diogenes and plato on tolstoy, ibsen, shaw, etc.
on the second night the olympians assembled at pompeii. it was a balmy, starry night. the ruins of the old town, white in their marble dresses, shone with a spectral brightness against the mountains, bays, and meadows surrounding them. from stabi? and gragnano opposite one could hear the pipe of pan and the laughter of his nymphs, and on the dark water there were magic boats carrying circe and her maids to their blue grotto in capri. selene sent her mildest rays over the scene, and grass and stone were as if steeped in silvery dreams. the place selected for the meeting was the amphitheatre. at a move of zeus' right hand the seats and alleys, which had long since disappeared under the pressure of the ugly lava, rose from the ground. the orchestra and stage took up their old shape, and the whole graceful space with its incomparable view was again full of beauty, comfort, and pleasurableness. zeus, and his wife juno, sat down on the central seat, and around them the other gods and heroes. when everyone had found his or her seat, zeus spake: "we have heard with much contentment the experiences of aristotle in the country which the little ones below call england. we should now like to hear something about the theatres in that strange[pg 33] land. if life itself is so uncommon and funny in that part of the non-grecian world, their theatre, reflecting life, must be unusually entertaining. perhaps you aristotle, as the most renowned critic of poetry and the drama, will be good enough to give us an idea of the thing they call drama in england."
whereupon aristotle rose from his seat, and treated the immortals to a sight which no one had as yet enjoyed: he smiled. and smilingly he said to the almighty son of kronos, ruler of the world: "o zeus, your wish is a behest, and if you insist i will of course obey. but pray, kindly consider that i have, with your consent, withheld from these people, who call themselves moderns, and who might better be called afterlings, the second book of my 'poetics,' in which i treat of the comedy, the farce, the burlesque, and similar phlyakes, as we term them. if now i should reveal my thoughts on the phlyakes of the english, several of their sophists, whom they call university professors, might still add to the lava which my commentators have spurted out upon my works, just as we see here the lava of angry vesuvius cover the beauteous fields in and around pompeii.
"may i propose the proper person to entertain us about that sort of comedy of the english which, at present, is more or less generally considered to be their most valuable dramatic output? if so," aristotle continued at a sign from zeus, "i propose him who over there at the right entrance of the stage lies carelessly on the ground and seems to heed us as little as in his time he heeded the athenians and the corinthians." aristotle, raising his hand, pointed[pg 34] to the shabby, untidy figure of diogenes. when the gods and heroes heard the name and looked at the person of the cynic, they all burst out in immortal laughter, and the sea, catching the gay ripple, laughed as far as sorrento.
diogenes, without moving from his position, and putting one of his legs comfortably on one of the low statues of a satyr, turned his head towards zeus and exclaimed: "verily, i tell you, you only confirm me in my old belief, that there is nothing sadder than laughter. why should you laugh? are we not here to enjoy ourselves? is not this lovely spot one where even we might and ought to feel perfectly happy? why, then, laugh? i mean, of course, laugh at me.
"i do pooh-pooh all your glories. olympus to me is not a whit more agreeable than my tub at corinth. this is, you understand, the reason of my predilection for the english. they, alone of all these europeans, live at least for five seconds each day in a tub.
"i also pooh-pooh your feasts, your ambrosia and nectar. for having passed a few months in a large village they call london, i have so completely lost my palate and taste, that for the next two thousand years, at anyrate, i shall not be able to distinguish nectar from stale ale, nor ambrosia from cabbage.
"yes, i still pooh-pooh, disdain and neglect most of the things that you and your worshippers hold in[pg 35] great esteem. alcibiades raved about the beauty of women now limping about in the various cities of the barbarians, and more particularly in the towns of the english. a woman! a mere woman! what is the good of a woman unless one is rid of her? i still think what i used to teach, that between a man and a woman there is only a slight difference, one that is scarcely worth considering.
"you may laugh until vesuvius again vomits scorn upon you, but i tell you here, at pompeii, what i used to tell everybody at corinth: your glories are all gone, or ought to go. just look at venus. there she sits displaying to eager-looking pans and sileni the loveliness of her head and neck and figure. but what does it mean after all? repentance and wormwood. look at ares—(mars). does he not look as if he ruled the world? does he not behave as if all great things were achieved through and by him? and what is it in reality? mere butchery—cowardly butchery. you laugh; of course, you do. but i mean to show you that all that i have ever taught is nothing less than strictly true; the only truth; truth the one.
"aristotle, in pointing me out as the person who can best tell you what this new shavian drama of england really is; aristotle, i say, may have acted with malice. he has, nevertheless, acted with great wisdom. i am indeed the only man out of the world (there is none in it), who does clearly and fully understand my little disciple who calls himself bernard shaw. of the other friends and admirers of his, he might very well say what that great german philosopher hegel said in his last moments: 'one man alone has understood me well,—and even[pg 36] he misunderstood me entirely.' he might with reference to my cynic lady friend hipparchia also say: 'one man alone understood me well,—and she was a woman.'
