THE MENO OF PLATO.*
THE questions discussed in this dialogue, or naturally arising out of it, are of a more simple and generally intelligible kind than those dealt with by the Sophists& In the volume containing his version of that dialogue, Mr. Mackay has tried to show that the present age can no better than its predecessors afford to despise or evade the higher problems of speculation. His burden is now the fragmentary and unsatisfaetory character of our moral educa- tion, due to the want of a standard of ideal excellence such as the Greeks proposed to themselves in their best days. Our aims, he thinks, • are too vague and yet too narrow; we attain neither scientific precision nor free development. Our notions of law and order are still so unformed that we cannot be expected to profit by any relaxation of authority. Rather we are in danger of falling more hopelessly than ever into the hands of " the two great teachers of corrupt Athenian as of modern English life, namely. . . . casual intercourse and established doctrinal routine, whose pith and essence are comprised in the two words, custom and catechism." We do not think the prospect for the future quite so bad as Mr. Mackay represents it, nor a return to the Athenian ideal the only way to mend it. We shall presently have occasion to dispute some of his specific charges ; however, some exaggeration may be excused when a writer calls attention to matters that are for the most part wholly overlooked. He begins by insisting on universality and freedom as the joint requisites of spaded moral standard, and claims as the glory of the Greeks that they realized the latter by "uniting with immunity from constraint a sense of graceful decorum, a something not impressed by force or fear, but spontaneously and preferentially submitted to." The first great step in a career of moral education is the growth, through perceptions of beauty, of an intelligent admira- tion, which expands into the religious feeling of love and reverence,
"The beet kind of elementary education [continues Mr. Mackay (p. 29)] must ever be the sesthetical, or that addressing sentiment in the first instance, and aiming not so much to enrich the memory and to equip the future mechanician, mineralogist, or chemist, as to form the man, evoking his free and better spirit by setting before him images of the beautiful and good No people ever practically realized this procedure, at least in the early period of their development, more easily and happily than the Greeks."
The continued employment of the ancient literature as a basis of education is presently vindicated in a passage (p. 37-39) which strikes us as one of the best in the essay. The author goes on to speak of the more definite guidance rendered necessary by the pro- gress of society to a complicated stage, and the means used at Athens to supply it, which he admits had become, in the age of Pericles, very inadequate. The insufficiency of the remedies pro- vided by the professional teachers who sprang up to meet the new wants, is criticized in language which applies pretty well to much of the popular instruction of our own time (p. 50) :— " They seem to have been as little aware as were their pupils that any practical or ethical teaching, worthy the name, must be founded on some general principle, and that therefore the disqualification attaching to their scientific teaching unfitted them also for moral. For morality, more than anything else, requires a far-reaching theory, inasmuch as it cannot, properly speaking, begin until after having, ideally at least, attained that firm hold of the universal which all other science may be regardecLas an unceasing effort to approach."
Some pages later is a thoughtful, and in places eloquent, expo- sition of the moral office of the dramatist and the philosopher.
Plato's Mess: a Dialogue on The Nature and Meaning of Education: translated, with Explanatory Notes and Introduction, and a Preliminary Essay on the Moral Education of the Greeks. By B, W. Mackay, London; Williams and Norgate. 1869.
That of the former is held to be intermediate between the external compulsion of positive law and the internal regeneration, which is the aim of philosophy ; his object being to present to the spec- tator's view an ideal order, underlying though obscured by the caprices of circumstance, and to lead the mind, through the play of diverse emotions, to the repose produced by the recognition of such a rule. The philosopher, again, sought a similar but loftier end, "to produce in the sphere of reason the same sort of effect which the dramatist achieved in that of emotion." This natu- rally leads to a review of the Platonic method in particular, in which Mr. Mackay displays an enthusiasm which must be wel- come to lovers of Plato, however their criticism may differ from his on details. He sums up his admiration in the following sen- tences (p. 97) :—
"Plato's philosophy, which began with beauty and harmony, returns through the entire maze of dialectical entanglement and conflict with jarring opinions to a point of completest repose Its tones or phraseology often sound harsh and dissonant, labouring among obscure contrarieties and subtleties, and terminating abruptly ; yet to attentive ears the harmony survives, and the music here addressing reason is as perfect in its way as that which in earlier times contented itself with soothing a less elevated faculty. In the general arrangement, the parts blend happily together, each being carefully adjusted to produce unity of effect, and it may truly be said that a dialogue failing to produce on the reader's mind the effect of a fine piece of music may fairly be presumed to have been insufficiently understood."
