And a comfort, possibly, in old age, when the judicial
faculties of the mind are breaking up and primitive man, the visionary,
reasserts his ancient rights. For questioning moods grow burdensome with
years; after a strain of virile doubt we are glad to acquiesce once
more - to relapse into Platonic animism, the logic of valetudinarians.
The dog to his vomit.
And after Plato - the deluge. Neo-platonism. . . .
Yet it was quite good sport, while it lasted. To "make men better" by
choice dissertations about Utopias, to sit in marble halls and have a
fair and fondly ardent jeunesse doree reclining about your knees while
you discourse, in rounded periods, concerning the salvation of their
souls by means of transcendental Love - it would suit me well enough, at
this present moment; far better than croaking, forlorn as the
night-raven, among the ruins of their radiant lives.
Meanwhile, and despite our Universities, new conceptions are prevailing,
Aristotle is winning the day. A fresh kind of thinker has arisen, whose
chief idea of "virtue" is to investigate patiently the facts of life;
men of the type of Lister, any one of whom have done more to regenerate
mankind, and to increase the sum of human happiness, than a wilderness
of the amiably-hazy old doctrinaires who professed the same object. I
call to mind those physicians engaged in their malaria-campaign, and
wonder what Plato would have thought of them. Would he have recognized the
significance of their researches which, while allaying pain and misery,
are furthering the prosperity of the country, causing waters to flow in
dry places and villages to spring up in deserts - strengthening its
political resources, improving its very appearance? Not likely. Plato's
opinion of doctors was on a par with the rest of his mentality. Yet
these are the men who are taking up the thread where it was dropped,
perforce, by those veritable Greek sages, whelmed under turbid floods of
Pythagorean irrationalism. And are such things purely utilitarian? Are
they so grossly mundane? Is there really no "philosophy" in the choice
of such a healing career, no romance in its studious self-denial, no
beauty in its results? If so, we must revise that classic adage which
connects vigour with beauty - not to speak of several others.
XXXIX
MIDDAY AT PETELIA
Day after day, I look across the six miles of sea to the Lacinian
promontory and its column. How reach it? The boatmen are eager for the
voyage: it all depends, they say, upon the wind.
Day after day - a dead calm.
"Two hours - three hours - four hours - according!" And they point to the
sky. A little breeze, they add, sometimes makes itself felt in the early
mornings; one might fix up a sail.
"And for returning at midday?"
"Three hours - four hours - five hours - according!"
The prospect of rocking about for half a day in a small boat under a
blazing sky is not my ideal of enjoyment, the novelty of such an
experience having worn off a good many years ago.
