NIGHTS WITH 
 THE GODS 
 
NIGHTS WITH 
 THE GODS t 
 
 BY 
 
 EMIL REICH 
 
 DOCTOR JURIS 
 Author of 
 
 1 ' Foundations of Modern Europe ' 
 " Success among Nations" etc. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 T. WERNER LAURIE 
 
 CLIFFORDS INN, FLEET STREET 
 
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE FIRST NIGHT 
 
 ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM IN ENGLAND . 1 
 
 THE SECOND NIGHT 
 
 DIOGENES AND PLATO ON TOLSTOY, IBSEN, 
 SHAW, ETC. ...... 32 
 
 THE THIRD NIGHT 
 
 ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN IN ENGLAND . . 65 
 
 THE FOURTH NIGHT 
 
 ALCIBIADES CONTINUED .... IOI 
 
 THE FIFTH NIGHT 
 
 CAESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS . T 34 
 
 THE SIXTH NIGHT 
 
 APOLLO AND DIONYSUS IN ENGLAND . . l6o 
 
 THE SEVENTH NIGHT 
 
 SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO ON RE- 
 LIGION ....... l82 
 
 270640 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 THE great spirits of the past, chiefly Hellenes, 
 recently revisited England. With a view to an ex- 
 change of ideas on English contemporary life, they 
 met at night in various towns of Italy, where, by the 
 favour of Dionysus, the author was allowed to be 
 present, and to take notes at the proceedings. The 
 following pages contain some of the speeches de- 
 livered in the Assembly of the Gods and Heroes. 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 33 ST LUKE'S ROAD, 
 NOTTING HILL, 
 
 LONDON, W. 
 
 vn 
 
NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 THE FIRST NIGHT 
 
 ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM IN ENGLAND 
 
 THE first night the gods and heroes assembled on 
 the heights around Florence. From the magnificent 
 town there came only a faint glimmer of artificial 
 light, and the Arno rolled its waves melodiously 
 towards the sea. On a height full of convenient 
 terraces, offering a view on the Lily of the Arno, on 
 Fiesole, and on the finely undulating outlines of the 
 Apennine Mountains, the Assembly sat down. From 
 afar one could see the bold lines of the copy of 
 Michelangelo's David on the hill. The evening was 
 lovely and balmy. Zeus opened the meeting with a 
 request directed to Alexander, King of Macedon, to 
 ask his teacher Aristotle to entertain them with his 
 experiences at the seats of modern learning and 
 study. Alexander did so, and the grave Stagirite, 
 mellowed by the years, addressed the Assembly as 
 follows : 
 
 " All my mortal life I have tried, by reading, by 
 making vast collections of natural objects and animals, 
 and by the closest thinking on the facts furnished to 
 me by men of all sorts of professions and crafts, to 
 get at some unity of knowledge. I held, and still 
 hold, that just as Nature is one, so ought Know- 
 
WITH THE GODS 
 
 ledge'. -too ."to be. \ have written a very large 
 number of treatises, many of which, thanks to 
 Thy Providence, O Zeus, have escaped the small- 
 pox called commentaries, in that the little ones 
 never got possession of those works. But while 
 always loving detail and single facts, I never lost 
 sight of the connection of facts. As a coin, 
 whether a penny or a sovereign, has no currency 
 unless the image of the prince is cut out on it, 
 even so has no fact scientific value unless the 
 image of an underlying general principle is grafted 
 thereon. This great truth I taught all my pupils, 
 and I hoped that men would carefully observe it 
 in all their studies. When then I went amongst 
 the little ones, I expected them to do as I had 
 taught their teachers to do. However, what I 
 found was, O Zeus, the funniest of all things. 
 
 " On my visit to what they call Universities I 
 happened to call, in the first place, on a professor who 
 said he studied history. In my time I believed that 
 history was not as suggestive of philosophical truths 
 as is poetry. Since then I have somewhat altered my 
 view. Naturally enough I was curious to know what 
 my Professor of History thought of that, and I asked 
 him to that effect. He looked at me with a singular 
 smile and said : ' My young friend ( I had assumed 
 the appearance of a student ), my young friend, 
 history is neither more nor less than a science. As 
 such it consists of a long array of specialities.' 
 f And which,' I asked timidly, c is your special period?' 
 Whereupon the professor gravely said : c The after- 
 noons of the year 1234 A.D." While everybody 
 present in the Assembly, including even St Francis 
 of Assisi, laughed at this point of Aristotle's narrative, 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 3 
 
 Diogenes exclaimed : " Why has the good man not 
 selected the nights of that year ? It would greatly 
 reduce his labours." 
 
 A peal of laughter rewarded the lively remark. 
 Aristotle resumed his tale, and said : " When the 
 professor saw that I was a little amused at his state- 
 ment, he frowned on me and exclaimed in a deep 
 voice, if with frequent stammerings, which as I subse- 
 quently learnt is the chief attraction of their diction, 
 4 My young friend, you must learn to understand 
 that we modern historians have discovered a method 
 so subtle, and so effective, that, with all deference 
 be it said, we are in some respects stronger even 
 , than the gods. For the gods cannot change the past ; 
 but we modern historians can. We do it every day 
 of our lives, and some of us have obtained a very 
 remarkable skill at it. 5 " 
 
 At this point of Aristotle's narrative Homeric 
 laughter seized all present, and Aristophanes patted 
 the Stagirite on the back, saying : " Pray, consider 
 yourself engaged. At the next performance of my 
 best comedy you will be my protagonist." Aristotle 
 thanked him with much grace, and continued : 
 "I was naturally very curious to learn what my 
 Professor of History thought of the great Greeks 
 of my own time and of that of my ancestors. I 
 mentioned Homer. I had barely done so but what 
 my professor burst into a coarse and disdainful 
 guffaw. 
 
 " ' Homer ? ' he exclaimed ; c Homer ? but of 
 whom do you speak ? Homer is nothing more nor 
 less than a multiple syndicate of street-ballad-singers 
 who, by a belated process of throwing back the 
 "reflex "of present and modern events to remote ages, 
 
4 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 and by the well-known means of literary contamina- 
 tion, epical syncretism, and religious, mythopceic, 
 and subconscious impersonation have been hashed 
 into the appearance of one great poet. 
 
