillumine the extinguished spark of

poetry in the human breast. In the lower stages of civilization

imagination more than reason distinguishes man from the animals; and to

banish art would be to banish thought, to banish language, to banish

the expression of all truth. No religion is wholly devoid of external

forms; even the Mahometan who renounces the use of pictures and images

has a temple in which he worships the Most High, as solemn and

beautiful as any Greek or Christian building. Feeling too and thought

are not really opposed; for he who thinks must feel before he can

execute. And the highest thoughts, when they become familiarized to us,

are always tending to pass into the form of feeling.

Plato does not seriously intend to expel poets from life and society.

But he feels strongly the unreality of their writings; he is protesting

against the degeneracy of poetry in his own day as we might protest

against the want of serious purpose in modern fiction, against the

unseemliness or extravagance of some of our poets or novelists, against

the time-serving of preachers or public writers, against the

regardlessness of truth which to the eye of the philosopher seems to

characterize the greater part of the world. For we too have reason to

complain that our poets and novelists ‘paint inferior truth’ and ‘are

concerned with the inferior part of the soul’; that the readers of them

become what they read and are injuriously affected by them. And we look

in vain for that healthy atmosphere of which Plato speaks,—‘the beauty

which meets the sense like a breeze and imperceptibly draws the soul,

even in childhood, into harmony with the beauty of reason.’

For there might be a poetry which would be the hymn of divine

perfection, the harmony of goodness and truth among men: a strain which

should renew the youth of the world, and bring back the ages in which

the poet was man’s only teacher and best friend,—which would find

materials in the living present as well as in the romance of the past,

and might subdue to the fairest forms of speech and verse the

intractable materials of modern civilisation,—which might elicit the

simple principles, or, as Plato would have called them, the essential

forms, of truth and justice out of the variety of opinion and the

complexity of modern society,—which would preserve all the good of each

generation and leave the bad unsung,—which should be based not on vain

longings or faint imaginings, but on a clear insight into the nature of

man. Then the tale of love might begin again in poetry or prose, two in

one, united in the pursuit of knowledge, or the service of God and man;

and feelings of love might still be the incentive to great thoughts and

heroic deeds as in the days of Dante or Petrarch; and many types of

manly and womanly beauty might appear among us, rising above the

ordinary level of humanity, and many lives which were like poems

(Laws), be not only written, but lived by us. A few such strains have

been heard among men in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, whom

Plato quotes, not, as Homer is quoted by him, in irony, but with deep

and serious approval,—in the poetry of Milton and Wordsworth, and in

passages of other English poets,—first and above all in the Hebrew

prophets and psalmists. Shakespeare has taught us how great men should

speak and act; he has drawn characters of a wonderful purity and depth;

he has ennobled the human mind, but, like Homer (Rep.), he ‘has left no

way of life.’ The next greatest poet of modern times, Goethe, is

concerned with ‘a lower degree of truth’; he paints the world as a

stage on which ‘all the men and women are merely players’; he

cultivates life as an art, but he furnishes no ideals of truth and

action. The poet may rebel against any attempt to set limits to his

fancy; and he may argue truly that moralizing in verse is not poetry.

Possibly, like Mephistopheles in Faust, he may retaliate on his

adversaries. But the philosopher will still be justified in asking,

‘How may the heavenly gift of poesy be devoted to the good of mankind?’

Returning to Plato, we may observe that a similar mixture of truth and

error appears in other parts of the argument. He is aware of the

absurdity of mankind framing their whole lives according to Homer; just

as in the Phaedrus he intimates the absurdity of interpreting mythology

upon rational principles; both these were the modern tendencies of his

own age, which he deservedly ridicules. On the other hand, his argument

that Homer, if he had been able to teach mankind anything worth

knowing, would not have been allowed by them to go about begging as a

rhapsodist, is both false and contrary to the spirit of Plato (Rep.).

It may be compared with those other paradoxes of the Gorgias, that ‘No

statesman was ever unjustly put to death by the city of which he was

the head’; and that ‘No Sophist was ever defrauded by his pupils’

(Gorg.)...

The argument for immortality seems to rest on the absolute dualism of

soul and body. Admitting the existence of the soul, we know of no force

which is able to put an end to her. Vice is her own proper evil; and if

she cannot be destroyed by that, she cannot be destroyed by any other.

Yet Plato has acknowledged that the soul may be so overgrown by the

incrustations of earth as to lose her original form; and in the Timaeus

he recognizes more strongly than in the Republic the influence which

the body has over the mind, denying even the voluntariness of human

actions, on the ground that they proceed from physical states (Tim.).

In the Republic, as elsewhere, he wavers between the original soul

which has to be restored, and the character which is developed by

training and education...

The vision of another world is ascribed to Er, the son of Armenius, who

is said by Clement of Alexandria to have been Zoroaster. The tale has

certainly an oriental character, and may be compared with the

pilgrimages of the soul in the Zend Avesta (Haug, Avesta). But no trace

of acquaintance with Zoroaster is found elsewhere in Plato’s writings,

and there is no reason for giving him the name of Er the Pamphylian.

