Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/336

 312 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE despotic. Plato himself knew that he had not found it. The future was for the men who had more mere grit and less self-criticism. Aristippus could teach and act unshrinking hedonism ; Democritus could organise science and form a definite dogmatic materialism ; Antisthenes could revile the world — art, learning, honour included — without misgiving. These were the authors of the great consistent schools. Platonism had no form of its own. Plato's nephew and successor, Speusippus, merely worshipped his uncle, and thought all detailed knowledge impossible till one could know everything; Aristotle developed his own system, prac- tical, profound, encyclopaedic, but rather 'cock-sure' and arrcte ; Heraclides ran to death his master's spirit of fiction and mysticism, and became a kind of reproach to his memory. But it is just this inconclusiveness of Plato's thought that has made it immortal. We get in him not a system but a spirit, and a spirit that no discoveries can super- sede. It is a mistake to think of Plato as a dreamer ; he was keen and even satirical in his insight. But he rises beyond his own satire, and, except in the Gorgias period, cares always more for the beauty he can detect in things than for the evil. It is equally a mistake to idealise him as a sort of Apolline hero, radiant and un- troubled, or to take that triumphant head of the Indian Bacchus to be his likeness. He was known for his stoop and his searching eyes ; the Letters speak often of illness ; and Plato's whole tone towards his time is like Carlyle's or Mr. Ruskin's. He is the greatest master of Greek prose style, perhaps of prose style altogether, that ever lived. The ancient critics, over-sensitive to oratory, put Demosthenes on a par with him or above