 " c Our critical methods, my young friend, are so 
 keen that, to speak by way of simile, we are able to 
 spot, from looking at the footprints of a man walking 
 in the sand, what sort of buttons he wore on his 
 cuffs. 
 
 " c Poor Cuvier otherwise one of my revered 
 colleagues used to say : " Give me a tooth of an 
 animal and I will reconstruct the rest of the animal's 
 body." What is Cuvier's feat as compared with 
 ours ? He still wanted a tooth ; he still was in need 
 of so clumsy and palpable a thing as a tooth ; perhaps 
 a molar. We, the super-Cuviers of history, we do 
 not want a tooth any more than toothache ; we want 
 nothing. No tooth, no footprint even, simply nothing. 
 Is it not divine ? We form, as it were, an Ex Nihilo 
 Club. We have nothing, we want nothing, and yet 
 give everything. Although we have neither leg to 
 stand on, nor tooth to bite with, we staunchly prove 
 that Homer was not Homer, but a lot of Homers. 
 Is that not marvellous? But even this, my young 
 friend, is only a trifle. We have done far greater 
 things. 
 
 " c These ancient Greeks (quite clever fellows, I 
 must tell you, and some of them could write gram- 
 matical Greek), these ancient Greeks had, amongst 
 other remarkable men, one called Aristotle. He 
 wrote quite a number of works ; of course, not quite 
 as many as he thought he did. For we have proved 
 by our Ex Nihilo methods that much of what he 
 thought he had written was not written by him, but 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 5 
 
 dictated. We have gone even so far (I myself, 
 although used to our exploits, stand sometimes 
 agape at our sagacity), we have gone so far as to 
 prove that in the dictation of some of his writings 
 Aristotle was repeatedly interrupted by letters or 
 telephonic messages, which accounts for gaps and 
 other shortcomings. 
 
 " ' Well, this man Aristotle (for, we have not yet 
 pluralised him, although I but this would pass your 
 horizon, my young friend) this clever man has left 
 us, amongst other works, one called " Politics." It 
 is not wanting in quality, and it is said, if with certain 
 doubts, that there are a few things to be learnt from 
 it. It is, of course, also said that no professor has 
 ever learnt them. But this is mere calumny. Look 
 at their vast commentaries. Of course, how can one 
 accept some of the glaring fallacies of Aristotle ? 
 Imagine, that man Aristotle wants us to believe that 
 nearly all Greek states were founded, equipped with 
 a constitution, and in a word, completely fitted out by 
 one man in each case. Thus, that Sparta was founded, 
 washed, dressed, fed, and educated by one Lycurgus. 
 How ridiculous ! 
 
 " ' Having proved, as we have, that Homer's 
 poetry, a mere book, was made by a Joint Stock 
 Company, Unlimited, how can we admit that a big 
 and famous state like Sparta was ordered, cut out, 
 tailored, stuffed and set on foot by one man ? 
 Where would be Evolution ? If a state like Sparta 
 was made in the course of a few months by one 
 man, what would Evolution do with all the many, 
 many years and ages she has to drag along ? Why, 
 she would die with ennui, bored to death. Can we 
 admit that ? Can one let Evolution die ? Is she not 
 
6 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 a nice, handy, comely Evolution, and so useful in the 
 household that we cannot be happy until we get 
 her? To believe in a big, important state like 
 Sparta having been completely established by one 
 man is like saying that my colleague, the Professor 
 of Zoology, taking a shilling bottle of Bovril, has 
 reconstituted out of its contents a live ox walking 
 stately into his lecture-room. Hah-hah-hah ! Very 
 good joke. (Secretary! Put it into my table-talk! 
 Voltairian joke ! serious, but not grave.) 
 
 cc < Now, you see, my young friend, in that capital 
 point Aristotle was most childishly mistaken; and 
 even so in many another point. We have definitely 
 done away with all state-founders of the ancients. 
 Romulus is a myth ; so is Theseus ; so is Moses ; so 
 is Samson (not to speak of Delilah) ; so is every- 
 body who pretended to have founded a city-state. 
 Since he never existed, how could he have founded 
 anything? Could I found a city-state? Or any 
 state, except a certain state of mind, in which I say 
 that no single man can found a city-state ? Could I ? 
 Of course, I could not. Well then, how could 
 Lycurgus ? Was he a LL.D. ? Was he a member 
 of the British Academy? Was he a professor at 
 Oxford ? Had he written numerous letters to The 
 Times'! Was he subscriber to so respectable a 
 paper as The Spectator! It is ridiculous to speak 
 of such a thing. Lycurgus founding Sparta ! It 
 is too amusing for words. These are all myths. 
 Whatever we cannot understand, we call a myth ; 
 and since we do not understand many things, we 
 get every day a richer harvest of myths. We are 
 full of them. We are the real living mythology.' 
 
 " To this long oration," Aristotle continued, " I 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 7 
 
 retorted as calmly as I could, that we Greeks had 
 states totally different from those of the moderns, just 
 as the latter had a Church system absolutely differ- 
 ent from our religious institutions ; so that if anyone 
 had tried to persuade an Athenian of my time 
 that a few hundred years later there would be 
 Popes, or single men claiming and obtaining the 
 implicit obedience of all believers in all countries, 
 the Athenian would sooner have gone mad than 
 believe such stuff. For, to him, as a Greek, it must 
 have seemed hopelessly incredible that an office such 
 as that of the universal Pope should ever be toler- 
 ated ; or, in other words, that a single man should 
 ever be given such boundless spiritual power. I said 
 all that with much apparent deference ; but my pro- 
 fessor got more and more out of control. 
 
 " c What,' said he, < what do you drag in Popes 
 for? We talk of Lycurgus, not of Popes. Was 
 Lycurgus a Christian? Let us stick to the point. 
 The point is that Lycurgus never existed, since so 
 many professors, who do exist beyond doubt, deny 
 his historical existence. Now, either you deny the 
 existence of these professors, which you can't; or 
 you deny that of Lycurgus, which you must. Exist- 
 ence cannot include non-existence. For, non-existence 
 is, is it not ? the negation of existence. And since 
 the professors exist, their non-existence would in- 
 volve us in the most exasperating contradictions with 
 them, with ourselves, and with the daily Press. 
 This, however, would be a disaster too awful to be 
 seriously thought of. Consequently, Lycurgus did 
 not exist ; nor did any other state-founding person- 
 ality in Greek or Roman times. 
 
