From the Contemporary Review.

TO trace that thread of physical color, entwined throughout, and multiplied sometimes into large tapestried figures, is the business, the enjoyment, of the student of the Dialogues, as he reads them. For this or that special literary quality, indeed, we may go safely by preference to this or that particular Dialogue; to the “Gorgias,” for instance, for the readiest Attic wit, and a manly practical sense in the handling of philosophy; to the “Charmides,” for something like the effect of sculpture in modeling a person; to the “Timæus,” for certain brilliant chromatic effects. Yet who that reads the “Theætetus,” or the “Phædrus,” or the seventh book of the “Republic,” can doubt Plato’s gift in precisely the opposite direction; his gift of sounding by words the depths of thought, a plastic power literally, molding to term and phrase what might have seemed in its very nature too impalpable and abstruse to lend itself, in any case, to language? He gives names to the invisible acts, processes, creations, of abstract mind, as masterfully, as efficiently, as Adam himself to the visible living creations of old. As Plato speaks of them, we might say those abstractions too become visible living creatures. We read the speculative poetry of Wordsworth or Tennyson; and we may observe that a great metaphysical force has come into language which is by no means purely technical or scholastic; what a help such language is to the understanding, to a real hold over the things, the thoughts, the mental processes, those words denote; a vocabulary to which thought freely commits itself, trained, stimulated, raised, thereby, toward a high level of abstract conception, surely to the increase of our general intellectual powers. That, of course, is largely due to Plato’s successor, to Aristotle’s lifelong labor of analysis and definition, and to his successors the Schoolmen, with their systematic culture of a precise instrument for the registration, by the analytic intellect, of its own subtlest movements. But then, Aristotle, himself the first of the Schoolmen, had succeeded Plato, and did but formulate, as a terminology “of art,” as technical language, what for Plato is still vernacular, original, personal, the product in him of an instinctive imaginative power,—a sort of visual power, but causing others also to see what is matter of original intuition for him.

  From the first, in fact, our faculty of thinking is limited by our command of speech. Now it is straight from Plato’s lips, as if in natural conversation, that the language came, in which the mind has ever since been discoursing with itself concerning itself, in that inward dialogue, which is the “active principle” of the dialectic method as an instrument for the attainment of truth. For the essential, or dynamic, dialogue is ever that dialogue of the mind with itself, which any converse with Socrates or Plato does but promote. The very words of Plato, then, challenge us straightway to larger and finer apprehension of the processes of our own minds; are themselves a discovery in the sphere of mind. ’Twas he made us freemen of those solitary places, so trying yet so attractive; so remote and high, they seem, yet are naturally so close to us; he peopled them with intelligible forms. Nay, more! By his peculiar gift of verbal articulation he anticipated the mere hollow spaces which a knowledge, then merely potential, and an experience still to come, would one day occupy. And so, those who cannot admit his actual speculative results, precisely his report on the invisible theoretic world, have been to the point sometimes, in that their objection, by sheer effectiveness of abstract language, he gave an illusive air of reality or substance to the mere nonentities of metaphysic hypothesis,—of a mind trying to feed itself on its own emptiness.

  Just there,—in the situation of one shaped, by combining nature and circumstance into a seer who has a sort of sensuous love of the unseen,—is the paradox of Plato’s genius, and therefore, always, of Platonism, of the Platonic temper. His aptitude for things visible, his gift of words, empower him to express, as if for the eyes, what, except to the eye of the mind, is strictly invisible,—what an acquired asceticism induces him to rank above, and sometimes, in terms of harshest dualism, oppose to, the sensible world. Plato is to be interpreted not merely by his antecedents, by the influence upon him of those who preceded him, but by his successors, by the temper, the intellectual alliances, of those who directly or indirectly have been sympathetic with him. Now it is noticeable that, at first sight somewhat incongruously, a certain number of Manicheans have always been of his company; people who held that matter was evil. Pointing significantly to an unmistakable vein of Manichean, or Puritan, sentiment actually there in the Platonic Dialogues, these rude companions or successors of his carry us back to his great predecessor, to Socrates, whose personal influence had so strongly enforced on Plato the severities moral and intellectual alike, of Parmenides, and of the Pythagoreans. The cold breath of a harshly abstract, a too incorporeal, philosophy, had blown, like an east wind, on that last depressing day in the prison cell of Socrates; and the venerable commonplaces then put forth, in which an overstrained pagan sensuality seems to be reacting, to be taking vengeance, on itself, turned now sick and suicidal, will lose none of their weight with Plato:—That “all who rightly touch philosophy, study nothing else than to die, and to be dead.” That “the soul reasons best, when, as much as possible, it comes to be alone with itself, bidding good-by to the body, and, to the utmost of its power, rejecting communion with it, with the very touch of it, aiming at what is.” It was, in short, as if for the soul to have come into a human body at all had been the seed of disease in it, the beginning of its own proper death.

