Part 7 (1/2)
”I am fully persuaded”, he says to his young listeners, ”that your two fathers, my old and dearly-loved friends, are living now, and living that life which only is worthy to be so called”. And he winds up the dialogue with the very beautiful apostrophe, one of the last utterances of the philosopher's heart, well known, yet not too well known to be here quoted:
”It likes me not to mourn over departing life, as many men, and men of learning, have done. Nor can I regret that I have lived, since I have so lived that I may trust I was not born in vain; and I depart out of life as out of a temporary lodging, not as out of my home. For nature has given it to us as an inn to tarry at by the way, not as a place to abide in.
O glorious day! when I shall set out to join that blessed company and a.s.sembly of disembodied spirits, and quit this crowd and rabble of life!
For I shall go my way, not only to those great men of whom I spoke, but to my own son Cato, than whom was never better man born, nor more full of dutiful affection; whose body I laid on the funeral pile--an office he should rather have done for me.[1] But his spirit has never left me; it still looks fondly back upon me, though it has gone a.s.suredly into those abodes where he knew that I myself should follow. And this my great loss I seemed to bear with calmness; not that I bore it undisturbed, but that I still consoled myself with the thought that the separation between us could not be for long. And if I err in this--in that I believe the spirits of men to be immortal--I err willingly; nor would I have this mistaken belief of mine uprooted so long as I shall live. But if, after I am dead, I shall have no consciousness, as some curious philosophers a.s.sert, then I am not afraid of dead philosophers laughing at my mistake”.
[Footnote 1: Burke touches the same key in speaking of his son; ”I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me: they who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors”.]
The essay on 'Friends.h.i.+p' is dedicated by the author to Atticus--an appropriate recognition, as he says, of the long and intimate friends.h.i.+p which had existed between themselves. It is thrown, like the other, into the form of a dialogue. The princ.i.p.al speaker here is one of the listeners in the former case--Laelius, surnamed the Wise--who is introduced as receiving a visit from his two sons-in-law, Fannius and Scaevola (the great lawyer before mentioned), soon after the sudden death of his great friend, the younger Scipio Africa.n.u.s. Laelius takes the occasion, at the request of the young men, to give them his views and opinions on the subject of Friends.h.i.+p generally. This essay is perhaps more original than that upon 'Old Age', but certainly is not so attractive to a modern reader. Its great merit is the grace and polish of the language; but the arguments brought forward to prove what an excellent thing it is for a man to have good friends, and plenty of them, in this world, and the rules for his behaviour towards them, seem to us somewhat trite and commonplace, whatever might have been their effect upon a Roman reader.
Cicero is indebted to the Greek philosophers for the main outlines of his theory of friends.h.i.+p, though his acquaintance with the works of Plato and Aristotle was probably exceedingly superficial. He holds, with them, that man is a social animal; that ”we are so const.i.tuted by nature that there must be some degree of a.s.sociation between us all, growing closer in proportion as we are brought into more intimate relations one with another”. So that the social bond is a matter of instinct, not of calculation; not a cold commercial contract of profit and loss, of giving and receiving, but the fulfilment of one of the yearnings of our nature.
Here he is in full accordance with the teaching of Aristotle, who, of all the various kinds of friends.h.i.+p to which he allows the common name, p.r.o.nounces that which is founded merely upon interest--upon mutual interchange, by tacit agreement, of certain benefits--to be the least worthy of such a designation. Friends.h.i.+p is defined by Cicero to be ”the perfect accord upon all questions, religious and social, together with mutual goodwill and affection”. This ”perfect accord”, it must be confessed, is a very large requirement. He follows his Greek masters again in holding that true friends.h.i.+p can exist only amongst the good; that, in fact, all friends.h.i.+p must a.s.sume that there is something good and lovable in the person towards whom the feeling is entertained it may occasionally be a mistaken a.s.sumption; the good quality we think we see in our friend may have no existence save in our own partial imagination; but the existence of the counterfeit is an incontestable evidence of the true original. And the greatest attraction, and therefore the truest friends.h.i.+ps, will always be of the good towards the good.
He admits, however, the notorious fact, that good persons are sometimes disagreeable; and he confesses that we have a right to seek in our friends amiability as well as moral excellence. ”Sweetness”, he says--antic.i.p.ating, as all these ancients so provokingly do, some of our most modern popular philosophers--”sweetness, both in language and in manner, is a very powerful attraction in the formation of friends.h.i.+ps”. He is by no means of the same opinion as Sisyphus in Lord Lytton's 'Tale of Miletus'--
”Now, then, I know thou really art my friend,-- None but true friends choose such unpleasant words”.
He admits that it is the office of a friend to tell unpleasant truths sometimes; but there should be a certain amount of this indispensable ”sweetness” to temper the bitterness of the advice. There are some friends who are continually reminding you of what they have done for you--”a disgusting set of people verily they are”, says our author. And there are others who are always thinking themselves slighted; ”in which case there is generally something of which they are conscious in themselves, as laying them open to contemptuous treatment”.