 " c In fact when you come to think of it, nobody 
 
8 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 ever existed except ourselves. Adam was not; he 
 will be at the end of ends. The whole concept of 
 the world is wrong as understood by the vulgar. 
 Those old Greek and Roman heroes, like Aristomenes, 
 Coriolanus, Cincinnatus, never existed for a day. 
 Nor did the Doric Migration, the Twelve Tables, 
 and lots of other so-called events. They have been 
 invented by schoolmasters for purposes of exams. 
 Did Draco's laws ever exist ? Ridiculous. That 
 man Aristotle speaks of them, but it is as evident 
 as soap that he invented them for mods, or other 
 exams, of his. 
 
 " c The vulgar constantly ask me whether or no 
 history repeats itself. What, for goodness' sake, 
 does that matter to me ? It is sufficient for all 
 purposes that historians repeat each other, for it is 
 in that way that historical truth is established. Or 
 do not the great business-princes thus establish their 
 reputation ? They go on repeating " Best furniture 
 at Staple's," "Best furniture at Staple's," three 
 hundred and sixty-five times a year, in three hundred 
 and sixty-five papers a day. By repetition of the 
 same thing they establish truth. So do we historians. 
 That's business. What, under the circumstances, 
 does it matter, whether history itself does or does 
 not repeat itself? 
 
 " c One arrogant fellow who published a wretched 
 book on " General History," thought wonders what 
 he did not do by saying, that " History does repeat Itself 
 in institutions, but never in events or persons" Can 
 such drivel be tolerated ! Why, the repetition by 
 and through persons (read: historians) is the very 
 soul of history. We in this country have said and 
 written in and out of time and on every sort of 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 9 
 
 paper, that the "Decline and Fall of the Burmese 
 Empire" is the greatest historical work ever written 
 by a Byzantine, or a post-Byzantine. We have 
 said it so frequently, so incessantly, that at present 
 it is an established truth. Who would dare to say 
 that it is not? Why, the very Daily Nail would 
 consider such a person as being beneath it. 
 
 " ' We real historians go for facts only. Ideas are 
 sheer dilettantism. Give us facts, nothing but 
 single, limited, middle-class facts. In the Republic 
 of Letters we do not suffer any lordly ideas, no more 
 than the idea of lords. One fact is as good as 
 another, and far worse. Has not our greatest 
 authority taught that the British Empire was estab- 
 lished in and by absent-mindedness, that is, without 
 a trace of reasoned ideas? As the British Empire, 
 even so the British historians, and, cela vo sang dir, 
 all the other historians. Mind is absent. " Mind " is 
 a periodical ; not a necessity. We solid researchers 
 crawl from one fact to another for crawling 5 s sake.' " 
 
 The gods and heroes were highly amused with 
 the tale of Aristotle, and it was with genuine delight 
 that they saw him resume the story of his ex- 
 periences at the seats of learning. "When I left 
 the Professor of History," continued Aristotle, "I 
 felt somewhat heavy and dull. I could not easily 
 persuade myself that such utter confusion should 
 reign in the study of history after so many centuries 
 of endless research. I hoped that the little ones 
 
io NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 might have made more real advance in philosophy; 
 and with a view to ascertain the fact, I entered a lectur- 
 ing hall where a professor was even then holding 
 forth on my treatise c De Anima.' He had just 
 published a thick book on my little treatise, although 
 (or perhaps because? . . .) another professor, a 
 Frenchman, had recently published a much thicker 
 book on it. 
 
 " I listened very attentively, but could not under- 
 stand a word of what he said. He treated me text- 
 critically, philologically, hermeneutically, everything, 
 except understandingly. I felt that my treatise was 
 not mine at all. It was his. At a given moment 
 I could not help uttering aloud a sarcastic remark 
 about the professor's explanations. Down he came 
 on me like thunder, and with a triumphant sneer 
 he proved to me that what I had said I had not said 
 at all. In that I differed entirely from a great states- 
 man of theirs, who had said what he had said. The 
 professor put me under a regular examination, and 
 after twenty minutes formally ploughed me in *De 
 Anima. ' 
 
 "This was a novel experience for me. In the 
 Middle Ages, it is true, I had repeatedly had the 
 same experience, and Albertus Magnus and St 
 Thomas Aquinas had done me the same honour. 
 But in modern times I had not yet experienced it. 
 The next day I called upon the professor, who lived 
 in a beautiful house, filled with books, amongst 
 which I saw a great number of editions of my own 
 works. 
 
 " I asked him whether he had ever cared* to study 
 the anima, or what they call the psychology of 
 animals. I added that Aristotle had evidently done 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM n 
 
 so, as his works explicitly prove, and that after he 
 had surveyed all sorts of souls in the vegetable, 
 animal and human kingdom, both normal and patho- 
 logical, he wrote his treatise * De Anima,' the real 
 sense of which must escape him who has not taken 
 such a wide range of the question. Ah you ought 
 to have seen the professor! He jumped from his 
 seat, took another whisky and soda and said : c My 
 young friend, the first thing in science is to dis- 
 tinguish well. Bene docet qui bene distinguit. You 
 speak of animals. What have they to do with 
 human psychology ? Their souls are studied by my 
 colleague who goes in for comparative psychology; 
 or rather by several of my colleagues, one of whom 
 studies the comparative psychology of the senses ; 
 the other that of the emotions; the third that of 
 memory; the fourth the fifth the sixth, etc., 
 etc., etc. 
 
 " < I, I stick to my point. I have my speciality. 
 You might think that my speciality is psychology, 
 or Aristotle's psychology. Not at all. This is 
 all too vague, too general. My speciality is quite 
 special; a particularly singular speciality: the text of 
 Aristotle's psychology. And even that goes too far; 
 for what I really call my speciality is my version of 
 the text which is said to have been written by 
 Aristotle. 
 