"the fact is, shaw, the son of pooh-pooh, is simply a goody disciple of my school, of the cynics. when i was still within that mortal coil which men call skin and flesh, i did take all my sputterings and utterings very seriously, or as they say in cultured mayfair: 'oh grant serio.' i really thought, as undoubtedly thinks my brave disciple in london, that my criticism of social, political, or religious things went deep into the essence of all that maintains society, the state, and the temples. good old plato, it is true, hinted at my vanity and conceit more than once, and i still feel the sting of his remark when once, soaked all through by the rain, i was surrounded by pitying folk: 'if you want to feel pity for diogenes,' plato said, 'then leave him alone.'
"but i then did not heed any satire directed against me, being fully occupied with satirising others all day long. however, since that time, and since i have been given a corner in the palace of the immortals, lying on one of the steps like a dog, as that italian dauber, whom they call raphael, painted me in his 'school of athens' (—a fresco which might be much better had raphael wisely chosen his age and appeared as a pr?-raphaelite—); ever since i have learnt a great deal, not only about others, but also about myself.
"while you superior people drink nectar and partake of ambrosia, i enjoy with infinite zest the malicious pleasure of studying the capers, antics, and poses[pg 37] of my posthumous selfs, the diogeneses of that speck on the mirror of eternity which the little ones below call 'our time.' could anything be more amusing to a cynic of about twenty-two centuries' standing like myself, who has heard and taught all the most nerve-rasping eccentricities imaginable, than to hear tolstoy, shaw, ibsen, and tutti quanti, teach with thunderous ponderosity, and with penurious fulguration their doctrines as the latest and hitherto unheard-of delivery of the human or inhuman mind? i beg to assure you it is excruciatingly funny. but i feel i must tell you the whole story in due order. it happened thus.
"i learnt from momus that another posthumous self of mine had arisen and, accordingly, i forthwith repaired to the place called london. (by the way, it is a queer place. it is neither a village, nor a town; neither a country, nor a desert; it is something of all, and much of neither.) in one of the streets i saw an inscription over a door—'agency for amusements, theatres, blue bands, green bands, etc.' i did not quite understand what blue bands had to do with amusement, but i entered.
"behind the counter was a middle-aged man working busily at papers. i addressed him: 'be cheerful!'
"he looked at me in a curious fashion, evidently doubting the sanity of my mind. as a matter of fact, after a little while i could not help seeing that he was right. how could i imagine him to be cheerful?
"i asked him for the means of seeing a theatrical piece by shaw. he offered a ticket, and wanted to know my name. i said 'diogenes.'
[pg 38]
"he became impatient, and said: 'diogenes—which? i mean, your family name?'
"'i have no other name,' i said; 'don't you know, i am diogenes who cut alexander the great?'
"'alexander the great?' he said—'why, i only know of a tailor, called alexander the great. do you mean to tell me you cut him?'
"'no,' i said; 'i do not. i mean alexander, king of macedon.'
"whereupon he contemptuously said: 'i never heard of the gentleman, and if he was a king of macedon he has made a jolly fine mess of his country—just read about the macedonian question in to-day's daily telegraph.' i wanted to ask him whether he was perchance professor of history, but other people came in, and so i left.
"on the same evening i was shown the way to a theatre, and i understood that the piece given was arms and the man. i enjoyed myself immensely.
"it is all very well to share the pleasures of olympus with the gods. yet, by all the graces, whenever i hear or read reminiscences of my early youth, those unforgettable events and ideas of the time when i walked in the streets of athens in the wake of my revered master antisthenes, it gives me a thrill of pleasure,—i might almost say, a new shiver.
"just fancy, here i was sitting in far-off britannia,[pg 39] over two thousand years after my mortal existence, listening to an oration—of antisthenes, my master, which we used to call 'kyros.' i see very well, o ares, you remember the famous oration directed against you, against all the glories of war, because even now you frown on me, and i must ask venus to keep you in check. i have received too many a whipping while i was at athens and corinth—pray let me in peace here in our temporary olympus.
"at present, as you well know, i have quite changed my ideas about war, and much as i may have disliked you before, at present i know that apollo, venus, you ares, and dionysus keep all mortal things agoing. but let us amuse ourselves with the contemplation of an oration of antisthenes in modern britannic.
"antisthenes hated war so much that he attacked the greatest and least doubted military glory of the athenians, their victories over the persians. he attacked it with serious arguments, he sneered at it, he tried to reduce it to a mere sham. did antisthenes not say, that the victory of the athenians over the persians at salamis would have been something admirable, had the persians excelled the athenians in point of virtue and capability? for in that case the athenians would have proved even more virtuous and more capable. however, the persians, antisthenes elaborately proves, were altogether inferior. nor did they have a true king, xerxes being a mere sham king with a high and richly jewelled cap on his head, sitting on a golden throne, like a doll. had xerxes not to whip his soldiers into battle? what, then, is the glory of the athenians? none! salamis, like all battles,[pg 40] was a mere butchery, and soldiers are mere cowards, beating inferiors and running away from superiors. so far antisthenes.
"the britannic version of antisthenes' sally against war, soldiers, and the whole of the military spirit, i found comical in the extreme. 'well done' i repeatedly exclaimed within myself, when i saw the old capers of the cynics of my mortal time brought up again for the consumption of people who had never heard of cynics. that man shaw out-cynics many a cynic. he brings upon the stage a number of persons, each of whom is, in turn, a good soul first, and then a viper; an enthusiast, and then a liar; a virtue, and then vice itself.
