Part 14

But it is not only in the phases of individual character and the experiences of personal life that the validity of the Aristotelian standard of well-being is strongly asserted. In every sphere of existence through the various drama of the cosmos, we find the same principle in operation. And we may, without qualification, broadly pronounce that the world is a κόσμος, an ordered and garnished whole, only in so far as it is held together by the harmonizing law of the mean; otherwise it jerks asunder, and through violent excess bolts into chaos. Take what we call Health, for instance; what is it but the rhythmical medium, of normal pulse between the excess of fever and the defect of feebleness? which two extremes, as the common saying is, necessarily meet; for they are both equally removed from healthy life, and sisters-uterine to death and dissolution. Then, again, what is Beauty? A power which all feel, but few can define; neither shall I attempt to define it now. But one thing at least in reference to it is quite plain, that it is always a medium {165} betwixt two extremes, or, what comes to the same thing, a marriage of extremes. For by such a marriage, as we see in the commonest processes of chemical action, a mean product is produced of a comparatively mild and innocuous character. The corrosive acid or alkali is annihilated and a neutral salt comes to view. Exactly so in works of nature or art on which the imagination can pleasantly dwell. No extreme is beautiful. The extreme of force overwhelms; the extreme of gentleness enfeebles and enervates. Therefore, to make a handsome man, we must borrow a few tricks of grace from the female; and to make a woman who shall be more than an animated rose or primrose, we must find her infected with a certain dose of firmness and energy from the male. A mere masculine creature, composed altogether of the extreme of strength and force, is disagreeable, and often unbearable; a mere feminine creature in the extreme of delicacy, however finely tinted with the “_dolce mistura di rosa e di ligustro_,” which Ariosto lauds, if she is capable only of a gentle smile and a soft caress, very soon becomes tiresome. She is the extreme of the mere woman, and, like a cooing turtle-dove, soon satiates; and at the apparition of such an unfeathered pigeon we yawn, as from the fully-developed unmitigated male bear we shrink. But it is in the great movements of the social world--in the rise and fall of stock and commercial speculations--no less than in the slow changes and violent revolutions of Churches and States, that the operation of the Aristotelian mean is most strikingly exemplified. Moderation, indeed, both in Church and State, and on ’Change, is the one great condition of safety--no proposition {166} in Euclid is more certain than this: but though this be the wisdom of government and of trade, it is a wisdom which political, commercial, and ecclesiastical adventurers in all ages have been slow to learn; and in public life we constantly meet with persons who act and speak as if they believed that the triumph of an extreme view is ever the triumph of right, and that the well-being of communities consists in the unlimited sway of one party and the complete annihilation of all others. And it may be said also, that, notwithstanding all the warnings of centuries of bloody experience, the man or the party that takes the strong one-sided violent view has, on critical occasions, the best chance to succeed. Wisdom in the days of Solomon lifted up her voice in the streets, and was not heard. It is even so now. The streets are not the place for wisdom. Wisdom requires calm reflection; but the streets are full of hurry and bustle. Aristotle had a serene contempt for the multitude, and the multitude have an instinctive aversion to Aristotle. When you bring a multitude of men together to be harangued, violent and extreme opinions pronounced in the strongest language are apt to be the most popular. A one-sided view taxes thought less; a one-sided speech flatters an ignorant audience, who are capable only of one idea--at least only of one at a time--and who delight to hug themselves in the fancy that there is no other idea in the universe. And the natural leader of a multitude so affected is not, of course, your man of many thoughts, your Aristotle, your Shakespeare, your Goethe, but your well-packed, self-contained, little man, full of bottled fire impatient to burst forth, who marches from his cradle to his grave capable only {167} of one aspect of things, and who, if the notion by which he is governed happens to jump with the humour of the time, shall become the demagogue of the hour, or, if circumstances favour, the dictator of the age. When, indeed, we consider the undeniable fact that great social changes are generally effected through the agency of excited multitudes and highly stimulated parties, we shall not be surprised at the result so often exhibited in history. That result shows bloody civil wars instead of peaceful arrangement; faction instead of patriotism; and an oscillation between feverish extremes, instead of a well-calculated balance of social forces. The revolutions and reforms which fill the most interesting pages of history teem with examples of this kind. These revolutions and reforms are of two kinds--remedial and constructive, or disintegrating and destructive; and the history of both equally illustrates the hopelessness--perhaps it were more correct to say the impossibility--of expecting wisdom and moderation to perform a prominent part in the management of the congregated millions of diverse and hostile-minded men under the passionate influences that accompany organic change. For these things are generally done in the manner of a battle: parties get heated; the blood is up; first ink is shed in oceans, then gall, then blood; and who expects moderation from men with partisan pens or poignards in their hands, and carrying on a systematic trade in all sorts of misrepresentation, slander, and lies? We read sometimes, indeed, of a whole people having by a happy accident found out their wisest man--as in the notable example of