 "'Now at last we are on firm ground. What 
 under those conditions need I trouble about cats and 
 rats ? The latter, the rats, have* I admit, some little 
 importance for me. They -have* in their time de- 
 voured parts of Aristotle's manuscripts, and I have 
 now to reconstitute what they have swallowed. I 
 am to them a kind of literary Beecham's Pill. But 
 
12 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 as to cats, mules or donkeys? What have they 
 to do with me ? Can they influence my version of 
 the text ? Hardly. 
 
 " ' My young friend, if Aristotle himself came to 
 me, I should tell him : " My good man, unless you 
 accept my version of your text, you are out of court. 
 I am a professor, and you are only an author. 
 Worse than that a Greek author. As theologians 
 fix the value and meaning of gospel- words ; as the 
 State makes a piece of worthless paper worth five 
 pounds sterling by a mere declaration; even so 
 we say what you Aristotle did say. What you said 
 or meant is indifferent; what we say you said or 
 meant is alone of consequence." How then could 
 even Aristotle refute me regarding my view of 
 his views ? It is logically impossible. 
 
 " 4 Don't you see, this is why we have invented our 
 beautiful system of excessive specialisation. Where 
 each of us studies only one very small thing, there 
 he need not fear much competition, but may hope for 
 exclusive authority. We shall soon establish chairs 
 for professors of philosophy, who will study, each of 
 them, just a mere splinter of a twig of one branch of 
 the tree of philosophy; or better still, just one leaf 
 of such a twig of such a branch; and finally, just 
 a dewdrop on such a leaf of such a twig of such 
 a branch. Then we shall have completed our net- 
 work of authority. 
 
 " ' Our contemptible enemies say that our talk 
 about Aristotle and Plato is like the gossip of 
 lackeys in the pot-house about their noble masters. 
 We know better. You are a young man* I will 
 give you a bit of profound advice. If you want 
 to make your way in the literary world rapidly and 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 13 
 
 with ease, hitch on your name to some universally 
 acknowledged celebrity. Do not write on obscure, 
 if great authors or heroes ; but pick out Homer, 
 Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Napoleon. 
 Write constantly on some speciality of these men; 
 thus, on the adjectives in Homer; on the neutral 
 article in Plato; on the conjunctions in Dante; on 
 the plant-lore in Shakespeare; on the names of 
 women in Goethe; or on the hats of Napoleon. 
 
 "'Your name will then incessantly be before the 
 public together with that of Homer or Shakespeare 
 or Napoleon. After a time, by a natural association 
 of ideas, something of the lustre of the immortal will 
 fall on you. Note how the most elaborate writers 
 on, say Shakespeare, are almost invariably men of 
 the most sincere mediocrity. They are, neverthe- 
 less, exceedingly clever tacticians. They become 
 "authorities." We are not authorities because we 
 are specialists ; we have, on the contrary, introduced 
 the system of specialities in order to pass for authori- 
 ties. To use Plato's terms: our whole business 
 spells effectology, and nothing else. Take this to 
 heart and be successful.' 
 
 " On leaving the professor," Aristotle said, " I felt 
 that I had made several steps forward in the compre- 
 hension of that system of specialisation which I heard 
 praised and admired in all the Universities. I need not 
 tell you, my friends, how utterly wrong that system 
 is. As humans do not think in words, but in whole 
 
i 4 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 sentences, so Nature does not act in particulars, but 
 in wholes. The particulars are ours, not Nature's. 
 In making them we act arbitrarily. Why should 
 dentistry be one speciality ? Why should there not 
 be thirty- two different specialist dentists for our thirty- 
 two teeth ? All specialisation in the realm of know- 
 ledge is rank arbitrariness. Without exception, the 
 great leading ideas in all organised thought have 
 invariably been made by wholesale thinkers like 
 Pythagoras, Plato, I venture to add : myself, Lionardo 
 da Vinci, Kepler, Newton, Pascal, Leibniz, Darwin. 
 . That is precisely where humans differ from animals. 
 All animals are the most conceited specialists." 
 
 Here Diogenes interrupted : " Does the converse 
 hold good, O Aristotle ? " 
 
 "I will leave," Aristotle replied with a smile, 
 " the consideration of this case to your own discre- 
 tion. I do repeat it, that each animal is an out- 
 and-out specialist. It troubles about nothing else 
 than the two or three things it takes a professional 
 interest in. It eats, sleeps, and propagates ; occasion- 
 ally it adds a tightly circumscribed activity of some 
 kind. That's why animals do not talk. It is not 
 part of their speciality. They do not talk for the 
 same reason that the English do not produce fine 
 music, nor the Prussians tactful behaviour. In all 
 these cases the interest of the specialist lies else- 
 where. 
 
 " Does a modern specialist in heart-diseases study 
 the kidneys? Does a specialist in surgery care to 
 study the nerves? Even so an animal does not 
 care to speak. It is a specialist; it restricts itself 
 to its 'business,' to 'the point.' The h'ttle ones 
 say that animals have no general ideas, and that 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 15 
 
 is why they cannot speak. But have human 
 specialists any general ideas of anything, and yet 
 do they not speak? The argument is too foolish 
 for words. 
 
 " Why, Nature created men in order to have a few 
 genera/ists, if I may say so, amongst all the specialists 
 called animals or plants; just as amongst men she 
 created Homers and Platos and Galileos and Leibnizes, 
 in order to save the rest of humans from their evil 
 tendency to over-specialisation. It is a plan as plain 
 as transparent glass. 
 
 "Thousands of years ago Nature found out that, 
 with all these endless vegetal and animal specialists 
 on hand, she would soon have to declare herself 
 bankrupt. One specialist ignored the other; or 
 hampered, hurt, and paralysed the other ; they could 
 N not understand one another, because they had no 
 common interest. In her predicament, Nature created 
 human beings for the same reason that men invented 
 the locomotive or the telegraph. She could no longer 
 be without him. Man was, by his very needs, 
 obliged to drop over-specialisation. He interested 
 himself, for a variety of ends and reasons, in stones 
 as much as in plants and animals. By exterminating 
 some of the most damaging species of animals, he 
 saved the life of millions of specimens of other 
 animals that would otherwise have been killed out 
 by ferocious specialists, such as the tiger, the leopard, 
 and the wolf. The same he did to plants, and partly 
 to rivers and lakes. He brought a little order into 
 this pandemonium of specialists in Nature. 
 
