Can we imagine Being (the fulfilment, that is, a perfection of all the objects of our effort and hope) to be devoid of life and mind, and to remain in awful unmeaningness, an everlasting fixture?... Or shall we say that Being has mind and not life... Or both, but that there is no soul in which they exist.... Or that Being has mind and life and soul, but that although endowed with soul remains entirely unmoved?... Then our inference is that, if there is no motion, neither is there any mind anywhere or about anything or belonging to anyone.... And yet this equally follows, if we grant that all things are in motion, upon this view too, mind has no existence."

The answer to the problem is suggested later in the same dialogue (Sophistes 250): "Then you can conceive of Being as some third and distinct nature, under which rest and motion are included, and observing that they both participate in Being, you declare that they are.... Being surely has communion with both of them."

So motion ends in passionate repose; and rest becomes instinct with tranquil emotion: the happy rivalry of contrasted forces is composed in a life which has the simplicity of art, and seeks nothing but the undisturbed communion of the mind with itself.

CHAPTER V

ORATORY AND VIRTUE

When Quintilian boldly asserts that the perfect orator must be a good man, he claims that his Treatise on the Art of Oratory is a Treatise on Education. The orator, he says, must not only have consummate ability in speaking, but every excellence of mind, and it is clear that in excellence he includes virtue. There are those, he adds, who would leave ethics to philosophers, and many writers on oratory have supported this view, believing that it was their business to add eloquence as a final and crowning accomplishment to persons who had received from other teachers other and distinct kinds of learning. The study of speech had come indeed long before his time to be divorced from the study of things about which men speak. The tongue became an instrument of gain, and men who were esteemed eloquent abandoned the care of morals which were thus neglected to become the prize of the less robust intellects. He carries his accurate irony still further when he adds that some persons, disliking the labour of cultivating eloquence, turn

back as upon an easier task upon the discipline of the mind, and the establishment of rules of life. For his own part he is unwilling to make a severance between things which are naturally allied. He does not say that every good man must be an orator, but he comes very near to making that startling announcement, for the orator is described as a man who has to sustain his character as a citizen: he must be qualified for the management of public affairs, able to govern communities by his counsel, settle them by means of laws, and improve them by judicial enactments. Already when Quintilian wrote, the duties and powers of a citizen were limited to a much narrower range; he has set forth what had been and what he would still desire, not what actually was in Rome and the Roman world as he knew it; the word citizen had fallen both from its ancient glory and from its proper significance. Yet he is fain to argue that the orator is for him the citizen at his height, at his fullest development: he is the ideal citizen, and might well claim kindred with him whom a liberal education as Milton conceived it made able justly and magnanimously to fulfil all offices both of peace and of war.

The education of the young has at all times been the touchstone of civilization: it is the attempt of Age to justify its ways to Youth; it is the apology of the present to the future-its splendid vindication or its timid and paltering excuse. No doubt, this effort at self-explanation has often been half-conscious and quite unsystematic, though at some

brilliant epochs what had been dimly felt by a whole people was brought by a speaker or writer to luminous expression and so received a force and a direction which it would else have lacked. This consummate expression has again and again been like the blooming of a rare flower which attains perfection and is overtaken by decay at the same instant; but always, whether splendidly revealed or faintly suggested, we have in any sincere utterance of a national ideal the best record that a community can leave us of its aim in education, and in its scheme of education the most trustworthy account of its corporate and collective ambition.

Such an ideal can never be wholly frustrated; and indeed, when it has prompted and been quickened by words in which at once its meaning is made public and its secret enshrined, it may be said, in a sense, to have reached completion. A national pride tempered by comity; a personal dignity maintained with sweetness; a versatility which consorts with real strength of character; the daring which springs from buoyant and disciplined health; fitness for the labours of warfare, and the intelligence to enjoy, without softness, a cultured peace-a vivid appreciation of beauty, as an active principle ordering and informing private and public conduct; and as a crown, modesty-the sense of proportion-humour blent with reverence-all this, or something like this, was what the Athenians at the period of their supreme success desired to possess, and hoped they had. And the orator who interpreted this ambition

framed for them, and not for them alone, a code for the education of the young.

The Romans, with a wider horizon, though with a vision less acute, translated this language of the Greeks into their own tongue to suit the needs of an Empire which the Greeks had dreamt of, but never realised. And once more we find an ideal drawn of the citizen, prepared for war and for peace, the inheritor now of Hellenic culture, occupied in government but making leisure for speculation, and uniting the qualities of the statesman with those of the scholar.

The picture is drawn by the orator, but he is its original; and in rendering to the State an interpretation which it accepted of its own traditions and hopes, he stands out as the model and the teacher of youth.

It has been maintained by some distinguished writers on style, themselves practised orators, that a main difficulty of beginners is to be found merely in lack of matter. If they had anything to saythat is the blunt contention-they would soon find how to say it. To know what to say is, no doubt, a large part of the equipment of the orator. Cicero himself was arrested for a moment by this truism. It was of course a tempting doctrine to a speaker and writer whose range was from the Nature of the Gods to the pettiest business of the law courts. He had spoken with effect upon every imaginable subject: he must, then, possess a knowledge as encyclopaedic as his topics had been various. But

C. E.

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