"take the girl raina. she begins by being ideal and enthusiastic; ideal, because she is pure, young, and in love with her own fiancé; enthusiastic, because she is in raptures over the military glory of her fiancé, as would be in all truth and reality a hundred out of each hundred girls in most countries of the sub-shavian world. not the slightest inkling or fact is indicated that she is not pure, ideal, or genuinely enthusiastic. in the next scene she is suddenly made out to be a vicious girl, a coldly calculating minx, and we are given to understand that she has had no end of general and particular adventures behind her, as she hopes to have a good many in front of her.
"why? why are we now to assume or believe that raina of yesterday is not raina of to-day? where is the motive, i asked myself with grim satisfaction with the brave cynicism of the author. why? simply, for nothing. the comedy as such does not require it; no fact alleged to have happened,[pg 41] substantiates it; no situation growing out of the piece makes it a dramatic necessity. it is done simply and exclusively, in true cynic fashion, for the sake of ridiculing a person that began by being enthusiastic for war.
"it is the old story of the ugly sorceress in the child's book of fables. 'if you praise the beauty of yonder little girl in the garden, i will transform you into a guinea-pig; and if you still continue doing so, i will make an old cock of you.' even so raina is changed into a viper, a liar, a dissimulator, a senseless changer of lovers, an—anything, without the slightest inner coherence, or what the philosophers call, psychological connection.
"the same old witch's wand is used, with the freedom of a clown, with regard to the fiancé of raina, the young military hero. he had by a bold cavalry charge captured a battery or two of the enemy's artillery. how can he be forgiven such an execrable deed? how dare he succeed? out with the old sauce of antisthenes! it is, of course, exceedingly stale by this time. but the english, it appears, are so thoroughly used to stale sauces. they will not notice it at all. and thus all the threadbare arguments of antisthenes are dished up again. i jubilated in my pride.
"the fiancé, sergius, took the batteries of cannon because, we are told, by a mistake of their commander, they were—not charged. how witty! how clever! antisthenes merely said that the persians were much inferior to the athenians, so the latter easily got the better of the former. but this twentieth-century dapper little cynic goes one better. he says, as it were, the persians had no[pg 42] weapons to strike with. who would have thought of such an ingenious satire?
"please, hermes (mercury), do not interrupt me! i know very well what you mean to say. in all actions of men, victory depends more on the shortcomings of their rivals and competitors than on their own genius. it is no special feature of military victories. of two grocers in the same street, one succeeds mainly because the other is neglectful and unbusinesslike. of two dramatists in the same country, one succeeds because he gives the people what they want, and not, as does the other, what dramatic art wants. and so forth ad infinitum.
"but my cynical shavian does not heed these inconsistencies; he knows the public will not notice them. he wants simply to ridicule war, and the whole military spirit. accordingly out with the witch's wand, and let us change the hero first into a whimpering calf, and then suddenly into a lewd he-goat, and then, for no reason whatever, into the most mendacious magpie flying about, and finally into a little mouse caught in a trap laid by a kitchen-maid. for this is precisely what happens to the hero sergius.
"returning from war, he is sick of it with a nauseating sea-sickness. why? unknown; or, as herbert spencer, the next best replica of antisthenes in britannia, would have said, unknowable.
"sergius is sentimentally idiotic about the nullity of his military glory. a few moments later he cannot resist the rustic beauties of a kitchen-maid, one minute after he had disentangled himself out of the embraces of his beautiful, young, and worshipped[pg 43] fiancé. the he-goat is upon him. why? unknown, unknowable.
"here in our fourth dimension we know very well (do we not, ares?) that soldiers have done similar escapades? but have barristers done less? have all solicitors proved bosom-proof? has no dramatist ever been sorely tempted by buxomness and vigorous development of youthful flesh? one wonders.
"why then bring up such stuff, without the slightest reason, without the slightest need, internal or external? but the soldier, do you not see, must be run down. he must be ridiculed. it must be shown that he is only a cowardly mouse caught in the trap laid for him by that very kitchen-maid whom at first he treats merely as a well-ordered mass of tempting flesh, and whom in the end he—marries.
"this trait is delicious. i have frequently been in mysia, or what these people now call bulgaria, where shaw's scene is laid. the idea of a bulgarian gentleman of the highest standing marrying a kitchen-maid gave me a fit of laughter. in eccentric england a high-born gentleman may very well marry a barmaid. in bulgaria a nobleman will no more marry a servant-girl than his own mother. he has known too many of them; he can study her carefully, encyclop?dically, without marrying her in the least. for, she will never love him.
"of course, my acolyte full well knows that the english are not at all conversant with any nation south of dover straits, and that one may tell them anything one pleases about nations other than themselves, they will believe it. and so sergius[pg 44] marries the girl by the same necessity that a mouse may be said to have married the trap into which it drops.
"is not this fun indeed? to call marrying what simple people call getting morally insane? how clever! how bright!