 "Look at the sea. There man was unable to 
 exert his power for order by general ideas. Look 
 at the indescribable disorder and chaos and mon- 
 
16 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 strosity of life and living beings in the sea. They 
 are hideous, like an octopus ; short-lived, nay, of 
 a few minutes' duration, like the jelly-fish; fearful 
 and yet cowardly like a shark ; abominably under- 
 sized or over-sized; incapable of any real passion, 
 except that of eating and drinking. This liquid 
 mass of fanatic and unsystematised specialists render 
 the sea as inferior to the land as is Thibet to Holy 
 Athens. People travelling in that ocean of specialists 
 are exasperated by foul sea-sickness ; and empires 
 built on it have repeatedly been destroyed in a single 
 week ; ay, in one day. 
 
 " The dread of being swamped by specialists has 
 driven Nature into creating the most grotesque 
 compositions of beings half plant and half animal, 
 or half stone and half plant ; or again half male and 
 half female ; or half land-animal, half fish. Another 
 way adopted by Nature in her attempt to obviate 
 the ravages of specialists was by giving them ex- 
 ceedingly short shrift, and just a mere speck of 
 existence ; or again by forcing them to form big 
 corporations and societies, such as forests, prairies, 
 meadows, swarms, troupes. 
 
 " In fact Nature is a free lance fighting incessantly 
 the evil done by the specialists. Ask Poseidon what 
 trouble the sea gives him; ask .ZEolus how his 
 life is made a misery through the mad freaks of 
 the various specialists in winds. And what is the 
 deep, underlying reason of all this insane race for 
 specialism? I will tell you that in one word. It 
 is Envy and Jealousy. In certain countries Envy 
 and Jealousy are the inextinguishable and ubiquitous 
 hydra of life. 
 
 " Take England. She is a democracy, if a masked 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 17 
 
 one. Hence Jealousy is the dominating trait of 
 her citizens. Jealousy has, thousands of years ago, 
 invented railways, telegraphs, wired and wireless 
 ones, telephones and Rontgen-rays, and all the rest 
 of the infernal machines whereby Space, Time, and 
 Work is shortened, curtailed, annihilated. Jealousy 
 has at all times sent wireless messages over and 
 through all the houses of a town or an entire country. 
 It has Rontgenised the most hidden interiors; and 
 its poison runs more quickly through all the veins 
 and nerves of men than does the electric spark. 
 
 "Look at the customs, social prejudices, or views 
 of that nation. Over one half of them was introduced 
 to disarm the ever-present demon of Jealousy. Why 
 is a man a specialist? Because in that way he 
 disarms Jealousy more quickly and more surely than 
 by any other expedient. It gives him an air both 
 of modesty and of strength by concentration. In 
 reality it does neither. It is only an air. The so- 
 called Reality consists of nothing but unrealities, 
 of shams, and masks. A specialist is not a master 
 of his subject ; he is a master of the art than which 
 there is no greater, the art of making other people 
 believe that you are not what you are, but what they 
 want you to be. 
 
 "Nature has a horror of specialists; and she 
 will reveal her secrets to an insane poet rather than 
 to a specialist. Most great inventions were made 
 either by 'outsiders,' or by young men who had 
 not yet had the time to harden into specialists. In 
 specialisation there is nothing but a total misunder- 
 standing of Nature. 
 
 "Nature acts by instantaneous correlation and 
 co-operation of different parts to one end ; and to 
 
1 8 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 specialise is tantamount to taking a clock to pieces, 
 putting them separately in a row on the table, 
 and then expecting them to give you the exact 
 time. 
 
 "In Nature there is no evolution, but only co- 
 evolution ; there is no differentiation but only co- 
 differentiation. The little ones have quite overlooked 
 all that ; and that is why so many of the statements 
 of co-differentiation in my zoology can be neither 
 confirmed nor refuted by them. Who dare say 
 which is a ' part ' in Nature ? Is the hand a ( part,' 
 that is, something that might legitimately be told off 
 as a speciality ? Or must it be studied in connection 
 with the arm, or with its homologies in the nether 
 part of the body ? 
 
 " In the same way : what constitutes a * period ' 
 in history ? Any division of a hundred or a thousand 
 years by two, three, or four ? Or by a division of 
 twenty-five or thirty only ? Who can tell ? A man 
 who says he is a specialist in the thirteenth century, 
 is he not like a man who pretends that he is a 
 specialist in respiration in the evening ? 
 
 " Nature does specialise ; witness her innumerable 
 specialists. But do we know, do we possess the 
 slightest idea as to how she does it ? Can we prove 
 why a goose has its peculiar head and not that of a 
 stork? Evidently not, because we do not know 
 what Nature calls a part, a speciality. She abhors 
 specialists, just because they know so little of her 
 way of specialising." 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 19 
 
 At this point of Aristotle's speech, Aristophanes 
 asked for leave to protest. Having obtained it from 
 Zeus, he commenced forthwith : " O Father of 
 Nature and Man, I can no longer stand the invective 
 of the Stagirite. In his time he was prudent enough 
 to postpone his birth till after my mortal days ; other- 
 wise I should have treated him as I did Meton and 
 Socrates, and other philosophers. But here he shall 
 not escape me. Just imagine, this man wants to 
 deprive creation of the best fun that is offered to 
 the thinking beings amongst animals and humans. 
 
 "I wish he had overheard, as I have, when the 
 other night I passed through an old forest near 
 Darlington, a conversation between an old owl, a 
 black woodpecker, and a badger. The owl sat, 
 somewhat lower than usual on a birch-tree, while 
 the woodpecker stopped his work at the bark of the 
 groaning tree, and the badger had left his hole in 
 order to enjoy the cool breath of the night. The 
 owl said : < Good-evening, Mr Woodpecker, how is 
 business? Many worms beneath the bark? 5 The 
 woodpecker replied : * Thanks, madam, there is a 
 slump, but one must put up with what one can get.' 
 
 "The badger then complained that he passed 
 tedious hours in the ground, and he wished he 
 could again see the exciting times of a few 
 hundred thousand years ago when earthquakes and 
 other catastrophes made existence more entertaining. 
 * Quite so,' said the owl, < the forest is getting too 
 civilised, and too calm. But you see, my friends, I 
 have provided for much solid amusement for my old 
 days. I used to visit a human's room, who read 
 a great number of books. I asked him to teach 
 me that art. I found it easy enough, only that 
 
20 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 these humans will read in a straight line from left 
 to right, and I am accustomed to circular looks all 
 round. 
 
