The Hidden Soul

by GEORGE SANTAYANA

1

SOCRATES. — Tell me, Alcibiades, in your best days were you ever possessed of all the faculties that you required or might have united to advantage?

ALCIBIADES. — No: I have always wished to swim and to sing, thinking I could have done so as well as anybody; but somehow fate never allowed me to become proficient in those arts.

SOCRATES. — Swimming and singing are trifles. If you had always been able to think and to speak the truth, that would have been an accomplishment worth having. But were you even in those best days at any moment without some blemish of soul or body, some weariness or surfeit, some ugly secret, or some superstitious fear?

ALCIBIADES. — A man is not a god, Socrates, to be always open and bold and at one with himself. While I lived in my own house and city I was like other young bloods, restless and oppressed, with the best in me unrecognized; and when I escaped and went to live among strangers my mastery over things seemed lost, and in all affairs of importance I was only a bystander and an inferior.

SOCRATES. — Even at your best moments, then, you needed some Socrates to distinguish what you might and should have been from what you were.

ALCIBIADES. — Perhaps.

SOCRATES. — If your friends had seen in you merely the defects and the excrescences — that you did not swim or sing or discern truth, and that you were a bit garrulous and a bit rash — do you think they would have been as much enraptured and benefited in your society as they said they were?

ALCIBIADES. — They did not notice those imperfections, for I was better than the other young men in Athens and better than any god ever dreamt of among the barbarians.

SOCRATES. — Quite so; your friends then were doing in their way what I was telling you the other day that I did in mine: they were seeing in Alcibiades an image of their own composition, one whom the same deity that created Alcibiades, or a much greater and subtler deity, had created in (heir minds. And this revelation they justly called, so long as they were in love and divinely inspired, the true Alcibiades, never stopping to dwell too curiously on I he warts and pimples of its fleshly image. For while they perhaps attempted, in their innocent illusion, to embrace your body, what really charmed them was your still half-disembodied soul, as their warm imagination had conceived it ; for they were like worshipers laying their offerings before the statues of the gods, but addressing, praising, and thanking the gods the while, and not the statues.

ALCIBIADES. — After all, Socrates, I believe you are right. When I hear you talk, though you abuse me as no man else ever dared, I feel that there is something better in me than I had supposed, and that you see it.

SOCRATES. — Is not that your true soul, Alcibiades? Is not that the ideal which you are ashamed I should compare with the exhibition of yourself that you may be making at some unhappy moment? Now you have no reason any longer for that shame. The gods that admit spirits to these regions strip them of all false trappings and restore to them all their natural gifts. Sometimes, when the trappings are off, nothing whatever appears under t hem, for in some people the circumstances of life have created everything and suppressed nothing; and since the souls they were imagined to have did not exist, and they were only wickerwork dummies dressed in the borrowed finery of their day, and hollow echoes of other men’s words, they at once dissolve into the elements out of which they were patched together, and nothing of them remains to enter these shades. But you have been stripped and have remained standing, far fairer than you had become in the dust and clotted blood and rags of your adventures.

ALCIBIADES. — What? Do you think that I am better-looking now?

SOCRATES. — Not better-looking in the eyes of ordinary sculptors or flute girls or crowds at the Olympian games, but more pleasing by far to my mind. For now you are ashamed of yourself, you hide, and you fear to give me pain. And although you cannot unmake or remake the past, you can judge it justly; and the light of your self-knowledge and humility gilds your image more becomingly than ever did the bloom of youth or flush of victory , when the agora cheered your fashionable opinions. Nor will this new unpretending and honest grace of yours ever desert you as did your earthly advantages, now that the gods have admitted you to share their eternity, not as Homer would describe such admission but as their divine essence implies. Therefore you have no occasion any longer to fear any contrast between what I find in you and what I love. And for me, too, there is no indignity now, as there was in your youth, in confessing publicly that I love you; for then it was inevitable that you and the other boys should mock and deride such a weakness, as you thought it, in an old man; nor could I, in such circumstances, be quite happy in my love. You misunderstood it when you rejected it, and you misunderstood it even more completely when you accepted it; for you thought to make a boast of it, to catch and enslave me. And you inevitably failed in that; for I was not so simple as to think you pure, or so vile as to wish to corrupt you, but loved you knowing you corrupt and wishing to save you.