"this is precisely what we cynics used to do in ancient greece. we turned humanity inside out, and then i walked in day-time in the streets with a lamp in my hand in search of a normal man, of a human being. if you vitriole a person's face or character first, how can you expect him to have unscathed features? but that is precisely the point with us cynics. we take human nature; we then vitriole it out of all shape, and afterwards cry out in sheer indignation, 'how awful!' 'how absurd!' this reminds me of my lawyer pupil who once, in the defence of a fellow who had murdered his parents, pathetically exclaimed to the jury: 'and finally, gentlemen, have pity on this poor, orphaned boy!'
"not content with sergius, another 'type' of soldier is dragged up to the stage; a swiss. now i do not here mean to repeat our old greek jokes about people similar to the swiss, such as the paphlagonians or cilicians. i will only remark that the french, who have for over four hundred years had intimate knowledge of the swiss, put the whole of swiss character into the famous mot: 'which animal resembles a human being most?' answer: 'a swiss.'
"from a swiss you may expect anything. he talks three languages; all in vile german. he is to his beautiful country like a wart on a perfect face.[pg 45] in the midst of paradise he is worse than a prussian yokel born in the dreary heaths of north germany. he is a swiss. he has been a mercenary soldier to popes and lutheran princes alike. his aim was money; is money; will always be nothing but money. he sells his blood as he does the milk of his cows, by the litre or the decilitre; preferably by the latter. he likes war well enough; but he prefers truces and cessation of arms. he thinks the best part of death is the avoidance thereof. he is, when a mercenary, a military cynic.
"i like him dearly; he does me honour. whenever i see him on the grand staircase in the vatican, i grin 'way down in my heart. here is a cynic dressed up like a parrot in gorgeous plumage. diogenes in rococo-dress! it is intensely amusing.
"now this swiss is made by shaw a 'type' of a soldier. this is quite in accordance with the procedure of the cynical school. first, all real soldierly qualities are vitrioled out of the man by making him a swiss mercenary; and then he is shown up in all his callous indifference to right, love, or justice; which is tantamount to saying 'a distinguished belgian lady patrolling piccadilly after midnight.' that swiss mercenary proves no more against the worth of soldiers, than that belgian woman proves anything in disgrace of the women of belgium. if shaw's figure proves anything, it proves the worthlessness of mercenaries in general, and of swiss mercenaries in particular. that is, it proves something quite different from what it means to prove. this too is arch-cynical. why, who knows it better than i, that we cynics were not infrequently instrumental in bringing about the very reverse of what[pg 46] we were aiming at? but the more perverse, the better the fun.
"and the fun is excellent beyond words. it is, in fact, as grim as the grimmest welshman. on my way home from the theatre i thought of it, and started laughing in the street with such violence that a policeman wanted to take me to the station. the grimness of the fun was this: inquiring about the author, i learnt that he was an irishman. i had no sooner made sure of the truth of this statement than i could not control myself for laughter.
"an irishman reviling war, and soldiers, and the military spirit! how unutterably grim,—how unspeakably grimy! the irish, endowed by nature with gifts of the body as well as the mind incomparably superior to those of the english, have made the most atrocious failure of their history, of their possibilities, of their chances, for that one and only reason, that they never found means of character and endurance to fight for their rights and hopes in bitter and unrelenting wars. not having made a single effort in any way comparable to the sustained armed resistance of the scotch, the dutch, the hungarians, or the boers, in the course of over three hundred years, they have fallen under the yoke of a nation whom they detest. this naturally demoralised them, as it demoralises a mere husband when he is yoked to a hated wife. being demoralised, they have never, oh never, reached that balance of internal powers without which nothing great can be achieved. the english with lesser powers, being undemoralised, got their powers into far greater balance. so did the scot through sustained, reckless fighting for their ideals. hence the misery of the irish, who are[pg 47] like their fairies, enchanting, but fatal to themselves and to others; unbalanced, unsteady in mind and resolution to a sickening degree; fickle, and resembling altogether sweet kisses from one's lady-love intermingled with knocks in the face from one's vilest creditors.
"their recoiling from making resolute war on the enemy being the great cause of the failure of the irish, what can be more grimly cynical than an irishman's indignation at all that appertains to war? we cynics always do that. moderation having been the soul of all things hellenic, we cynics told the greeks that the one fatal excess that man can commit is moderation. of music we taught that its only beauties are in the pauses; and of man we held that he is perfect only by making himself into a beast.
"we taught people to contemplate everything in a convex mirror and then to fall foul of the image so distorted. this the idlers and the mob greatly admire. they deem it marvellous originality. and what can be nearer to the origin of new things than to take man and nature always in the last agonising stage of final decomposition?
"in my own dramas i did all that with a vengeance; so did crates, my revered colleague. what was a plot to us? what does a plot matter? the other day when i sauntered through the champs elysées of paris, i overheard a conversation between little girls playing at ladies. by antisthenes, that was the real model of the plot and dialogue of all cynic dramas!
"said one little girl to the other: 'how are you, madame?'
"'thanks,' said the other, 'very well. i am watching my children.'
[pg 48]
"'how many have you?'
"'seventy-five, please.'
"'and how old are you?'
"'twenty years, madame.'
"'and how is your husband?'
"'y pensez-vous? my husband? fancy that! why, i have none!'