 " c When I had quite acquired the art, I read some 
 of his books. They were all about us folk in the 
 forest. Once I chanced upon a chapter on owls. 
 You may easily imagine how interested I was. I 
 had not yet read a few pages, when I was seized 
 with such a laughter that the professor became very 
 indignant and told me to leave him. This I did ; 
 but whenever he read his books, I read them too, 
 perched on a tree not far from his study. I cannot 
 tell you how amusing it was. 
 
 " c These humans tell stories about us owls, and 
 about you, Mr Woodpecker, and Mr Badger, that 
 would cause a sloth to dance with joy. They 
 imagine they know how we see, how we fly, how 
 we get our food, and how we make our abodes. As 
 a matter of fact they have hopelessly wrong notions 
 about all these things. They want, as my venerated 
 father used to say, to tap the lightning off into nice 
 little flasks, in order to study it conveniently. This 
 they call Evolution. 
 
 " c The idea was mostly developed in England, in 
 a country where they are proud of thinking that 
 they always "muddle through somehow." These 
 > three words they apply to Nature, and call it 
 Evolution. Once upon a time, they say it does not 
 matter whether 200,000 or 300,000 years, or per- 
 chance 645,789 years ago there was my ancestor 
 who, by mere accident, had an eye that enabled him 
 to see more clearly at night than other , birds did. 
 This eye enabled him to catch more prey, thus to 
 live longer, and to transmit his nocturne of an eye 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 21 
 
 to his progeny. And so by degrees we muddled 
 into owlship. 
 
 " c Is that not charming ? My father used to laugh 
 at that idea until all the cuckoos came to inquire 
 what illness had befallen him. He told me, that 
 an owl's eye was in strict correlation with definite 
 and strongly individual formations of the ears, of the 
 neck, of the feet, and of the intestines, and that 
 accordingly a mere accidental change in the supposed 
 ancestor's eye was totally insufficient to account for 
 the corresponding and correlative formations just 
 mentioned. 
 
 " c Such correlative and simultaneous changes in 
 various organs can be the consequences only of a 
 violent and, as it were, fulgurous shock to the whole 
 system of a bird. Such shocks are not a matter of 
 slow growth. As all individual animal life at present 
 is called into existence by one shock of fulgurant 
 forces, even so it arose originally. 
 
 " ' But the English think that Nature is by birth 
 an Englishman who adopts new organisms as English- 
 men adopt new systems of measures, calendars, 
 inventions, or laws, i.e. hundreds of years after 
 someone else has fulgurated them out. 
 
 " c They imagine Nature to be, by rank and profes- 
 sion, a middle-class man and muddler; by religion, 
 a Nonconformist ; and by politics, a Liberal. How- 
 ever, we know better. Nature is, by rank and 
 profession, a free lance and a genius ; by religion, a 
 Roman Catholic; and by politics, a Tory of the 
 Tories. Now this being so, you may imagine, Mr 
 Woodpecker and Mr Badger, what capital fun it is 
 to read these learned lucubrations about birds and 
 other animals as written by humans. 
 
22 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " c The other day I called on Master Fox in the 
 neighbourhood. He was ill and, in order to amuse 
 him, I told him what they say of him in human 
 books. He fairly burst with laughter. He told me 
 later on, that by narrating all the Don Quixote 
 stories told of him by man, to a big brown bear, he 
 became the court-favourite of that dreaded king of 
 the place, 
 
 " ' I have sent the swiftest bat, to whom I gave 
 a safe conduct, to all the birds and animals of this 
 country, to meet at a given time on one of the peaks 
 of the Hartz Mountains, where I mean to entertain 
 them with the stories told by specialists on each of 
 them, on their structure, functions, and mode of life. 
 It will be the greatest fun we have had these two 
 thousand years. I charged the nightingales, the 
 larks, and the mocking birds of America to open the 
 meeting with the most wonderful chorus that they 
 have ever sung, and I am sure that 1 will deserve 
 well of the whole community of birds and other 
 animals by offering them this the most exhilarating 
 amusement imaginable.' 
 
 " So spake the owl. And now, O Zeus, can you 
 really brook Aristotle's attempt to demolish and to 
 remove men who furnish pleasure and intense amuse- 
 ment to so many animals holy to men and even to 
 the gods ? I cannot believe it. You know how 
 necessary it is to provide carefully for the amuse- 
 ment of people. To neglect Dionysus is to court 
 hideous punishment. If the specialists in Nature 
 should disappear, you will, O Zeus, have endless 
 anarchy on all sides. Birds, insects, v sn$kes, and 
 reptiles, lions, felines, and bears they will all rise 
 in bored discontent, in the waters, on land, in the 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 23 
 
 air. You will never have a free moment for calm 
 repose. 
 
 " They will worry all the gods incessantly. They 
 will make the most annoying conspiracies and plots 
 and intrigues against all of us. Let us not take 
 Aristotle seriously. He means well, and is no doubt 
 quite right, as far as reason goes. But does reason 
 go very far ? Can he now deny the eternal rights 
 of unreason ? To remove the specialists in biology 
 and natural history is to remove the comedy from 
 Athens. The Athenians, in order to be ruled, must 
 be entertained. But for me and the like of me, the 
 Athenians could never have held out as long as they 
 did hold out. It is even so with animals. They 
 want their Aristophanes. They must have their 
 specialists. Pray, Artemis, you who in your hunts 
 over dales and mountains have heard and observed 
 everything that concerns animals, join me in protest- 
 ing against the onslaught of Aristotle on men so 
 necessary for the well-being of animated Nature." 
 
 Artemis Diana laughed melodiously and nodded 
 consent. The other gods, amidst great hilarity, 
 passed a vote against Aristotle, and the sage smilingly 
 bowed acceptance of the censure. 
 
