Plato and the Present IT is natural, for one reason,
to put these two books together. They are both cast in the same mould of form. They both ask, and seek to answer, the question, "What would Plato think of us, if he were moving among us to-day ? " But there the likeness ends.
Mr. Woodruff's book is the book of a young and gay spirit. It is dedicated to Father Ronald Knox : it has something of a Knoxian flavour. The writer, one would guess, is an English Catholic, interested in English history from that point of view ; but he is also a Lucian—a Lucian rather than a Plato ,—inclined to make merry, in an understanding way, with the English social life of our day. All our institutions come under the gentle flick of his whip. Now it is the Athenaeum in Pall Mall ; and Socrates, overhearing a conversation which begins, " What can that be which all men desire ? " and pricking up his ears at the prospect of a discussion about the Idea of the Good, is made to fall into a mood of despondency when he realizes that the interlocutors are only concerned to find a word of four letters to suit a crossword puzzle. Next it is Oxford ; but here the reviewer, who was a tutor once upon a time (" far away and long ago ") in Mr. Woodruff's college, must himself fall into a mood of despondency—and silence. (Perhaps, however, he may express a hope that he never said to any of his pupils, in talking about Henry VIII, what Mr. Woodruff says in writing about him, that " he gave away most of the lands :which he took from the priests to the new class of rich." Henry VIII very seldom "gave away" anything ; and he sold the monastic lands for what they would fetch in the market.) But whatever the theme— the Athenaeum or Oxford, the " dole" or the English passion for sports, the British Empire or the factory system—there is always the gentle flick of an ironic yet kindly satire. The whip of the social satirist (and that, on the whole, is the part for which the author of Plato's Britannia has cast himself) has a happy value of its own. If it is provocative of laughter, it is also provocative of thought ; and the victim may smile and wince in a breath. We English, as we amble round the ring under Mr. Woodruff's whip, are made to describe amusing capers. If only we can go away with the conviction, "Lord, what fools we be," we shall have had our profit, and we shall have had it pleasantly. Ridentem dicere verum quid velat?
Mr. Lowes Dickinson's hook is Platonic alike in form and in substance. He, too, is concerned with English society, but he is concerned with its deep foundations, and his business is with the eternal values (or " ideas ") on which a true society should rest. Like Plato in the Republic (and like Isaiah and St. Paul on the other side of the Aegean, before and after Plato), he asks the great question, " What is Righteous- ness ? " and he stays to find an answer. His book is a dialogue, and the dialogue takes place in the dim, silvery light of the Elysian fields. It is a dialogue between Plato, drawn by thought from the other world " after two thousand years," and a spirit of to-day " who loves the truth." The dialogue falls into two parts ; and it ranges over the whole sphere of the Here and the Hereafter. Part I is a study of Here and Now : it deals with Property and Democracy, Socialism and Population, War and Education. In the course of the argument Plato hears from the Lover of Truth the story of two thousand years and the goal of to-day to which all their revolutions have brought humanity ; and as he hears he applies, in criticism and yet in appreciation, the abiding canons of his philosophy. For the One remains, however much the Many may change and pass ; and, indeed, the Many—all the forms and shapes of human society and polity—do not change so fundamentally but that their basis still remains a constant, so that to-day, as in Plato's time, we have still the old problems, " Who shall govern ? How shall property be distributed ? How shall war cease among States ? What is the way of education ? " All this leads to the second part of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's book, and there we are carried into the heaven of the true " goods " —the heaven in which the ideal order of human life is some- v here to he found. Truth and Art and Love are the goods on which the discourse turns : and at the end of all we are rapt away, not into a myth (and yet it is a " myth " in the true Platonic sense), but into the vision of a " world full of gods, ascending the golden stairs," and of " the long ascent of life reaching up into the heaven of heavens—and of that chain you, on your little step, are but one small link."
After Two Thousand Years is a noble piece of prose and a moving, profoundly moving, sequence of thought, especially as it moves in music to its close. Mr. Lowes Dickinson not only reveals his inmost thought about human society and human life : he also reveals his own emotions and his own experience of struggle. It is all touched with beauty ; and there is a Greek Charis upon the whole of the book.
ERNEST BARKER.
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