"this is precisely the plot and dialogue in shaw's candida.
"i enjoyed candida so intensely; i could have kissed the author. how entirely like my own dramas! how closely modelled on the dialogue of the little girls!
"a husband of forty, vigorous, brave, honest, hard-working in a noble cause, loving and loved, father of two children, befriends a boy of eighteen, who is as wayward and conceited and inconsistent as only boys of eighteen can be. that boy suddenly tells the husband that he, the boy, loved candida, the wife of the said husband. the boy, not satisfied with this amenity, becomes intolerably impudent, and the husband, acting on his immediate and just sentiment, wants to throw him out of the house.
"but this is too much of what ninety-nine out of a hundred husbands would do. so instead of kicking the impertinent lad into the street, the husband—invites him to lunch.
"i was so afraid the husband would in the end bundle the youth out of the room. to my intense[pg 49] delight the author did not forget the rules of the cynic drama, and the boy remained for lunch.
"bravo! bravo! i secretly hoped the husband would solemnly charge the interesting youth to fit candida with the latest corset. to my amazement that did not take place. but yet there was some relief for me in store: the husband invites the boy to pass the evening with his wife alone.
"this is, of course, precisely what most husbands would do.
"this is what another disciple of mine in paris (a man called anatole, and misnamed france), did do in an even worse case. in anatole's story, the husband arrives in the most inopportune moment that a forgetful wife can dread. he looks at the scene with much self-control, takes up the petit parisien lying on the floor, and withdraws gracefully into another room, there to make sundry reflections on the petit parisien and on the 'petite parisienne.'
"how classically cynical! how bion, metrocles, menippus, and all the rest of our sect would have enjoyed that! here is a true comedy! here is something truly realistic, and realistically true. that's why anatole is so much admired by englishmen. he too is, as we cynics have been called, a philosopher of the proletariate.
"much, o zeus, as i enjoy the honour and pleasure of being allowed to crouch on one of the steps of your divine halls, i do also keenly appreciate the pleasure of meeting my disciples of the hour. one of these next days i will ask momus to invite tolstoy, ibsen, shaw, anatole, and a few others to a lunch, to meet me in a swiss hotel. plato, you better come and listen behind a screen. you might[pg 50] perhaps improve upon your gorgias in which dialogue you attempt to sketch the superman and super-cynic. ibsen will stammer and jerk his best in deathly hatred of all authority. shaw will pinprick to death the foundations of marriage and family. anatole will try to upset, by throwing little mud-pellets at them, ideal figures such as joan of arc" (—diogenes had barely uttered this name, when zeus and all the other gods rose from their seats, and bowed towards pallas athene, who held joan in her holy arms—). "tolstoy, with a penny trumpet in his toothless mouth, will bray against war; oh, it will be glorious.
"of course, by this time i know very well that the controlling principle of all mundane and supramundane things is authority. as we here all bow to zeus, so mortals must always bow to some authority. nothing more evident can be imagined nor shown. it is the broadest result of all history, of all experience. just because this is so, and unmistakably so, my disciples must naturally say the reverse. they do not look at facts by a microscope or a telescope; they telescope train-loads of facts into a mass of pulverised debris.
"instead of saying that in england, through her social caste system, there are many, too many, parvenus or tactless upstarts, my disciples must say: 'the greatness of england is owing to her tactlessness.' this is the real merchandise which i sold at corinth over two thousand years ago.
"tolstoy thunders against war. i wonder he does not thunder against mothers' breasts feeding their babies. why, war made everything that is worth having. first of all, it made peace. with[pg 51]out war there is no peace; there is only stagnation. the greater the ideal, the greater the price we have to pay for it. and since we always crave for the sublime ideals of liberty, honour, wealth, power, beauty, and knowledge, we must necessarily pay the highest price for it—ourselves, our lives in war. there is no dante without the terrible wars of the guelfs and the ghibellines. there could have been no ideal superman like raphael without the counter-superman called cesare borgia. it is only your abominable philistine who squeaks: 'oh, we might have many a nice slice from the ham of ideals without paying too dearly for it.' what do you think of that, hercules? did you win hebe by avoiding conflicts and disasters?"
hercules groaned deeply and looked first at his battered club and then at charming hebe. the gods laughed aloud and apollo, taking up his lyre, intoned a grand old doric song in praise of the heroes of war who, by their valour, had prepared the pal?stra for the heroes of thought and beauty. he was soon joined by a thousand harmonious voices from the temple of isis, and from his own majestic sanctuary at pompeii. vesuvius counterpointed the lithe song with his deep bass; and, with dionysus at the head of them, pan and the nymphs came wafting through the air, strewing buds of melodies on to the olympian wreaths of tones sung by ph?bus apollo in praise of war.
[pg 52]
when the song had subsided, zeus, in a voice full of serenity and benign music, addressed the gods and heroes as follows: "we are very much beholden to diogenes for his bright and amusing story of the cynical ants that at present run about the woods and cottages of men, biting each other and their friends. their epigrams and other eccentric utterances can affect none of us here assembled. you very well know that i have not allowed apollo, or reason to reign alone and unaided by unreason, or dionysus. the cynical critics of men want to bring about the age of reason, or as these presumptuous half-knowers call it, the age of science. this, i have long since laid down, shall never be.