 " I will abide," he exclaimed, " by your decision. 
 But, pray, let me make just one more remark which, 
 I have ncy doubt, the master-minds of the unique 
 city, over which we are hovering at present, will 
 gladly approve. I call upon you Lionardo, Michel- 
 
24 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 angelo, Machiavelli, and you magnificent Lorenzo, 
 whether I am exceeding the limits of truth. I 
 do maintain that while the little ones have, in 
 religion, gone from Polytheism to Monotheism, 
 they pretend that in matters of knowledge time is 
 constantly increasing the number of gods to be 
 worshipped. 
 
 "At present they affect to believe no longer in 
 the numerous gods and goddesses of the Olympus, 
 but only in one God. In point of knowledge, on the 
 other hand, they declare that each little department 
 thereof is endless, requiring the study and devotion 
 of a whole lifetime, and controlled, each of them, 
 by a god whom they call an authority. Now, nothing 
 can be more evident than the fact that knowledge, 
 real knowledge, becomes increasingly more steno- 
 graphic in expression, and sensibly easier of acquisi- 
 tion. The Chinese write encyclopaedias in 6000 
 volumes ; the modern Europeans do so in twenty-four 
 or thirty-six volumes." 
 
 Here Diogenes interrupted the Stagirite and said : 
 "I am afraid, O Aristotle, that your argument has 
 little real force to boast of. It does not prove at all 
 that the Chinese have only crude, empirical, and un- 
 organised knowledge, while the little ones in Europe 
 have a reasoned and systematised, and hence a less 
 cumbrous one. This is owing to quite a different cause. 
 
 "The little ones have of late invented a method of 
 publishing encyclopaedias in a manner so well adapted 
 to tempt, threaten, bully, or wire each member of 
 the general public into the purchase of an entire 
 copy, that if their encyclopaedias consisted of 6000 
 or 10,000 volumes each, the people of England, for 
 instance, would have to conquer Norway, Sweden, 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 25 
 
 and Iceland first. Norway they would be obliged to 
 conquer, in order to possess themselves of sufficient 
 wood for the cases ; Sweden, in order to appoint all 
 Swedish gymnasts for the acrobatic feat of fetching 
 a volume from the fiftieth row of a bookcase ; and 
 Iceland, in order to place excited readers of the en- 
 cyclopaedia in a cool place. But for this circumstance, 
 I am sure the little ones in Europe would fain publish 
 an encyclopaedia in 1 5,000 volumes." 
 
 When the laughter of the Assembly had subsided, 
 Aristotle continued : cc Nothing has struck me more 
 forcibly in my visit to their seats of learning than 
 this universal belief in the infinitude of each tiny 
 department or speciality. They do most gravely 
 assert that c nowadays ' it is impossible to embrace 
 more than one speciality ; and they look upon me or 
 Leibniz with a certain knowing smile as if in our 
 times all knowledge would have consisted of a few 
 jugs full of water, whereas now it is no less than 
 an ocean. But when you ask them the simplest 
 questions, they are at a loss how to answer them. 
 
 " I asked one of their most famous specialists why 
 the eyebrows of men are shorter than the moustaches. 
 He did not know it. How could he ? It takes the 
 knowledge of at least five so-called specialities to 
 answer such a question. I asked their most learned 
 specialist in their language, why the English have 
 dropped the use of c thou,' although no other 
 European nation has done so. He did not know it. 
 
26 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "They study a given subject when death has 
 driven out all life from it. They do not trouble 
 about language as a living organism, full of fight, of 
 movement, of ruses, of intrigues, of sins and graces ; 
 but only of language when it lies motionless, a 
 veritable corpse, on the table of the anatomical dis- 
 sector and dictionary-fiend. They do not study a 
 butterfly when it is in full life, flirting, pilfering, 
 gossiping, merrymaking ; but only when it is motion- 
 less, lifeless, pierced by a pin. This is how they get 
 their specialities. 
 
 " Death indeed is the greatest of all specialisers. 
 As soon as a man is dead, each hair or bone on or in 
 his body takes up a separate line of decay, caring 
 nothing for the other, full of scorn for its immediate 
 neighbour, sulking by itself, wandering to the Styx 
 alone and sullen. 
 
 " In England they have pushed that belief in 
 specialities to a funereal degree. I wonder they 
 allow a man to play one of their instruments, called 
 the piano, with both his hands at a time. I wonder 
 they do not insist that a given piece by Chopin be 
 played by two men, one of whom should first play 
 the part for the right hand, and afterwards the 
 other man the part for the left hand. To play 
 both parts at a time, and to have that done by 
 one single man too, what presumption ! How 
 superficial ! 
 
 "In law they have long acted in this sense. 
 There is one man, called the solicitor ( a very good 
 name ), who plays the bass, or left-hand part with a 
 vengeance, for several weeks. When that is done; 
 when the c hearer ' or client lies prostrate on the 
 ground from the infernal noise made by the solicitor's 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 27 
 
 music, the solicitor hands over the whole case to the 
 other man, the barrister, who plays the most tortuous 
 treble, in a manner likely to madden Pan himself. 
 
 "The idea, accepted by all the other nations of 
 Europe, that the whole prejudicial business of a legal 
 contention might very well be left to one man, to 
 a lawyer proper, what presumption ! How super- 
 ficial ! 
 
 " But when you tell them that they browbeat their 
 own principle of specialisation by taking their judges 
 from amongst late barristers, then they wax into an 
 august anger. Yet no other nation does that. The 
 function of a judge is radically different from that of 
 a barrister. After a man has been a barrister for 
 twenty years ; after all his mind has taken the creases 
 and folds of barristerdom ; after he has quite special- 
 ised himself in that particular line, he is unlikely to 
 have the best qualities of a judge. If a barrister 
 cannot be a solicitor ; why should he be at once, and 
 suddenly able to become judge? 
 
 " Their arguments to that effect are most amusing. 
 They dance a real war-dance round the truth that 
 they mean to scalp. 
 
 "The truth of course is that all the three have 
 one and the same speciality : that of running England. 
 That country is lawyer-ridden, as Egypt was priest- 
 ridden, or Babylonia scribe-ridden. The English 
 being too proud to be stingy or petty in money 
 matters, do not mind their rulers, the solicitors- 
 barristers-judges, because these deprive them eventu- 
 ally only of what the English do not hold in great 
 esteem, small sums of money. In France, where 
 people cling fanatically to a penny, the bar- 
 risters have not been allowed to become judges. 
 