I too seemed to fail; for you fled in your folly to the barbarians and appeared to outrage every virtue you had possessed; but it was only in desperation and in the love of freedom. For there was a seed of divine freedom within you, which the rare splendor and elegance of your guardian Pericles and of his Athens had smothered in vanity, but which the same god that inspired me to love you, himself loved and meant to foster and save. Your contamination with the barbarians had not killed that seed; and that guardian god, who I think must have been Hermes, rescued it and transplanted it here, being the impartial gardener of all scattered and exotic souls. — But there I spy the Stranger approaching without seeing us — for living eyes can see but a short distance— and I will leave you to carry on this subject with him, if you like, for he too is a friend of yours and curious, like me, about the multiple self-salvation of souls.

(Exit SOCRATES. Enter THE STRANGER.)

2

ALCIBIADES. — Socrates and I were just now talking of you, or rather of a subject which to me seems rather chimerical: namely, the preciousness of my own soul. He says you might tell me all about it, having studied psychology among the sophists of your absurd world — as if what they concoct could reveal anything about us. But you have heard him talk, and you understand his artifice in imagining a hidden soul beneath every young simpleton that he comes across and then scolding us all for falling short of the impossible beings that his daemon assures him we really are.

THE STRANGER. — Are you convinced that what he reads into you and thinks he admires is what actually charms him? If he loved the pure image of Greek perfection, why not find it in Hippolytus or Leonidas or Epaminondas or Dion? It is the looseness of your petals, my friend, that inebriates him: and the reason, if 1 may assign one, is that his own Hellenism is overblown and, frankly, gone to seed.

ALCIBIADES. — How so ?

THE STRANGER. — I suspect, for instance, that what you did to the Hermae secretly delighted him.

ALCIBIADES. — What an extraordinary notion! He, so pious a man!

THE STRANGER. — I mean it seriously. That: which was ribaldry and sacrilege in you fell in with the beginnings of iconoclasm and prudery in him; he thinks even old thrice-chastened Homer immoral; and knavery and vice, if only they confess that they are such, are more interesting to him and more congenial than an unconcerned and fearless liberty, lie combines the illusions of a paederast with the self-immolating zeal of a missionary; and he loves you for being handsome and for needing so very obviously to be saved.

ALCIBIADES. — Overwrought fancies of yours.

THE STRANGER. — Could you have committed any crime that would have alienated him from you? And might not certain virtues have done so?

ALCIBIADES. — What virtues?

THE STRANGER. — All such as are impulsive or sacrificial, not reflective or useful: for example, freedom from moral superstition, which freedom is really necessary to discern justice and rational conduct. Or again, insight into the futility of dialectic, if you are looking for the truth, which can be gathered only from contact with facts.

ALCIBLVDES. — His theory is that vice is ignorance of our own true nature and its t rue good; and I confess that stubbornness in not admitting that doctrine is the only crime he will never forgive. But that is the case with all philosophers, and I almost think that you are one of them. However, Socrates is not a prig, as most of them are, and for a Greek who has not traveled he is wonderfully free from prejudice. True, he is a strange monster himself, and that may render him more discreet. Yet monstrosity too has something divine in it.

Pan, though a god, has a round belly and a goat’s legs and beard; Cassandra and Ajax and Orestes, who were heroes, were mad, and the madness in them was their diviner part; and it was a sacrilege in Pentheus to refuse homage to Bacchus, who was inciting disorders in the stale, and in Hippolytus to refuse homage to Venus, who had inspired an incestuous passion in his stepmother, Phaedra, which would cause his own innocent death. Why should we, then, refuse to pay homage sometimes to the gods of the barbarians, who never prompted things worse than do our own gods? Have not all the Greeks, since our day, actually come to worship other gods, when their beautiful gods forsook them?

THE STRANGER. — Yes, long ago; only that on being received among the Greeks the new gods, too, became beautiful. Your heart, Alcibiades, is not shut against aliens, as I find to my own advantage. You are aware that different nations and ages breed different virtues and different types of beauty. It is for that reason that both the wisdom of Socrates and your independence are ideally justified in their way. The blemishes that Socrates affects to find in you, and you in Socrates, are not dramatically such, but elements, I am convinced, of what each of you secretly admires in the other.