The philosophy of Heracleitus cannot be shown to be borrowed from

Zoroaster, and still less the myths of Plato.

The local arrangement of the vision is less distinct than that of the

Phaedrus and Phaedo. Astronomy is mingled with symbolism and mythology;

the great sphere of heaven is represented under the symbol of a

cylinder or box, containing the seven orbits of the planets and the

fixed stars; this is suspended from an axis or spindle which turns on

the knees of Necessity; the revolutions of the seven orbits contained

in the cylinder are guided by the fates, and their harmonious motion

produces the music of the spheres. Through the innermost or eighth of

these, which is the moon, is passed the spindle; but it is doubtful

whether this is the continuation of the column of light, from which the

pilgrims contemplate the heavens; the words of Plato imply that they

are connected, but not the same. The column itself is clearly not of

adamant. The spindle (which is of adamant) is fastened to the ends of

the chains which extend to the middle of the column of light—this

column is said to hold together the heaven; but whether it hangs from

the spindle, or is at right angles to it, is not explained. The

cylinder containing the orbits of the stars is almost as much a symbol

as the figure of Necessity turning the spindle;—for the outermost rim

is the sphere of the fixed stars, and nothing is said about the

intervals of space which divide the paths of the stars in the heavens.

The description is both a picture and an orrery, and therefore is

necessarily inconsistent with itself. The column of light is not the

Milky Way—which is neither straight, nor like a rainbow—but the

imaginary axis of the earth. This is compared to the rainbow in respect

not of form but of colour, and not to the undergirders of a trireme,

but to the straight rope running from prow to stern in which the

undergirders meet.

The orrery or picture of the heavens given in the Republic differs in

its mode of representation from the circles of the same and of the

other in the Timaeus. In both the fixed stars are distinguished from

the planets, and they move in orbits without them, although in an

opposite direction: in the Republic as in the Timaeus they are all

moving round the axis of the world. But we are not certain that in the

former they are moving round the earth. No distinct mention is made in

the Republic of the circles of the same and other; although both in the

Timaeus and in the Republic the motion of the fixed stars is supposed

to coincide with the motion of the whole. The relative thickness of the

rims is perhaps designed to express the relative distances of the

planets. Plato probably intended to represent the earth, from which Er

and his companions are viewing the heavens, as stationary in place; but

whether or not herself revolving, unless this is implied in the

revolution of the axis, is uncertain (Timaeus). The spectator may be

supposed to look at the heavenly bodies, either from above or below.

The earth is a sort of earth and heaven in one, like the heaven of the

Phaedrus, on the back of which the spectator goes out to take a peep at

the stars and is borne round in the revolution. There is no distinction

between the equator and the ecliptic. But Plato is no doubt led to

imagine that the planets have an opposite motion to that of the fixed

stars, in order to account for their appearances in the heavens. In the

description of the meadow, and the retribution of the good and evil

after death, there are traces of Homer.

The description of the axis as a spindle, and of the heavenly bodies as

forming a whole, partly arises out of the attempt to connect the

motions of the heavenly bodies with the mythological image of the web,

or weaving of the Fates. The giving of the lots, the weaving of them,

and the making of them irreversible, which are ascribed to the three

Fates—Lachesis, Clotho, Atropos, are obviously derived from their

names. The element of chance in human life is indicated by the order of

the lots. But chance, however adverse, may be overcome by the wisdom of

man, if he knows how to choose aright; there is a worse enemy to man

than chance; this enemy is himself. He who was moderately fortunate in

the number of the lot—even the very last comer—might have a good life

if he chose with wisdom. And as Plato does not like to make an

assertion which is unproven, he more than confirms this statement a few

sentences afterwards by the example of Odysseus, who chose last. But

the virtue which is founded on habit is not sufficient to enable a man

to choose; he must add to virtue knowledge, if he is to act rightly

when placed in new circumstances. The routine of good actions and good

habits is an inferior sort of goodness; and, as Coleridge says, ‘Common

sense is intolerable which is not based on metaphysics,’ so Plato would

have said, ‘Habit is worthless which is not based upon philosophy.’

The freedom of the will to refuse the evil and to choose the good is

distinctly asserted. ‘Virtue is free, and as a man honours or

dishonours her he will have more or less of her.’ The life of man is

‘rounded’ by necessity; there are circumstances prior to birth which

affect him (Pol.). But within the walls of necessity there is an open

space in which he is his own master, and can study for himself the

effects which the variously compounded gifts of nature or fortune have

upon the soul, and act accordingly. All men cannot have the first

choice in everything. But the lot of all men is good enough, if they

choose wisely and will live diligently.

