Part 4

"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 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.'

"'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 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 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. Without 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 _palæstra_ 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 Phoebus Apollo in praise of War.

* * * * *

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 Eccentrics 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."

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.

* * * * *

"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.