  As for any adornments or provision for this body, the master had declared that a true philosopher as such would make as little of them as possible. To those young hearers, the words of Socrates may well have seemed to anticipate, not the visible world he had then delineated in glowing color as if for the bodily eye, but only the chilling influence of the hemlock; and it was because Plato was only half convinced of the Manichean or Puritan element in his master’s doctrine, or rather was in contact with it on one side only of his complex and genial nature, that Platonism became possible, as a temper for which, in strictness, the opposition of matter to spirit has no ultimate or real existence. Not to be “pure” from the body, but to identify it, in its utmost fairness, with the fair soul, by a gymnastic “fused in music,” became, from first to last, the aim of education as he conceived it. That the body is but “a hindrance to the attainment of philosophy, if one takes it along with one as a companion in one’s search,” a notion which Christianity, at least in its later though wholly legitimate developments, will correct,—can hardly have been the last thought of Plato himself on quitting it. He opens his door indeed to those austere monitors. They correct the sensuous richness of his genius, but could not suppress it. The sensuous lover becomes a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, after his earlier pattern, carrying into the world of intellectual vision, of θεωρία, all the associations of the actual world of sight. Some of its invisible realities he can all but see with the bodily eye: the absolute Temperance, in the person of the youthful Charmides; the absolute Righteousness, in the person of the dying Socrates. Yes, truly! all true knowledge will be like the knowledge of a person, of living persons, and truth, for Plato, in spite of his Socratic asceticism, to the last, something to look at. The eyes which had noted physical things, so finely, vividly, continuously, would be still at work; and, Plato, thus qualifying the Manichean or Puritan element in Socrates by his own capacity for the world of sense, Platonism has contributed largely, has been an immense encouragement toward the redemption of matter of the world of sense, by art, by all right education, by the creeds and worship of the Christian Church,—toward the vindication of the dignity of the body.

  It was doubtless because Plato was an excellent scholar that he did not begin to teach others till he was more than forty years old,—one of the great scholars of the world, with Virgil and Milton: by which is implied that, possessed of the inborn genius, of those natural powers, which sometimes bring with them a certain defiance of rule, of the intellectual habits of others, he acquires, by way of habit and rule, all that can be taught and learned; and what is thus derived from others by docility and discipline, what is rangé, comes to have in him, and in his work, an equivalent weight with what is unique, impulsive, underivable. Raphael,—Raphael as you see him in the Blenheim “Madonna,” is a supreme example of such scholarship in the sphere of art. Born of a romantically ancient family, understood to be the descendant of Solon himself, Plato had been in early youth a writer of verse. That he turned to a more vigorous, though pedestrian mode of writing, was perhaps an effect of his corrective intercourse with Socrates, through some of the most important years of his life,—from twenty to twenty-eight.

  He belonged to what was just then the discontented class, and might well have taken refuge from active political life in political ideals, or in a kind of self-imposed exile. A traveler, adventurous for that age, he certainly became. After the Lehr-jahre, the Wander-jahre!—all round the Mediterranean coasts as far west as Sicily. Think of what all that must have meant just then, for eyes which could see. If those journeys had begun in angry flight from home, it was for purposes of self-improvement they were continued: the delightful fruit of them is evident in what he writes; and finding him in friendly intercourse with Dionysius the elder, with Dio, and Dionysius the younger, at the polished court of Syracuse, we may understand they were a search also for “the philosophic king,” perhaps for the opportune moment of realizing “the ideal state.” In that case, his quarrels with those capricious tyrants show that he was disappointed. For the future he sought no more to pass beyond the charmed theoretic circle, “speaking wisdom,” as was said of Pythagoras, only “among the perfect.” He returns finally to Athens; and there, in the quiet precincts of the Acadêmus, which has left a somewhat dubious name to places where people come to be taught or to teach, founds, not a state, not even a brotherhood, but only the first college, with something of a common life, of communism on that small scale, with Aristotle for one of its scholars, with its chapel, its gardens, its library with the authentic text of his “Dialogues” upon the shelves: we may just discern the sort of place, through the scantiest notices. His reign was, after all, to be in his writings. Plato himself does nothing in them to retard the effacement which mere time brings to persons and their abodes; and there had been that, moreover, in his own temper, which promotes self-effacement. Yet as he left it, the place remained for centuries, according to his will, to its original use. What he taught through the remaining forty years of his life, the method of that teaching, whether it was less or more esoteric than the teaching of the extant “Dialogues,” is but matter of surmise. Writers, who in their day might still have said much we should have liked to hear, give us little hut old, quasi-supernatural stories, told as if they had been new ones, about him. The year of his birth fell, according to some, in the very year of the death of Pericles (a significant date!) but is not precisely ascertainable: nor is the year of his death, nor its manner. “Scribens est mortuus,” says Cicero: after the manner of a true scholar, “he died pen in hand.”