SOLON--and oligarchs and democrats voluntarily submitting themselves to {168} him as a just and legal arbiter. The result in this case, as we read, was what might have been expected. The wise man produced a wise constitution. The contending claims of the adverse parties were adjusted with moderation; and a mingled polity, presenting a just medium between oligarchy, the cold selfishness of the few, and democracy, the overbearing insolence of the many, was the result. But nothing human is permanent; and the next changes did not proceed so comfortably. The democracy, inflated with their military successes at Marathon and Salamis, would tolerate no check; their Areopagus, or House of Lords, was shorn of all influence; the extravagant ambition of their popular assemblies was fooled to the top of its bent by the unprincipled brilliancy of adventurers like Alcibiades; the constant necessity of maintaining political influence by flinging sops to a greedy multitude produced, as we see in America at the present hour, a corruption of public morals, and a deterioration of the character of public men, against which all patriotic remonstrances were weak: faction assumed the helm; venality became law; and at the moment of danger, when the young Macedonian snake might yet have been crushed, there was found only one honest man among the noisy haranguers of the Pnyx. And to him they listened only when it was too late. Thus, by the excess of democratic polity fostered by Pericles, the insolence of democratic ambition spurred by Alcibiades, the languor that followed the over-exertion of the Peloponnesian War, and the corruption that belongs to every extreme form of government, Athens forfeited her short lease of brilliant liberty, and became a slave for more than two thousand years. A similar scene {169} was exhibited in the Roman Forum, which, however, I must refrain from painting out in detail here. Suffice it to say that, so long as a moderate balance between patricians and plebeians was maintained, the Aristocratic Republic of Rome prospered at home and conquered abroad; but no sooner had the democracy, by the Hortensian law of B.C. 286, asserted the right of acting alone in legislative measures, without the co-operation of the Roman House of Lords (that is, the Senate), than the seed of destruction was sown. The two parties were now planted face to face on independent ground; two masters in the same house claimed equal power; the peaceful balance became a battle-field; assassinations in the Forum were the harbingers of butcheries in protracted dramas of civil slaughter; violence was followed by exhaustion; and on the bloody steps of a democratic Tribunate the armed nursling of the democracy mounted the throne of universal despotism. So the public life of Ancient Rome ended with faction and a native military monarchy, as that, of Greece in faction and subjection to a foreign power. There are some people of a happy innocence of mind who believe that we in modern times, by the help of Christianity and schoolmasters, may haply escape all these evils and flourish in a green immortality on the earth, if not under present circumstances exactly, at least by and by with the help of manhood suffrage, ballot-boxes, unbearded politicians, and a few other democratic imaginations. I am sorry to say that I do not in the least share in these anticipations: only under one condition is it possible that modern States should escape the disintegrating process which annihilated the constitutions of Ancient Greece and {170} Rome--they must study moderation; they must be converted to the doctrine of Aristotle; otherwise they must perish. That in free constitutions public affairs should be managed by the oscillations of opposing parties is necessary and natural: the annihilation of parties is possible only with the prostration of liberty; but the eternal truth still remains, that if parties will not acknowledge certain wise limitations, but push their hostility to extremes, the preservation of national liberty is impossible. If, when organic reforms are necessary, the wise and moderate men of all parties will unite together to make such changes as will satisfy the just demands of new claimants, without destroying the equally just rights of the old, then, so far as political forces of corruption are concerned, the durability of a constitution may be looked upon as secured; but if the parties, instead of working for a patriotic purpose, are more concerned for the momentary success of a parliamentary manœuvre than for the ultimate triumph of a great principle--if, instead of wisely and courageously confronting a violent and unreasonable clamour and quashing outrageous folly with statesmanlike firmness, they waver, and flinch, and yield, and even condescend to the base game (practised in ancient Rome and mediæval Florence) of outbidding one another in cowardly concessions to an untempered multitude--in this case, neither Christianity nor schoolmasters can save any modern State from perdition, either on this or on the other side of the Atlantic. For there is not one law of morality for the individual and another for public men, but they are both the same; and it is not so much the form of government as the tone of political morality, {171} and the character of politicians, that saves or ruins a State. If in any country the management of public affairs falls into the hands of men who make a trade of politics, and employ an organized machinery of violence, and lies, and intrigue, for the purpose of getting into power; and if they consider power valuable, not for the purpose of moderating popular passions and exposing popular delusions, but for keeping their party in place by spreading full sails to the popular breeze, then that country is already in the hands of the destroying Siva, and no constitution can save it. Political wisdom is not to be expected from men who enter the game of public life with the recklessness of professional gamblers; and that army will scarcely be looked to for noble achievements in the field which, with Selfishness for its god, has chosen Cunning for its captain, and planted Cowardice for a guard.

