SOCRATES AND PLATO


By this time you should have seen, rather than any picture of
Greece and Athens in their heyday, an indication of certain
universal historical laws. As thus (to go back a little): an
influx of the Spirit is approaching, and a cycle of high
activities is about to begin. A great war has cleared off what
karmic weight has been hanging over Athens;--Xerxes, you will
remember, burnt the town. Hence there is a clearness in the inner
atmosphere; through which a great spiritual voice may, and does,
speak a great spiritual message. But human activities proceed,
ever increasing their momentum, until the atmosphere is no longer
clear, but heavy with the effluvia of by no means righteous
thought and action. The Spirit is no more visibly present, but
must manifest if at all through a thicker medium; and who speaks
now, speaks as artist only,--not as poet--or artist-prophet. Time
goes on, and the inner air grows still thicker; till men live in
a cloud, through which truths are hardly to be seen. Then those
who search for the light are apt to cry out in despair; they
become realists struggling to break the terrible molds of
thought:--and if you can hear the Spiritual in them at all, it is
not in a positive message they have for men, but in the greatness
of their heart and compassion. They do not build; they seek only
to destroy. There seems nothing else for them to do.

So in England, Wordsworth opened this last cycle of poetry;
coming when there was a clear atmosphere, and speaking more or
less clearly through it his message from the Gods. You hear a
like radiant note of hope in Shelley; and something of it in
Keats, who stood on the line that divides the Poet-Prophet from
the Poet-Artist. Then you come to the ascendency of Tennyson,
whose business in life was to be the latter. He tried the role of
prophet; he lived up to the highest he could: strove towards the
light much more gallantly than did Sophocles, his Athenian
paradigm. But the atmosphere of his age made him something of a
failure at it: no clear light was there for him to find, such as
could manifest through poetry. Then you got men like Matthew
Arnold with his cry of despair, and William Morris with his
longing for escape; then the influence of Realism. So many
poets recently have an element of Euripides in them; a will to
do well, but a despair of the light; a tendency to question
everything, but little power to find answers to their questions.
Then there were some few who, influenced (consciously or not) by
H.P. Blavatsky, that great dawn-herald, caught glimpses of the
splendor of a dawn--which yet we wait for.

Euripides, with the Soul stirring within and behind him, "broke
himself on the bars of life and poetry," as Professor Murray
says. He was so hemmed in by the emanations of the time that he
could never clearly enunciate the Soul. Not, at any rate, in an
unmixed way, and with his whole energies. Perhaps his favorite
device of a _Deus ex Machina_--like Hercultes in the _Alcestis_
--is a symbolical enunciation of it, and intended so to be.
Perhaps the cause of the unrest he makes us feel is this: he
knew that the highest artistic method was the old Aeschylean
symbolic one, and tried to use it; but at the same time was
compelled by the gross emanations of the age, which he was not
quite strong enough to rise above, to treat his matter not
symbolically, but realistically. He could not help saying:
"Here is the epos you Athenians want me to treat,--that my artist
soul forces me to treat; here are the ideas that make up your
conventional religion;--now look at them!" And forth-with he
showed them, in there exoteric side, sordid, ugly and bloody;--
and then, on the top of that showing, tried to twist them round
to the symbolic impersonal plane again; and so left a discord
not properly solved, an imperfect harmony; a sense of loss
rather than gain; of much torn down, and nothing built up to
take its place. The truth was that the creative forces had
flowed downward until the organs of spiritual vision were no
longer open; and poetry and art, the proper vehicles of the
higher teaching in any age approximately golden, could no longer
act as efficient channels for the light.
 

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