There are three elements—one of them immeasurably more important than the other two—of which the composite portrait of our modern Socrates is made up: Xenophon, Plato, the dramatists. To the contribution furnished by the first, not much weight is usually attached. Yet it should really have been regarded as extremely illuminating. It suggests that the subject of “Socrates” was a sort of school exercise, useful practice in rhetoric or in dialectics. The very fact that Xenophon’s Socrates was so reminiscent of his creator ought to have been instructive.[33] It has, however, taken scholars some time to recognise this, and Karl Joël, who spent fifteen of the best years of his life over the Xenophontic Socrates, to discover that the figure was just as much a fiction as the Platonic Socrates, has lately confessed that he thinks those years rather wasted. It might have been clear earlier that what Plato had done was really just the same thing so far as method was concerned, though a totally different thing in result because done by the most richly endowed of poet-philosophers, the most consummate of artists. For that is probably how we ought to regard Plato, and not, like some, as merely a great mystificator. It is true that Plato was the master of irony, and that “irony,” in its fundamental meaning, is, as Gomperz points out, “pleasure in mystifying.” But while Plato’s irony possesses a significance which we must always keep before us, it is yet only one of the elements of his vast and versatile mind. It is to the third of these sources that some modern investigators are now inclined to attach primary significance. It was on the stage—in the branch of drama that kept more closely in touch with life than that which had fallen into the hands of the prose dialecticians and rhetoricians—that we seem to find the shadow of the real Socrates. But he was not the Socrates of the dramatic dialogues of Plato or even of Xenophon; he was a minor Sophist, an inferior Diogenes, yet a remarkable figure, arresting and disturbing, whose idiosyncrasies were quite perceptible to the crowd. It was an original figure, hardly the embodiment of a turning-point in philosophy, but fruitful of great possibilities, so that we could hardly be surprised if the master of philosophic drama took it over from real life and the stage for his own purposes.