"at the gate of the future, at delphi, apollo is associated with dionysus, and so it has been ever since i came to rule this universe. just as good music consists of tones and rhythms, and again of the cessation of all sound, or of measured pauses; even so my realm consists of reason, and of the cessation of all reason, or of unreason. the cynics who ignore the latter, misjudge the former. this, i take it, is perfectly clear to all of us.
"but while we here may laugh at the bites of the cynical ants below, we do not mean to state that in their occupation there is no point, no utility at all. these little ants may be, and undoubtedly are largely sterile mockers. yet even i have experienced it on myself that the effects of their doings are not always sterile."
and leaning back on his chryselephantine chair, zeus lowered his voice and said almost in a whisper: "see, friends, why do we meet here in lonely places, in a dead town, during the mysterious hours of[pg 53] night? you know very well who and what has prevailed upon me to choose this temporary darkening of our blissful life."
at this moment there came from the rushes near the sea a plaintive song accompanied by a flute, and a voice of a human sobbed out the cry: "pan, the great pan is dead!"
a sudden silence fell over the divine assembly. a cloud of deep sadness seemed to hover over all.
the three graces then betook themselves to dancing, and their beauteous movements and poses so exhilarated the assembly, that the former serenity was soon re-established.
zeus now turned to plato, calling upon him to give his opinion on the cynics. zeus reminded plato that hitherto the cynics had been treated by him merely incidentally, mostly by hidden allusions to antisthenes, or by witty remarks on diogenes. at present plato might help the gods to pass agreeably the rest of the beautiful night by telling them in connection and fulness what really the ultimate purport of these modern cynics, shavian or other is going to be. everybody turned his or her face towards plato, who rose from his seat, and bowing, with a smile, towards diogenes, thus addressed zeus and the assembly of gods and heroes at pompeii:
"it is quite true that in my writings i have not devoted any explicit discussion to the views and tenets of the cynics. they appeared to me at that[pg 54] time far too grotesque to be worth more than a passing consideration. of their dramas i had, and still have a very poor opinion. from what i hear from diogenes, the modern imitators of cynic dramatists are not a whit better. in addition to all their wearying eccentricities, they add the most unbearable eccentricity of all, to wit, that their dramas and comedies represent a new departure within dramatic literature.
"shaw's dramas are no more dramas than his swiss, in arms and the man, is a soldier; or his clergyman in candida a husband, or a man. his pieces are not dramatic in the least; they do not exhibit the most elementary qualities of a comedy. for, whatever the definition of a comedy may be, one central quality can never be missing in it: the persons presented must be types of human beings.
"shaw's persons are no humans whatever. they are homunculi concocted in a chemical laboratory of pseudo-science and false psychology. they crack, from time to time, brave jokes; so do clowns in a circus. that alone does not make a wax figure into a human.
"there may be very interesting comic scenes amongst bees, wasps, or beavers; but we cannot appreciate them. we can only appreciate human comicality, even when it is presented to us in the shape of dialogues between animals, as aristophanes, the fabulists, and so many other writers have done.
"who would care to sit through a comedy showing the comic aspects of life in a bedlam? if madmen have humour, as undoubtedly they have, we do not want to see it on a public stage. the fact that it is a madman's humour deprives it of all humour.
"hedda gabler can appeal to no sound taste.[pg 55] one never sees why she is so fearfully unhappy. if she is not in love with her husband, let her work in the house, in the kitchen, in the garden; let her try to be a mother; let her adopt a child if the gods deny her one of her own. let her do something. of course, idling all day long as she does, will in the end demoralise a poker; and far from wondering that she ends badly at the end of the last act, one only wonders that she did not do away with herself before the first scene of the first act. by doing so she would have done a great service to herself, her people, and to dramatic literature.
"of the same kind is raina, in arms and the man. she is a doll, but not a young girl. she has neither senses, nor sense. she is made of cardboard, and fit only to appear in a punch and judy show. she is, in common with most of the figures in the comedies of the modern cynics, a mere outline drawing of a human being from whose mouth hang various slips of paper on which the author conveniently writes his variorum jokes and bright sayings. all these so-called dramatic pieces will be brushed away by the broom of time, as happened to the dramas and travesties of our greek cynics. life eternal is given to things only through art, and in these writings of the cynics, old or modern ones, there is not the faintest trace either of one of the graces, or of one of the muses.
"having said this much about shaw's and the other modern cynics' alleged dramatic writings, i[pg 56] hasten to add, that when we come to consider the effect these so-called dramas have, and possibly will continue to have on the mind of the public, we are bound to speak in quite a different manner.
"i have had plenty of time, since the days of my academy at athens, to think out the vast difference between such works of the intellect as aim at nothing but truth and beauty, or what we might call alethology, on the one hand; and such works as aim at effect, or what may be generally termed as effectology.
"it is from this all-important point of view that i say that tolstoy, ibsen, shaw and the others are, effectologically, just as remarkable as they are alethologically without much significance.
"as to the latter; as to their hitting off great or new truths; as to their being philosophers; or to put it in my terms, as to their having any alethological value, diogenes has already spoken with sufficient clearness. just consider this one point.