In these last remarks we have wandered beyond the strict bounds of the present essay into the domain of Politics, and the Art of Government, but not without design; for the _Politics_ and the _Ethics_ are with the Stagirite only two parts of the same work; as indeed with the Greeks generally, personal ethics were always conceived of in connexion with the State, in the same way that with thorough and consistent Christians the fruits of social virtue cannot be divorced from the root of theological faith of which they are the consummation. And whoever studies the great treatise on the Art of Government with that care, which more than any other work of antiquity its weighty conclusions demand, will not fail to observe that the key-note to the whole political system lies in that μεσότης, or just mean, {172} which is the prominent principle of the _Ethics_. But this by the way. What remains for us now, in order that the modern thinker may have a full view of the attitude of Aristotle as a moral philosopher, is that we exhibit him discoursing in his own person on some one of those types of social character, which in his third and fourth books he has so skilfully analysed. For this purpose we shall choose the section on μεγαλοψυχία or _great-mindedness_, a chapter eminently characteristic both of the writer and of the people to whom he belonged, and presenting also, one of the most striking of those contrasts between the attitude of Hellenic and that of Christian ethics, which it is one object of the present volume to set forth. The Chapter is the third of Book IV.

“That great-mindedness has reference to something great is plain from the name; let us inquire therefore, in the first place, to what great things it refers; and here it is of no consequence whether we talk formally of the moral habitude itself, or of the person who possesses that habitude. Now, a great-minded person is one who esteems himself worthy of great things, being in fact so worthy; for the man who claims for himself what he does not deserve is a fool; but in virtue there can be nothing foolish or unintelligent. This therefore is the great-minded man. For though a person’s estimate of himself should be just, for example, if, being worthy of little consideration, he esteems himself accordingly, such an one we call sober-minded, but not great-minded; for without a certain magnitude there is no greatness of soul, just as beauty demands a certain stature, and little people may indeed be pretty and well-proportioned, but they {173} are never called beautiful.[173.1] On the other hand, the man who esteems himself worthy of great things, being not so worthy, we call pretentious and conceited; though not every one who over-estimates in some degree his real worth is justly charged with conceit. And in the opposite extreme to this, the man who claims less than he deserves is small or mean-minded, whether his real desert be something great or something moderate; and he remains small-minded also, if, while he is worthy of little, he rates himself at less. But the greatest offender in this case is he who, being worthy of great things, nevertheless considers himself worthy of little or of nothing; for how deep might such a man’s self-esteem have fallen if he had been really as devoid of moral desert as even with so much real merit he rates himself? Now the great-minded man, in respect of comparative magnitude, seems to stand at an extreme, but in respect of self-estimate he is the just mean; for his estimate of himself falls neither within nor beyond the mark of truth, while the others fail on the one side by excess, and on the other by defect. Further, the man who deems himself worthy of great things, being so worthy, of course deems himself worthy of the greatest things, and of one thing, whatever that be, pre-eminently great. What then do we mean when we say that a man is worthy, that he may justly claim great things or small things? We use {174} this language always in reference to something external. And the greatest of external things is that which we pay to the gods, and that which men in the highest situations chiefly desire, and for which among men there arises the most noble struggle of the most noble. This, of course, is honour; for honour is the greatest of external goods. It is in reference therefore to demonstrations of honour and dishonour that the great-minded man comports himself as a wise man ought. And indeed this is a point which requires only to be stated, not argued; for it is manifest that great-minded men everywhere are spoken of as being great-minded in reference to honour; for it is honour above all things of which truly great men think themselves worthy, and that in the measure of their desert. But the small-minded man is deficient both in relation to himself and in relation to the dignity that belongs to the great-minded, while the conceited man no doubt sins by excess in reference to his own merit, but not in reference to the high estimate of himself justly entertained by the great-minded man.