Cicero's own character displays itself in this short treatise. Here, as everywhere, he is the politician. He shows a true appreciation of the duties and the qualifications of a true friend; but his own thoughts are running upon political friends.h.i.+ps. Just as when, in many of his letters, he talks about ”all honest men”, he means ”our party”; so here, when he talks of friends, he cannot help showing that it was of the essence of friends.h.i.+p, in his view, to hold the same political opinions, and that one great use of friends was that a man should not be isolated, as he had sometimes feared he was, in his political course. When he puts forward the old instances of Coriola.n.u.s and Gracchus, and discusses the question whether their ”friends” were or were not bound to aid them in their treasonable designs against the state, he was surely thinking of the factions of his own times, and the troublesome brotherhoods which had gathered round Catiline and Clodius. Be this as it may, the advice which he makes Laelius give to his younger relatives is good for all ages, modern or ancient: ”There is nothing in this world more valuable than friends.h.i.+p”. ”Next to the immediate blessing and providence of Almighty G.o.d”, Lord Clarendon was often heard to say, ”I owe all the little I know, and the little good that is in me, to the friends.h.i.+ps and conversation I have still been used to, of the most excellent men in their several kinds that lived in that age”.
CHAPTER XI.
CICERO'S PHILOSOPHY.
'THE TRUE ENDS OF LIFE'.[1]
Philosophy was to the Roman what religion is to me. It professed to answer, so far as it might be answered Pilate's question, ”What is truth?”
or to teach men, as Cicero described it, ”the knowledge of things human and divine”. Hence the philosopher invests his subject with all attributes of dignity. To him Philosophy brings all blessings in her train. She is the guide of life, the medicine for his sorrows, ”the fountain-head of all perfect eloquence--the mother of all good deeds and good words”. He invokes with affectionate reverence the great name of Socrates--the sage who had ”first drawn wisdom down from heaven”.
[Footnote 1: 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum'.]
No man ever approached his subject more richly laden with philosophic lore than Cicero. s.n.a.t.c.hing every leisure moment that he could from a busy life, he devotes it to the study of the great minds of former ages.
Indeed, he held this study to be the duty of the perfect orator; a knowledge of the human mind was one of his essential qualifications. Nor could he conceive of real eloquence without it; for his definition of eloquence is, ”wisdom speaking fluently”.[1] But such studies were also suited to his own natural tastes. And as years pa.s.sed on, and he grew weary of civil discords and was hara.s.sed by domestic troubles, the great orator turns his back upon the noisy city, and takes his parchments of Plato and Aristotle to be the friends of his councils and the companions of his solitude, seeking by their light to discover Truth, which Democritus had declared to be buried in the depths of the sea.
[Footnote 1: ”Copiose loquens sapientia”.]
Yet, after all, he professes to do little more than translate. So conscious is he that it is to Greece that Rome is indebted for all her literature, and so conscious, also, on the part of his countrymen, of what he terms ”an arrogant disdain for everything national”, that he apologises to his readers for writing for the million in their mother-tongue. Yet he is not content, as he says, to be ”a mere interpreter”. He thought that by an eclectic process--adopting and rearranging such of the doctrines of his Greek masters as approved themselves to his own judgment--he might make his own work a subst.i.tute for theirs. His ambition is to achieve what he might well regard as the hardest of tasks--a popular treatise on philosophy; and he has certainly succeeded. He makes no pretence to originality; all he can do is, as he expresses it, ”to array Plato in a Latin dress”, and ”present this stranger from beyond the seas with the freedom of his native, city”. And so this treatise on the Ends of Life--a grave question even to the most careless thinker--is, from the nature of the case, both dramatic and rhetorical. Representatives of the two great schools of philosophy--the Stoics and Epicureans--plead and counter-plead in his pages, each in their turn; and their arguments are based on principles broad and universal enough to be valid even now. For now, as then, men are inevitably separated into two cla.s.ses--amiable men of ease, who guide their conduct by the rudder-strings of pleasure--who for the most part ”leave the world” (as has been finely said) ”in the world's debt, having consumed much and produced nothing”;[1] or, on the other hand, zealous men of duty,
”Who scorn delights and live laborious days”,
and act according to the dictates of their honour or their conscience. In practice, if not in theory, a man must be either Stoic or Epicurean.
[Footnote 1: Lord Derby.]
Each school, in this dialogue, is allowed to plead its own cause. ”Listen”
(says the Epicurean) ”to the voice of nature that bids you pursue pleasure, and do not be misled by that vulgar conception of pleasure as mere sensual enjoyment; our opponents misrepresent us when they say that we advocate this as the highest good; we hold, on the contrary, that men often obtain the greatest pleasure by neglecting this baser kind. Your highest instances of martyrdom--of Decii devoting themselves for their country, of consuls putting their sons to death to preserve discipline--are not disinterested acts of sacrifice, but the choice of a present pain in order to procure a future pleasure. Vice is but ignorance of real enjoyment. Temperance alone can bring peace of mind; and the wicked, even if they escape public censure, 'are racked night and day by the anxieties sent upon them by the immortal G.o.ds'. We do not, in this, contradict your Stoic; we, too, affirm that only the wise man is really happy. Happiness is as impossible for a mind distracted by pa.s.sions, as for a city divided by contending factions. The terrors of death haunt the guilty wretch, 'who finds out too late that he has devoted himself to money or power or glory to no purpose'. But the wise man's life is unalloyed happiness. Rejoicing in a clear conscience, 'he remembers the past with grat.i.tude, enjoys the blessings of the present, and disregards the future'. Thus the moral to be drawn is that which Horace (himself, as he expresses it, 'one of the litter of Epicurus') impresses on his fair friend Leuconoe:
'Strain your wine, and prove your wisdom; life is short; should hope be more?