The chief fault we have to find with this ingenious essay is the undue predominance given to the msthetic part of human nature. Mr. Mackay seems to think that the sense of artistic harmony is of itself competent to engender such an idea of law and order as will guide the soul "through various stages of philosophy to a condition of intelligent self-mastery and active repose." Now we fully believe in the spiritual power and value of art as an auxiliary to other forces ; we repudiate as completely as any one the doctrine now commonly advanced that it has no kind of connection with morality. But experience has repeatedly shown that no amount of oesthetic culture can alone be relied on as a safeguard against not merely occasional insurrections of crime, but the habitual anarchy of vice ; and in no case has this been more decisively exemplified than among the people whose example Mr. Mackay holds up for our imitation. Of course, he is not unaware of the facts disclosed by almost every page of the Attic writers ; but he dismisses them with a bare admission of their existence (p. 9), expressing in a note his indignation, not against the im- morality that was compatible with Attic taste, but against the bad taste of any one who might find ground for objections in it I Having done this, in the very next sentence he pronounces our moral maturity "stunted and poor " compared with the highest Greek standards. He seems, indeed, to fall every now and then into the agreeable illusion of seeing the Greeks, not as they were at any time, but as Socrates wished them to become.
Otherwise it is difficult to reconcile his unqualified praises of their moral culture with his unqualified admiration for Plato and his master, who, as the whole of this dialogue among others goes to show, were by no means of opinion that their contemporaries had been so successful in the search for ideal excellence, as to make their method a model for all future generations.
On the other hand, Mr. Mackay's enthusiasm leads him into a persistent depreciation of everything modern which sometimes becomes quite unreasonable. It is true that the systematic and intelligent employment of music as an instrument of education is still wanting among us to a great extent ; and so far we can understand Mr. Mackay's lament at p. 33 of his introduction. But his assertion that at the present day "it is regarded chiefly as a harmless pastime or display, calculated to bewilder or astonish by unmeaning varieties of sound and difficulties of execution," is grotesquely extravagant. Can it be seriously thought that such was or is the view of the great composers whose works are happily becom- ing day by day better known to the people of England, of the players who interpret those works, or of the listeners who throng to. hear them whenever the enjoyment of them is put within the reach of moderate means? The slightest experience will show that we are not yet so dull and degraded. Perhaps some of our readers may remember the last performance at a Monday Popular Concert of a double violin concerto of Bach, led by Herr Joachim. We would ask them to recall the eager silence of the audience as they awaited the first note ; their collective aspiration that found expression in Herr Joachim's triumphant glance round the hall, when he roes in his place, as of one in the act to attain that intui- tion of consummate good so seldom allowed to human weakness; the rush of majestic harmonyinto which the master-mind seemed to have gathered all the power and splendour of sunlight and free air and boundless waters, and which bore up on its wings the soul
of the hearer, realizing through sense, yet in a sphere above all sense, what Homer felt when he saw "the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest,"—and then to say whether the total result could be rightly described as "to amuse the ear without affecting the intellect," or such rendering of such music is not rather worthy to take an honourable rank in the noblest scheme of moral education that can be devised. We are no less surprised to learn that the "so-called Christian Church" is no better than a caricature of the Platonic Republic, and follows a standard more ignoble than that of the Sophists (p. 90). It is difficult to see the meaning of this epithet, which supplies us with a parallel to what we had thought a unique figure of speech in a sermon denouncing the vices of " this so-called nineteenth cen- tury." We do not regard with the horror felt by many modern readers the manner of life prescribed by Plato for the guardians of his city, and the arrangements by which he secures their freedom from domestic cares. In fact no nearer approach to the institution of a celibate order was at that time possible to Hellenic imagination. Still, when this, the extreme development of Plato's ideal subordination of the individual to the common weal, is compared with the extreme development in the monastic system of the corresponding features of the Christian church, we cannot fail to see that the latter has, in spite of all its defects and abuses, maintained a standard of organized self- control far above any which Plato could venture even to suggest.
The essay is followed by a discussion of the object of the Meno as compared with the Protagoras. These two dialogues, in Mr. Mackay's view, "are intended to refute two variously aberrant modes of attempting" the task of education,—the first dealing with casuistical teaching, while the Prolagoras is an exposure of routine or common-place morality.
Mr. Mackay's translation is rather disappointing. The style is often clumsy, and slight inaccuracies frequently occur. The nice distinctions of meaning which in the original contribute so much to the charm of the conversation are overlooked, and the result of many little negligences is that the English reader gets Plato's feast of dialectic without the salt. While the general features of the dialogue are preserved faithfully enough, the bright- ness and sharpness and subtle play of humour are utterly gone. Moreover, there are one or two more serious errors. We find (71 D), "When although acquainted with you and Gorgias, I said I never yet found any one who knew this," the sense being, "If it appears that you and Gorgias knew this, though I have said I never yet found any one who knew it." Again, in 76 E, "Were you to remain longer you would be fully initiated," for it tali: adthvivalc re xal punkin; is really unpardon- able. In 86 D, the words, "Being of course determined to exercise your prerogative," can hardly be said to represent the original at all, and are unintelligible without reference to it ; and the render- ing of the obscure geometrical passage which follows is very confused. It is true, as Mr. Mackay observes, that no such illus- tration as Plato gives is now needed ; but it would have been better to omit it altogether, than to leave it in a form which can only bewilder the reader. Plato is an author who taxes a trans- lator's powers to the utmost, and such work cannot be safely undertaken as collateral to an essay.
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