In early laborious ages heroes are like Theseus, guilty of many rude excesses, proper to robber chieftains fresh from the forests yet with the dawn of order in their souls. In later times, when the civilization that those heroes established has begun to dissolve, heroes are like Socrates and you, in whose souls is breaking the dawn of romantic liberty or of spiritual metanoia. You are twilight natures. In you the enlightenment and graces of a mature culture are touched with a premonition of darkness and failure. At that conjunction arise your new virtues, humility, self-knowledge, and a radical contempt of the world, half despair and half mystic aspiration. To typify that transition it is natural that you, Alcibiades, should be brilliant and dissolute, and that Socrates should be ugly, sophistical, and apostolic. Virtue is hatched in many different nests: one is the beauty of the peacock, gorgeous and screeching, and another the magic of the nightingale, melodious and dark.

ALCIBIADES. — I knew that I really agreed with you and not with Socrates. The poetry of the barbarians, when once we are accustomed to it, is very beautiful; I have seen an ugly face grow beautiful in death; and outshining all marbles, I think a jeweled scimitar that a Persian once gave me quite the most beautiful thing in the world.

THE STRANGER. — The handle and the scabbard, I suppose, were exquisitely inlaid and designed?

ALCIBIADES. — Yes; but the curved and murderous blade was more beautiful still.

THE STRANGER. — Let us not argue any longer, Alcibiades. We understand each other.

3

ALCIBIADES. — What I do not understand is how Socrates can be so deeply in the wrong and yet compel us to confess that he is in the right.

THE STRANGER. — I should not say that he was in the wrong in his own art, of which he is a master; and perhaps he could never practice it so wholeheartedly, if he were not deceived in other matters. If we were pure spirits, beauty for us would be the tight well-knit harmony that Socrates says it is; but beauty in fact, even for him, in this loose, spontaneous, and variable world, is not that, because we are loose, spontaneous, and variable ourselves.

Suppose that instead of being the son of Clinias you had found yourself born the son of Xerxes or of Darius, would not all your natural gifts and virtues have taken a different color? You would not have attempted to look so much like a naked Apollo, but you might have acquired more of the magic beauty of that Persian scimitar of yours, in which subtle art and fatal power combine, as you and I might well feel, to form a more piercing and mysterious loveliness. Had you been a Persian prince, and heir to the Great King, your pose of being the first would have been legitimate, your coolness not arrogance but dignity, and your licentiousness a poetical freedom of soul. You might have been the perfection of an Oriental monarch, instead of failing rather sadly in being the imitation of a Greek god. Socrates would have thought you much less beautiful, but to an open mind would you not have seemed much more so? And morality and moral beauty have an even greater range than that.

Suppose you had been horn in the modern world and in my Western parts of it, you might have aspired to nothing save to be a useful honest plebeian, doing your appointed work loyally and contentedly in the cycle of generation: a son, a soldier, a citizen, the faithful husband of one beloved wife, a father and in your brief turn perhaps a magistrate. In every phase you might have seen yourself as a happy link between two other similar links, supported and supporting, blest and beneficent. No one might have loved you poetically or philosophically, but you might have been the center of much simple affection and loyalty, so that even after your death pleasant traces of your passage might remain for some years in the world. Such is the beauty and sweetness of life as modern people understand it, whose religion comes from the Hebrews. They whirl dutifully round and round the vortex of existence, as Socrates docs round the vortex of dialectic, both persistently and, as I think, both vainly.

Greeks in the tradition of Homer, Sophocles, and Pindar had another morality. They wore not willing to be servants and to work for wages in the household of God. They insisted, as you and I insist, on being their own masters, free and having their justification in themselves. But they soon abandoned that effort, and became truants in the world rather than masters; butterflies fluttering because of an impulse to flutter. They preferred pleasure to riches, and knowledge to strength. In a word, they coveted the beautiful, and there is the end. When we have touched the beautiful, what can we stretch our hands to beyond? Beautiful unhappy mortals, having touched the end, they were obliged to move on notwithstanding. They could not stop at youth, like their gods; they could not arrest the perfection of their beauty. They were forced to descend sadly to worse things, to pomp, to voluptuousness, to cruelty, to sophistry, to superstition. They had simply to disappear, and yield to us Christians and moderns. How much better for them, if existence be the only goal of existence, not to have been or to have wished to be beautiful! They might then have continued to flow without repining round and round the vortex of natural life, blindly and perpetually, like the animals and like the stars.

