What Plato has left out are the poets, dramatists, and painters. Literature and music, in order to contribute to the noble education of the Guardians, are both severely restricted in theme and in treatment. Plato has his limitations; and here is the principal one: Plato distrusted the emotional life, and whilst he was prepared to do full homage to man’s obvious sensualities, he feared the emotions as a tight-rope walker fears the wind; for they threatened his balance. In one significant passage he classifies “love” with disease and drunkenness, as a vulgar misfortune; and though he was ready to permit the active expression of the emotions, as in the dance or the sexual act, he treated the mere play upon the feelings, without active participation, as a form of intemperance. Hence a great deal of music and dramatic mimicry was taboo. Foreign as this doctrine sounds to the modern reader, there is perhaps more than a grain of sense in it: William James used to teach that no one should passively experience an emotion at a concert or a play without trying to express that emotion actively as soon as he could make the opportunity. At any rate, let us leave this problem which Plato opens up with a free mind; and note here in passing that in the utopia of William Morris novels drop naturally out of existence because life is too active an ecstasy to be fed with the pathetic, the maudlin, and the diseased. 12 As we leave this little city of Plato’s, nestling in the hills, and as the thin, didactic voice of Plato, who has been perpetually at our elbows, dies away from our ears--what impression do we finally carry away? In the fields, men are perhaps plowing the land for the autumn sowing; on the terraces, a band of men, women, and children are plucking the olives carefully from the trees, one by one; in the gymnasium on the top of the Acropolis, men and youths are exercising, and as they practice with the javelin now and then it catches the sun and glints into our eye; apart from these groups, in a shaded walk that overlooks the city, a Guardian is pacing back and forth, talking in quick, earnest tones with his pupils. These are occupations which, crudely or elaborately, men have always engaged in; and here in the Republic they engage in them still. What has changed? What has profoundly changed is not the things that men do, but the relations they bear to one another in doing them. In Plato’s community, servitude and compulsion and avarice and indolence are gone. Men mind their business for the sake of living well, in just relations to the whole community of which they are a part. They live, in the strictest sense, according to nature; and because no one can enjoy a private privilege, each man can grow to his full stature and enter into every heritage of his citizenship. When Plato says no to the institutions and ways of life that men have blindly fostered, his eyes are open, and he is facing the light. CHAPTER THREE