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Page 49
Now this aristocratic principle has, so to speak, its everlasting
embodiment in Greek literature, from whence it was taken over into Latin
and transmitted, with much mingling of foreign and even contradictory
ideas, to the modern world. From Homer to the last runnings of the
Hellenic spirit you will find it taught by every kind of precept and
enforced by every kind of example; nor was Shakespeare writing at hazard,
but under the instinctive guidance of genius, when he put his aristocratic
creed into the mouth of the hero who to the end remained for the Greeks
the personification of their peculiar wisdom. In no other poetry of the
world is the law of distinction, as springing from a man's perception of
his place in the great hierarchy of privilege and obligation, from the
lowest human being up to the Olympian gods, so copiously and magnificently
set forth as in Pindar's _Odes of Victory_. And �schylus was the first
dramatist to see with clear vision the primacy of the intellect in the law
of orderly development, seemingly at variance with the divine immutable
will of Fate, yet finally in mysterious accord with it. When the
philosophers of the later period came to the creation of systematic
ethics, they had only the task of formulating what was already latent in
the poets and historians of their land; and it was the recollection of the
fulness of such instruction in the _Nicomachean Ethics_ and the Platonic
Dialogues, with their echo in the _Officia_ of Cicero, as if in them were
stored up all the treasures of antiquity, that raised our Sir Thomas into
wondering admiration:
Lorde god, what incomparable swetnesse of wordes and mater shall
he finde in the saide warkes of Plato and Cicero; wherin is ioyned
grauitie with dilectation, excellent wysedome with diuine
eloquence, absolute vertue with pleasure incredible, and euery
place is so infarced [crowded] with profitable counsaile, ioyned
with honestie, that those thre bokes be almoste sufficient to make
a perfecte and excellent gouernour.
There is no need to dwell on this aspect of the classics. He who cares to
follow their full working in this direction, as did our English humanist,
may find it exhibited in Plato's political and ethical scheme of
self-development, or in Aristotle's ideal of the Golden Mean which
combines magnanimity with moderation, and elevation with self-knowledge.
If a single word were used to describe the character and state of life
upheld by Plato and Aristotle, as spokesmen of their people, it would be
_eleutheria_, _liberty_: the freedom to cultivate the higher part of a
man's nature--his intellectual prerogative, his desire of truth, his
refinements of taste--and to hold the baser part of himself in subjection;
the freedom, also, for its own perfection, and indeed for its very
existence, to impose an outer conformity to, or at least respect for, the
laws of this inner government on others who are of themselves ungoverned.
Such liberty is the ground of true distinction; it implies the opposite of
an equalitarianism which reserves its honors and rewards for those who
attain a bastard kind of distinction by the cunning of leadership, without
departing from common standards--the demagogues who rise by flattery. But
it is, on the other hand, by no means dependent on the artificial
distinctions of privilege, and is peculiarly adapted to an age whose
appointed task must be to create a natural aristocracy as a _via media_
between an equalitarian democracy and a prescriptive oligarchy or
plutocracy. It is a notable fact that, as the real hostility to the
classics in the present day arises from an instinctive suspicion of them
as standing in the way of a downward-levelling mediocrity, so, at other
times, they have fallen under displeasure for their veto on a contrary
excess. Thus, in his savage attack on the Commonwealth, to which he gave
the significant title _Behemoth_, Hobbes lists the reading of classical
history among the chief causes of the rebellion. "There were," he says,
"an exceeding great number of men of the better sort, that had been so
educated as that in their youth, having read the books written by famous
men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths concerning their polity
and great actions, in which books the popular government was extolled by
that glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of
tyranny, they became thereby in love with their forms of government; and
out of these men were chosen the greatest part of the House of Commons; or
if they were not the greatest part, yet by advantage of their eloquence
were always able to sway the rest." To this charge Hobbes returns again
and again, even declaring that "the universities have been to this nation
as the Wooden Horse was to the Trojans." And the uncompromising monarchist
of the _Leviathan_, himself a classicist of no mean attainments, as may be
known by his translation of Thucydides, was not deceived in his
accusation. The tyrannicides of Athens and Rome, the Aristogeitons and
Brutuses and others, were the heroes by whose example the leaders of the
French Revolution (rightly, so far as they did not fall into the opposite,
equalitarian extreme) were continually justifying their acts:
There Brutus starts and stares by midnight taper,
Who all the day enacts--a woollen-draper.
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