ALCIBIADES. — Repeat all that to Socrates, if you wish to get a sound beating. I have a weakness for the barbarians myself, and in a manner what you say sounds to me barbarous and true. Men are creatures of circumstance, and must put up, like pigs and vermin, with the life that falls to their lot, even if it be ignoble. So now I willingly put up with the twilight here, although on earth I never flinched from the fiercest glory of the day. But when Socrates upbraids me, as he never stops doing, I cannot find words in which to defend myself. Nor will you be able to do so, unless you prove a better sophist than all the rest of them.

THE STRANGER. — I should never attempt to defend myself against Socrates. We are not talking of the same things. Rational beauty he describes perfectly, only he overlooks and even denies this little fact: that it is not reason that rules the world. What ought to be, according to human reason, never will be according to the course of nature. Nonetheless, to see and proclaim what ought to be according to human reason is of the greatest importance, not because we can make it happen except in trifles and ironically, but because thereby we uncover the heart and the mind of man, and enable him to live knowingly and undeceived. The gods made us, but Socrates reveals to us what the gods have made. That is why I say that he has taught us a more precious lesson than Prometheus, or any other material benefactor of mankind. He has taught us to distinguish arts that are truly profitable from those that are at once irksome and vain.

ALCIBIADES. — Why then was he unfortunate in being right, as I was unfortunate in being handsome?

THE STRANGER. — Because all true goods are not compatible in human life. Good fortune lies in having the gifts and virtues appropriate to your time and country, so that you need not pine for those that then and there are out of season. Both you and Socrates, it seems to me, though apparently very much in the fashion of your day, were at heart strangers in it, as I have been in mine: not spring flowers or summer fruits, but only autumn leaves. No chance for you to play the hero like Achilles or Theseus; no chance for Socrates to restore the virtues proper to an archaic city. Yet you each had an autumnal beauty or wisdom of your own. Autumn has its splendors, rich and deeply saturated with the variegated tints of life, as pure green budding virtue can never be. You are like the mellow damasks and tapestries and stained glass or like the poetic towers, all filigree in stone, of our own great days of religion and chivalry; for Christendom was never sane or young, but its particolored soul lived through an artificial drama of alternating sinful passions and rhetorical repentance: three days of Carnival to forty days of Lent. Yet here in this Limbo nothing is out of date. All beauties and all virtues arc native here and coeval; and the liberated spirit can survey with almost equal interest the world that banished it from its chosen good, and that good in its own divine eternity.

ALCIBIADES. — I suspect you are inspired a second time, because to me what you say is not intelligible. But pray do not attempt to explain it. My experience teaches me that when an idea is obscure it turns out not to be worth disentangling. Socrates may be right in some sense which you think important. I think him sophistical in a very palpable way. Nonetheless I call him fortunate and not unfortunate as you do, apparently only because he did not anticipate your exact system of philosophy. To me he seems of all men the most admirable and most worthy of respect. The sophistical things he says and perhaps believes are only skin-deep, a cuticle of satirical humor to cover a goodness too tender and intimate to be laid bare to the rude touch of the world. It is an enviable thing to be a man like that; and his errors and failures are not due to defects in him, but to an evil fatality in things and, as they say, to the envy of the gods.

As to beauty, it is also worth having, whatever evils it may forebode. Beauty was the cause of Helen being carried away to Troy, which the narrow-minded Greeks called a barbarous city, though Helen found it, I dare say, far pleasanter than Sparta; and beauty was the cause of Ganymede being carried up into Olympus, which we may presume to be an even better place. I too was carried away, partly by beauty, partly by knavery, to my Troy and to this, my rather washed-out Olympus; and what I have done I have done, and I do not regret it. Often what is called degradation is the most honest and satisfying part of life. I prostituted my Hellenism to the brutal embraces of the world, which was and always will be prevailingly barbarous. Those lawless loves of ours were perturbed, but not, I suspect, unfruitful. Is not your own soul, Stranger, perhaps their child?