The verisimilitude which is given to the pilgrimage of a thousand

years, by the intimation that Ardiaeus had lived a thousand years

before; the coincidence of Er coming to life on the twelfth day after

he was supposed to have been dead with the seven days which the

pilgrims passed in the meadow, and the four days during which they

journeyed to the column of light; the precision with which the soul is

mentioned who chose the twentieth lot; the passing remarks that there

was no definite character among the souls, and that the souls which had

chosen ill blamed any one rather than themselves; or that some of the

souls drank more than was necessary of the waters of Forgetfulness,

while Er himself was hindered from drinking; the desire of Odysseus to

rest at last, unlike the conception of him in Dante and Tennyson; the

feigned ignorance of how Er returned to the body, when the other souls

went shooting like stars to their birth,—add greatly to the probability

of the narrative. They are such touches of nature as the art of Defoe

might have introduced when he wished to win credibility for marvels and

apparitions.

There still remain to be considered some points which have been

intentionally reserved to the end: (1) the Janus-like character of the

Republic, which presents two faces—one an Hellenic state, the other a

kingdom of philosophers. Connected with the latter of the two aspects

are (2) the paradoxes of the Republic, as they have been termed by

Morgenstern: (a) the community of property; (b) of families; (c) the

rule of philosophers; (d) the analogy of the individual and the State,

which, like some other analogies in the Republic, is carried too far.

We may then proceed to consider (3) the subject of education as

conceived by Plato, bringing together in a general view the education

of youth and the education of after-life; (4) we may note further some

essential differences between ancient and modern politics which are

suggested by the Republic; (5) we may compare the Politicus and the

Laws; (6) we may observe the influence exercised by Plato on his

imitators; and (7) take occasion to consider the nature and value of

political, and (8) of religious ideals.

1. Plato expressly says that he is intending to found an Hellenic State

(Book V). Many of his regulations are characteristically Spartan; such

as the prohibition of gold and silver, the common meals of the men, the

military training of the youth, the gymnastic exercises of the women.

The life of Sparta was the life of a camp (Laws), enforced even more

rigidly in time of peace than in war; the citizens of Sparta, like

Plato’s, were forbidden to trade—they were to be soldiers and not

shopkeepers. Nowhere else in Greece was the individual so completely

subjected to the State; the time when he was to marry, the education of

his children, the clothes which he was to wear, the food which he was

to eat, were all prescribed by law. Some of the best enactments in the

Republic, such as the reverence to be paid to parents and elders, and

some of the worst, such as the exposure of deformed children, are

borrowed from the practice of Sparta. The encouragement of friendships

between men and youths, or of men with one another, as affording

incentives to bravery, is also Spartan; in Sparta too a nearer approach

was made than in any other Greek State to equality of the sexes, and to

community of property; and while there was probably less of

licentiousness in the sense of immorality, the tie of marriage was

regarded more lightly than in the rest of Greece. The ‘suprema lex’ was

the preservation of the family, and the interest of the State. The

coarse strength of a military government was not favourable to purity

and refinement; and the excessive strictness of some regulations seems

to have produced a reaction. Of all Hellenes the Spartans were most

accessible to bribery; several of the greatest of them might be

described in the words of Plato as having a ‘fierce secret longing

after gold and silver.’ Though not in the strict sense communists, the

principle of communism was maintained among them in their division of

lands, in their common meals, in their slaves, and in the free use of

one another’s goods. Marriage was a public institution: and the women

were educated by the State, and sang and danced in public with the men.

Many traditions were preserved at Sparta of the severity with which the

magistrates had maintained the primitive rule of music and poetry; as

in the Republic of Plato, the new-fangled poet was to be expelled.

Hymns to the Gods, which are the only kind of music admitted into the

ideal State, were the only kind which was permitted at Sparta. The

Spartans, though an unpoetical race, were nevertheless lovers of

poetry; they had been stirred by the Elegiac strains of Tyrtaeus, they

had crowded around Hippias to hear his recitals of Homer; but in this

they resembled the citizens of the timocratic rather than of the ideal

State. The council of elder men also corresponds to the Spartan

gerousia; and the freedom with which they are permitted to judge about

matters of detail agrees with what we are told of that institution.

Once more, the military rule of not spoiling the dead or offering arms

at the temples; the moderation in the pursuit of enemies; the

importance attached to the physical well-being of the citizens; the use

of warfare for the sake of defence rather than of aggression—are

features probably suggested by the spirit and practice of Sparta.

To the Spartan type the ideal State reverts in the first decline; and

the character of the individual timocrat is borrowed from the Spartan

citizen. The love of Lacedaemon not only affected Plato and Xenophon,

but was shared by many undistinguished Athenians; there they seemed to

find a principle which was wanting in their own democracy. The (Greek)

of the Spartans attracted them, that is to say, not the goodness of

their laws, but the spirit of order and loyalty which prevailed.

Fascinated by the idea, citizens of Athens would imitate the

Lacedaemonians in their dress and manners; they were known to the

contemporaries of Plato as ‘the persons who had their ears bruised,’

like the Roundheads of the Commonwealth. The love of another church or

country when seen at a distance only, the longing for an imaginary

simplicity in civilized times, the fond desire of a past which never

has been, or of a future which never will be,—these are aspirations of

the human mind which are often felt among ourselves. Such feelings meet

with a response in the Republic of Plato.