"tolstoy, as well as shaw, wants to reform the abuses of civilisation. in order to do so they combat with all their might the most powerful purifier and reformer of men,—war. can anything be more ludicrous, and unscientific?
"who gave the modern germans that incomparable dash and élan, thanks to which they have in one generation quadrupled their commerce, doubled their population, quintupled their wealth, and ensured their supremacy on the continent?
"was it done by their thinkers and scholars? the greatest of these died before 1870.
"was it done by getting into possession of the[pg 57] mouth of the rhine, or of the access to the danish sounds, which formerly debarred them from the sea? they do not possess the mouth of the rhine, nor denmark to the present day.
"nothing has changed in the material or intellectual world making the germany of to-day more advantageous for commerce or power than it had been formerly.
"except the victorious wars of 1866 and of 1870.
"can such an evident connection of fact be overlooked? and would russia have introduced the duma without the battle of mukden? it is waste of time even for the immortals to press this point much longer.
"as in this case, so in nearly all the other cases, cynics revile abuses the sole remedies for which they violently combat. in their negative attacks they brandish the keenest edges of the swords, daggers and pins of logic; in their positive advices they browbeat every person in the household of logical thought.
"yet, worthless, or very nearly so, as they may be as teachers of truth, they are powerful as writers of pamphlets. for this is what their literature comes to. they do not write dramas, nor novels. they can do neither the one, nor the other. but they write effective pamphlets in the apparent form of dramas and novels.
"they are pamphleteers, and not men of letters.
"in that lies their undeniably great force. they instinctively choose as eccentric, as loud, and as striking forms and draperies of ideas as possible, so[pg 58] as to rouse the apathetic philistine to an interest in what they say. they are full of absurdities; but which of us here can now after centuries of experience venture to make light of the power of the absurd?
"error and absurdity are so powerful, so necessary, so inevitable, that protagoras was perhaps not quite wrong in saying that truth herself is only a particular species of error.
"once, many years ago, i despised the cynics, and my own master socrates made light of them. but at present i think differently. when socrates said, with subtle sarcasm, to antisthenes: 'i see your vanity peeping out through the holes of your shabby garment,' antisthenes might have retorted to him: 'and i, o socrates, see through these very holes how short-sighted you are.'
"for have we not lived to see that while all revere socrates in words, they follow the pupils of antisthenes in deeds? the cynics, fathered by antisthenes, begot the stoics; and the stoics were the main ferment in the rise and spread of christianity. many of the sayings and teachings and doings of the cynics, which we at athens made most fun of, have long since become the sinews and fibres of christian ideas and institutions. there is greater similarity and mental propinquity between antisthenes or diogenes and st paul, than between socrates and st augustine of hippo.
"i pray thee, o zeus, to let us for a moment see this town of pompeii as it was a day before its destruction, with all its life in the streets and the forum, so as to give us an ocular proof of the truth of what i just now said about the cynics and eccen[pg 59]trics of antiquity, and what i am going to apply to the modern cynics, literary or other."
thereupon zeus, by a wave of his hand, placed the whole assembly in the shadow as if encircled by a vast mantle of darkness, and shed a strange and supramundane light on the town of pompeii, which grew up at sight from the ground, putting on life and movement and beauty on all its houses, narrow streets, gardens, and squares. the ancient population filled, in ceaseless movement, every part of the charming city. richly dressed ladies, carried in sedan-chairs by black slaves; patricians in spotless togas, followed by crowds of clients; magistrates preceded by lictors; soldiers recruited from all nations; tradesmen from every part of the roman empire; all these and innumerable others, visitors from the neighbouring cities, thronged the streets, and the whole population seemed to breathe nothing but joy and a sense of exuberant life.
in one of the squares there was a hilarious crowd listening, with loud derision and ironical applause, to a haggard, miserably clad, old man who, addressing them in ionian greek, with the strong guttural accent of the asiatics, stood on one of the high jumping-stones of the pavement, and spoke with fanatic fervour of the nameless sinfulness of the people of pompeii. with him were two or three other persons of the same description, joining him from time to time in his imprecations against the "doomed town."
[pg 60]
the old man told them that their whole life was rotten through and through, a permanent lie, a contradiction to itself, a sure way to damnation. he thundered against the soldiers jeering at him in the crowd, calling them cowards, butchers, wretches, and the sinners of all sinners. he sneered at one of the priests of isis present in the crowd, telling the people that there was only one true belief, and no other.
the more the old man talked, the more the crowd laughed at him; and when a greek philosopher, who happened to be there, interpellated and elegantly refuted the old man in a manner approved by the rules of the prevalent school of rhetoric and dialectics, the crowd cheered the philosopher, and the more accomplished amongst the bystanders said to one another: "this old man is a mere charlatan, or an impostor; it's waste of time to take him seriously."
one man alone, in the whole crowd, a shy and retiring disciple of apollonius of tyana, waited until the crowd had dispersed, and then walking up to the old man, asked him what sect of cynics he belonged to.
the old man said: "i am no cynic; i am a christian."
thereupon the disciple of apollonius took the old man's hand, pressed it with emotion, kissed him, and turning away from him, walked off, plunged in deep thought.
a minute later the supramundane light over pompeii disappeared, and the assembly of the gods and heroes was again in the mild rays of selene.
