Volume XVII

October

NELLIE WALTON FORD

A being walks abroad
Beneath whose Midas finger

All things are turned to gold.
But, like that ancient monarch,
When his work is done

He finds that all he loved is dead.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
-Byron.

The Greek Gone to Seed

DR. P. M. MAGNUSSON

PLATO

It is unfortunate that the above caption is slang, for I mean the plain English of it and not the smarty insolence of the street-boy.

Greece was a great civilization. In some respects it is the only perfect, natural, happy, and healthy civilization we have had on this planet. Egypt has a funeral air; Assyria suffers from the garish Semitic lack of half-tones; India is feverish luxury; Rome is simple and stern unto stupidity; the Middle Ages are monkish, mawkish, and sentimental; modern life is—everything; but it has lost its selfpoise and peace of soul, and is from top to bottom devoured by industrialism. In ancient Greece alone. the happy, healthy bimana lived the life of a mortal god, that delved, sailed, ate, drank and breathed pure divinity. Even the swineherd might with propriety be said to have a divine work in ancient Greece. The islands in the Aegean, the peninsula of Greece and the Ionian shore of Asia form the Lord's kindergarten for mankind. The rare characteristics of the Greek conspired to make the result perfect-extreme in nothing except in its sensitiveness, this race developed the perfect animal, man. He was the child of the moment, sunny, volatile, affectionate, fickle, and surfacy. This was the Early Greek, the happy Greek. He and his civilization were perfect. Therein he differed from what went before and what came after. The

Number 10

Parthenon is its epitome-not large nor rich nor intricate nor elaborate. Perfectly simple and that is the Greek of it-simply perfect. Every line held its place by divine right.

Now wherein lay the secret of the Hellenes? How could they attain perfection so complete in all they undertook? Simply by not undertaking too much. The Greek in his happiest days never gave notice to the highest and deepest in man. He did not bother himself about anything beyond this life and this earth. He was satisfied to know that here the sun shone and now his blood was warm. Those were happy days, those flowering days of Greek civilization. But the florescence was brief. For there is a higher and deeper in man that cannot be contained or expressed in this little time-and-space world. The infinity of man awoke in his snug but narrow little Paradise of Perfection. Infinity awoke and drove him out of the paradise. The Greeks of historic times were continually and unconsciously struggling with this impossible problem: how to keep the infinite in man. down. The flower of Hellas was past. The seed, the grand and bitter seed, was maturing.

Plato was the seed. He was no longer a Greek, he was the product, the fruit of Greece.

Grand, noble, tragic, misunderstood hero. How thy broad brow looms up luminous through the mist of milleniums. It is the fashion in our "practical" days to look down with lofty disdain on "idealistic Plato," as a dreamer of dreams; but for all that, Plato need not call half a dozen men of the succeeding centuries his peers. If Aristotle is "the master of those who know," Plato, his teacher, is certainly the master of those who think.

The essence of Plato's doctrine may be stated thus: There is a supersensible world, and that is the real world. What we call reality is, on the other hand, but the fleeting shadow, the passing phantom of the Eternal World of Ideas which abides without variableness or shadow of turning. To use his own figure: Mankind is like prisoners sitting bound in the mouth. of a cave with their faces turned inward. As the cavalcade of light, life and reality passes on in its mighty march behind their backs, the shadows paint a faint