Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 5.djvu/49

 is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking? Phocion, who mostly did not speak at all, was a great deal nearer hitting the mark than Demosthenes. He used to tell the Athenians, "You can't fight Philip. Better if you don't provoke him, as Demosthenes is always urging you to do. You have not the slightest chance with Philip. He is a man who holds his tongue; he has great disciplined armies, a full treasury; he can bribe anybody you like in your cities here; he is going on steadily with an unvarying aim toward his object; while you, with your idle clamorings, with your Cleon the Tanner spouting to you what you take for wisdom! Philip will infallibly beat any set of men such as you, going on raging from shore to shore with all that rampant nonsense." Demosthenes said to him once, "Phocion, you will drive the Athenians mad some day, and they will kill you." "Yes," Phocion answered, "me, when they go mad; and as soon as they get sane again, you!"

The highest outcome and most precious of all the fruits that are to spring from this ideal mode of educating is what Goethe calls art; of which I could at present give no definition that would make it clear to you, unless it were clearer already than is likely. Goethe calls it music, painting, poetry; but it is in quite a higher sense than the common one, and a sense in which, I am