[pg 61]
"can anyone here," continued plato, "deny that that crowd together with the philosopher was quite mistaken in their appreciation of the eccentric old man, and that the silent pupil of apollonius alone was right?
"cynics and eccentrics have at all times been the forerunners of vast popular movements. the flagellants, the beguins and lollards, and countless other cynics in the latter half of the middle ages preceded the reformation.
"and was not the french revolution, or the vastest effort at realising ideals ever made by the little ones down here, preceded by a cynic and his pamphlets, by jean jacques rousseau?
"no greek town would have endured within its walls a youth so completely shattered in all his moral build, as was rousseau. he was thoroughly and hopelessly demoralised in character, décousu and eccentric in thought, and badly tutored in point of knowledge. the clever woman that was his protectress, mistress, and guide, and who displayed a marvellous capacity for devising jobs and an inexhaustible resourcefulness in turning things and persons to practical use, could yet never discover any usefulness in jean jacques.
"he wrote, later on, novels, political treatises, botanical ones, musical ones. in truth he never wrote a novel; he wrote nothing but pamphlets; stirring, wild, eccentric, enchanting pamphlets. he was not, like beaumarchais, a pamphleteer and yet a writer of a real, and immortal comedy, itself a political pamphlet. rousseau was a writing stump-orator doing anticipative yeoman's work for the revolution.
"so are all the cynics. so are ibsen, tolstoy; so[pg 62] is shaw. their dramas may be, say are no dramas at all; their novels may be, say are no novels at all; their serious treatises are neither serious nor treatises; and yet they are, and always will be great effectological centres. they attack the whole fabric of the extant civilisation; by this one move they rally round them both the silent and the loud enemies of what is, and the eager friends of what ought to be. of these malcontents there always is a great number; especially in times of prolonged peace.
"a war, a real, good national war would immediately sweep away all these social malcontents.
"that's why the leaders of the cynics, and more especially tolstoy and shaw, hate war. it is their mar-feast, their kill-joy; their microbes do not prosper in times of war.
"without the fatal and all but universal peace of the period from 50 a.d. to 190 a.d., christianity could never have made any headway in the roman empire; just as we got rid of our cynics by the second athenian empire and its great wars.
"this, then, is in my opinion the true perspective of our modern cynics. as literature or truth, they exhibit little of value, except that shaw appears to me (—if a greek may be allowed to pass judgment on such a matter—) to be the only one amongst living writers in england who has real literary splendour in his style. as men, however, exercising an effect on a possible social revolution, these writers are of the utmost importance.
"or to repeat it in my terms: alethologically nil or nearly so, effectologically very important or interesting; this is the true perspective of writers like tolstoy, shaw, and other modern cynics.
[pg 63]
"their influence is not on thought, nor on art, but on action.
"they may eventually, if mars will continue trifling with wood-nymphs and other well-intended cordials, become a great power. they may beget neo-stoics, who may beget neo-christians. they themselves may then appear only as the tiny drum-pages running in front or beside the real fighters in battle. yet their importance will be little impaired thereby.
"the church fathers have frequently endeavoured to honour me with the name of one of the lay protagonists of christianity. but i know much better than that. the true protagonists were antisthenes or diogenes; and that is why the roman catholic church has at no time countenanced me. and just as we now do not mind the jokes, burlesques and boutades of diogenes any more, admitting freely, as we do, that behind them was the aurora borealis of a new creed, a new movement, a new world; even so we must not mind the grotesque boutades of tolstoy, ibsen, shaw, anatole, and other modern cynics, for behind them is the magnetic fulguration of new electric currents in the social world.
"this, the public indistinctly feel; that's why they continue to read and criticise or revile these men. the public feels that while there may not be much in what these men yield for the present, the future, possibly, is theirs.
"the little ones below do not as yet know, that there is no future; nor that all that is or can be, has long been. therefore they do not turn to us who might point out to them what things are[pg 64] driving at; but they want the oldest things in ever new forms.
"we, however, know that plus cela change, plus c'est la même chose, as one of the modern athenians in paris has put it.
"do not frown on me, heraclitus; i well know that you hold the very reverse, and that you would say: 'plus c'est la même chose, plus cela change.'
"i have gladly accepted that in my earthly time when i made a sharp distinction between phenomena and super-phenomena, or noumena. but i do no longer make such a distinction.
"we are above time. we hellenes are alive to-day as we were over two thousand years ago. we still think aloud or on papyrus the most beautiful and the truest thoughts of men. have we not but quite lately sent down for one of us to while amongst us for ever? he too began as a cynic. but having learnt the inanity of the so-called 'future,' he rose above time and space, and soared on the wings of eagle concepts to the heights where we welcome him. he has just entered the near port in a boat rowed by the nymphs of circe. we cannot close our meeting in a more condign fashion than by asking hebe to offer him the goblet of welcome."
the eyes of all present turned to the shore, where a man of middle age, who had evidently regained his former vigour, walked up to the steps of the amphitheatre. when he came quite near to the assembly, diogenes exclaimed: "hail to thee, frederick nietzsche!"