Walter Savage Landor

“ Diogenes.
Nay, nay, my good Plato ! Thou hast however the frailty of concupiscence for things tangible and intangible, and thou likest well-turned vases no less than well-turned sentences: therefor they who know thee would leave no temptation in thy way, to the disturbance and detriment of thy soul. Away with the horse and vase! we will come together to the quarters of the virgin. Faith ! my friend, if we find her only just as beautiful as some of the goddesses we were naming, her virginity will be as immortal as their divinity. ”

“ Why not at once introduce a new religion?* since religions keep and are relished in proportion as they are salted with absurdity, inside and out? and all of them must have one great crystal of it for the centre; but Philosophy pines and dies unless she drinks limpid water. When Pherecydes and Pythagoras felt in themselves the majesty of contemplation, they spurned the idea that flesh and bones and arteries should confer it: and that what comprehends the past and the future should sink in a moment and be annihilated for ever. ”

“ He persuaded the princes of Italv to renounce their self-constituted and unlawful authority : in effecting which purpose, thou must acknowledge, O Plato, that either he was more eloquent than thou art, or that he was juster. If, being in the confidence of a usurper, which in itself is among the most hainous of crimes, since they virtually are outlaws, thou never gavest him such counsel at thy ease and leisure as Pythagoras gave at the peril of his life, thou in this likewise wert wanting to thy duty as an Athenian, a republican, a philosopher. ”

“ Heroes, like gods, must have their own way; but against thee and thy confraternity of elders I would turn the closet-key, and your mouths might water over, but your tongues should never enter those little pots of comfiture. Seriously, you who wear embroidered slippers ought to be very cautious of treading in the mire. Philosophers should not only live the simplest lives, but should also use the plainest language. Poets, in employing magnificent and sonorous words, teach philosophy the better by thus disarming suspicion that the finest poetry contains and conveys the finest philosophy. ”

“ Plato.
Is not this a contradiction to your own precepts, O Diogenes ? Have you not been censuring me, I need not say how severely, for my intercourse with Dionysius? and yet surely he was wealthy, surely he required the advice of a philosopher, surely he could have done much good with it.
Diogenes.
An Athenian is more degraded by becoming the counsellor of a king, than a king is degraded by becoming the schoolmaster of paupers in a free city. ”

“ Thou makest poor Socrates tell us that a beautiful vase is inferior to a beautiful horse; and as a beautiful horse is inferior to a beautiful maiden, in like manner a beautiful maiden is inferior in beauty to the immortal gods. ”

“ Plato.
On seeing the exercise of power, a child cannot doubt who is powerful, more or less; for power is relative. All men are weak, not only if compared to the Demiurgos, but if compared to the sea or the earth, or certain things upon each of them, such as elephants and whales. So placid and tranquil is the scene around us, we can hardly bring to mind the images of strength and force, the precipices, the abysses——
Diogenes. ”

“ To the world’s turmoils and pageantries is attracted, not only the admiration of the populace, but the zeal of the orator, the enthusiasm of the poet, the investigation of the historian, and the contemplation of the philosopher: yet how silent and invisible are they in the depths of air! ”

“ Plato.
If style, without elocution, can be.
Diogenes.
Neither without nor with elocution is there eloquence, where there is no ardour, no impulse, no energy, no concentration. Eloquence raises the whole man: thou raisest our eyebrows only. We wonder, we applaud, we walk away, and we forget. Thy eggs are very prettily speckled; but those which men use for their sustenance are plain white ones. People do not every day put on their smartest dresses; they are not always in trim for dancing, nor are they practising their steps in all places. ”

“ Diogenes.
Few people can endure them anywhere: but whatever is contradictory to either is intolerable. The business of a good writer is to make them pervade his works, without obstruction to his force or impediment to his facility ; to divest them of their forms, and to mingle their potency in every particle. I must acknowledge that, in matters of love, thy knowledge is twice as extensive as mine is: yet nothing I ever heard is so whimsical and silly as thy description of its effects upon the soul, under the influence of beauty. The wings of the soul, thou tellest us, are bedewed ”

“ Did never this reflection of thine warn thee that, in human life, the precipices and abysses would be much farther from our admiration if we were less inconsiderate, selfish, and vile? I will not however stop thee long, for thou wert going on quite consistently. As thy great men are fighters and wranglers, so thy mighty things upon the earth and sea are troublesome and intractable encumbrances. ”

“ Such people as Dionysius are to be approached by the brave and honest from two motives only: to convince them of their inutility, or to slay them for their iniquity. Our fathers and ourselves have witnessed in more than one country the curses of kingly power. All nations, all cities, all communities, should enter into one great hunt, like that of the Scythians at the approach of winter, and should follow it up unrelentingly to its perdition. ”

“ I do not assert that I have done it; but if I have not, what man has? what man has come so nigh to it? He who could bring Socrates, or Solon, or Diogenes through a dialogue, without disparagement, is much nearer in his intellectual powers to them, than any other is near to him.
Diogenes.
Let Diogenes alone, and Socrates, and Solon. None of the three ever occupied his hours in tingeing and curling the tarnished plumes of prostitute Philosophy, or deemed anything worth his attention, care, or notice, that did not make men brave and independent. ”

“ All popular orators, victorious commanders, crowned historians, and poets above crowning, have done it. Homer, for the glory of whose birthplace none but the greatest cities dared contend, is alike the highest and the easiest in poetry. Herodotus, who brought into Greece more knowledge of distant countries than any or indeed than all before him, is the plainest and gracefulest in prose. Aristoteles, thy scholar, is possessor of a long and lofty treasury, with many windings and many vaults at the sides of them, abstruse and dark. He is unambitious of displaying his wealth ”

“ Prythee, what is companionship where nothing that improves the intellect is communicated, and where the larger heart contracts itself to the model and dimension of the smaller ? 'Tis a dire calamity to have a slave; 'tis an inexpiable curse to be one. When it befalls a man through violence he must be pitied: but where is pity, where is pardon, for the wretch who solicits it, or bends his head under it through invitation ? Thy hardness of heart toward slaves, O Plato, is just as unnatural as hardness of heart toward dogs would be in me. ”

“ The consequence, that souls exist after death, cannot be drawn from the corruption of the body, even if it were demonstrable that out of this corruption a live one could rise up. Thou hast not said that the soul is among those dead things which living things must spring from; thou hast not said that a living soul produces a dead soul, or that a dead soul produces a living one. ”

“ It enthrals the freedom both of mind and body; it annihilates not only political and moral, but, what nothing else however monstrous can do, even arithmetical proportions, making a unit more than a million. Odious is it in a parent to murder or sell a child, even in time of famine: but to sell him in the midst of plenty, to lay his throat at the mercy of a wild and riotous despot, to whet and kiss and present the knife that immolates him, and to ask the same favour of being immolated for the whole family in perpetuity, is not this an abomination ten thousand times more execrable ? ”

“ Great writers are gifted with that golden wand which neither ages can corrode nor violence rend asunder, and are commanded to point with it toward the head (be it lofty or low) which nations are to contemplate and to revere. ”

“ Demonstrate that kings, by their nature and education, are obedient to the laws; bear them patiently; deem them no impediment to their wishes, designs, lusts, violences; that a whole series of monarchs hath been of this character and condition, wherever a whole series hath been permitted to continue; that under them independence of spirit, dignity of mind, rectitude of conduct, energy of character, truth of expression, and even lower and lighter things, eloquence, poetry, sculpture, painting, have flourished more exuberantly than among the free. ”

“ Diogenes.
Read it.
Plato. (reads.)
"Sayest thou not that death is the opposite of life, and that they spring the one from the other?" "Yes." "What springs then from the living?" "The dead." "And what from the dead?" "The living." "Then all things alive spring from the dead." ”

“ At the mention of this indeed, friend Plato, even thou, although resolved to stand out of harm’s way, beginnest to make a wry mouth, and findest it difficult to pucker and purse it up again, without an astringent store of moral sentences. Hymen is truly no acquaintance of thine. We know the delicacies of love which thou wouldst reserve for the gluttony of heroes and the fastidiousness of philosophers. ”

“ Thou tellest us, in thy fourth book on Polity, that it matters but little whether a state be governed by many or one, if the one is obedient to the laws. Why hast not thou likewise told us, that it little matters whether the sun bring us heat or cold, if he ripens the fruits of the earth by cold as perfectly as by heat ? ”

“ Plato.
This is an abuse of wit, if there be any wit in it.
Diogenes.
I doubt whether there is any; for the only man that hears it does not smile. We will be serious then. Such nonsense, delivered in a school of philosophy, might be the less derided; but it is given us as an oration, held before an Athenian army, to the honour of those who fell in battle. The beginning of the speech is cold and languid : the remainder is worse; it is learned and scholastic. ”

“ Now a man may be a very bad one, and yet possess three out of the four. Every cut-throat must, if he has been a cut-throat on many occasions, have more fortitude and more prudence than the greater part of those whom we consider as the best men. And what cruel wretches, both executioners and judges, have been strictly just! how little have they cared what gentleness, what generosity, what genius, their sentence hath removed from the earth! Temperance and beneficence contain all other virtues. Take them home, Plato ”

“ In like manner thou confoundest the harmony of music with symmetry in what is visible and tangible: and thou teachest the stars how to dance to their own compositions, enlivened by fugues and variations from thy master-hand. ”

“ The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne, and that everyone who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse. ”

“ Without the virtues of courage and patriotism, the seeds of such morality as is fruitful and substantial spring up thinly, languidly, and ineffectually. The images of great men should be stationed throughout the works of great historians. ”

“ They who believe that their praise gives immortality, and who know that it gives celebrity and distinction, are iniquitous and flagitious in withdrawing it from such exemplary men, such self-devoted citizens, as Epaminondas and Thrasybulus. ”

“ But if it is the quality and essence of beauty to gratify the sight, there are certainly more persons who can receive gratification from the appearance of a beautiful vase than of a beautiful horse. Xerxes brought into Hellas with him thousands of beautiful horses and many beautiful vases. Supposing now that all the horses which were beautiful seemed so to all good judges of their symmetry, it is probable that scarcely one man in fifty would fix his eyes attentively on one horse in fifty ”

“ Plato.
Is learning worse in oratory than languor ?
Diogenes.
Incomparably, in the praises of the dead who died bravely, played off before those who had just been fighting in the same ranks. What we most want in this business is sincerity; what we want least are things remote from the action. Men may be cold by nature, and languid from exhaustion, from grief itself, from watchfulness, from pity ”

“ Thou mightest as well say that a barley-corn dies before the germ of another barley-corn grows up from it, than which nothing is more untrue; for it is only the protecting part of the germ that perishes, when its protection is no longer necessary. ”

“ Great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for. ”

“ Before I gave thee this lesson, which is a better than thou ever gavest any one, and easier to remember, thou wert accusing me of invidiousness and malice against those whom thou callest the great, meaning to say the powerful. ”

“ Athens gave to Nature her own again: and equal laws were the unalienable dowry brought by Liberty, to the only men capable of her defence or her enjoyment. Did Pericles, did Aspasia, did Socrates foresee, that the descendents of those, whose heroes and gods were at best but like them, should enter into the service of Persian satraps, and become the parasites of Sicilian kings ? ”