28 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 In France specialisation in law has triumphed, where 
 in England it has failed. 
 
 " Does that not show that specialisation is done, 
 not in obedience to the behests of truth, but to those 
 of interests ? 
 
 " We Hellenes specialised on small city-states ; 
 we did not want to widen out indefinitely into huge 
 states; just because we wanted to give each citizen 
 a chance of coining out all his human capital, and not 
 to become, like our slaves, a limited specialist. In a 
 huge state specialisation becomes inevitable. In such 
 states they must, more or less, sterilise the human 
 capital of millions of citizens, just as we Hellenes 
 sterilised the political capital of thousands of slaves. 
 
 "Specialisation is enslaving, if not downright 
 slavery. It furthers truth very little; it cripples 
 man. 
 
 " Just as a man who talks several languages well, 
 will write his own idiom better than do his less 
 accomplished compatriots; even so the man who 
 keeps his mind open to more than one aspect of 
 things, to more than one c speciality ' will be by far 
 more efficient than his less broad-minded colleagues. 
 Man may and shall invent, as I have long predicted 
 it, highly specialised machines doing the work of the 
 weaver, or the baker. But he himself must not 
 become a machine. This is what happens c now,' as 
 the little ones say all over Europe and America. 
 
 " Not only have they formed states with many, 
 many millions of people each. Worse than that, 
 they have agglomerated the majority of these millions 
 into a few towns of unwieldy size. In those towns 
 specialisation is carried into every fibre of men and 
 women. This desiccates them, disemotions them, 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 29 
 
 sterilises them. We Hellenes gladly admit that the 
 Europeans of the last four centuries have excelled us 
 in one art : in music. But their period for this ex- 
 ceeding excellence is now gone. 
 
 "By over-specialisation of thought and heart, 
 caused chiefly by over-urbanisation, the very wells of 
 music begin to dry up. The music of the day is 
 hysterical, neurasthenic, and false. It is the cry, not 
 of an aching heart, but of an aching tooth, of a 
 gouty toe, or a rheumatic nerve. It does not weep ; 
 it coughs phthisically. It does not sigh ; it sneezes. 
 It is a blend of what we used to call Phrygian and 
 Corybantic rhapsodies. 
 
 "And as in music, even so in character. Where 
 each individual distorts himself or herself into a 
 narrow speciality, there people must needs become as 
 angular, lop-sided, and grotesque as possible. They 
 are, when together in a room, like the words on a 
 page of a dictionary: they have nothing to com- 
 municate to one another. There they stand, each in 
 his cage, uncommunicative, sulky, and forbidding. 
 One thinks in F major ; the other in F sharp minor. 
 Harmony amongst them is impossible. Every one of 
 them is hopelessly right in every one of his ideas ; and 
 of all mental processes, that of doubt or hesitation in 
 judgment is the last they practise. 
 
 " A specialist, does not doubt. Why should he ? 
 To him the most complicated things human appear as 
 mere specialities, that is, as mere fragments. A 
 woman is only a specialist in parturition. A physician 
 is only a specialist in writing Latin words on small 
 slips of paper. A barrister is only a man who wears 
 neither moustache nor beard. A clergyman is prac- 
 tically a collar buttoning behind, and supported by 
 
30 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 a sort of man inside it. In that way everything is 
 so simplified that no difficulty of comprehending it 
 remains. 
 
 " All this clearly proves, O Empedocles, how right 
 and, at the same time, how wrong you were in your 
 view of the origin of things. Perhaps you were 
 right in saying that the parts or organs of our bodies 
 arose singly, or, as it were, as specialists. In times 
 long before us there arose, as you taught, heads 
 without necks ; arms wandering alone in space ; eyes, 
 without foreheads, roaming about by themselves. 
 But when you say that all this happened only at the 
 beginning of things, you are, I take it, sorely mis- 
 taken. Indeed it is still going on in countries where 
 specialism reigns supreme; at anyrate it is going on 
 in the moral world. In such countries you still see 
 arms wandering alone in space, or eyes roaming 
 about without foreheads, as well as heads without 
 brains flying about in space. Not literally, of course. 
 But what else is a character-specialist cultivating 
 exclusively one quality of the human soul than an 
 arm wandering about alone? The little ones must 
 come back to the Hellenic idea of seeing things as a 
 whole, and not, as do wretched flies, as mere chips 
 of things." 
 
 The divine Assembly had listened deferentially to 
 the great sage. Zeus now charged Hermes^ to fetch 
 some of the masterpieces from the room called the 
 Tribuna at the Uffizi in Florence. Hermes, aided by 
 
ARISTOTLE ON SPECIALISM 31 
 
 a number of nymphs, fetched them and, placing them 
 in the midst of the Assembly, exhibited their perfect 
 beauty to the gods and heroes. This refreshed their 
 souls sickened with the story of the serfdom of 
 modern over-specialism. 
 
THE SECOND NIGHT 
 
 DIOGENES AND PLATO ON TOLSTOY, IBSEN, 
 SHAW, ETC. 
 
 ON the second night the Olympians assembled at 
 Pompeii. It was a balmy, starry night. The ruins 
 of the old town, white in their marble dresses, shone 
 with a spectral brightness against the mountains, 
 bays, and meadows surrounding them. From Stabise 
 and Gragnano opposite one could hear the pipe of 
 Pan and the laughter of his nymphs, and on the 
 dark water there were magic boats carrying Circe 
 and her maids to their blue grotto in Capri. Selene 
 sent her mildest rays over the scene, and grass and 
 stone were as if steeped in silvery dreams. The 
 place selected for the meeting was the amphitheatre. 
 At a move of Zeus' right hand the seats and alleys, 
 which had long since disappeared under the pressure 
 of the ugly lava, rose from the ground. The 
 orchestra and stage took up their old shape, and the 
 whole graceful space with its incomparable view was 
 again full of beauty, comfort, and pleasurableness. 
 Zeus, and his wife Juno, sat down on the central 
 seat, and around them the other gods and heroes. 
 When everyone had found his or her seat, Zeus 
 spake : " We have heard with much contentment the 
 experiences of Aristotle in the country which the 
 little ones below call England. We should now like 
 to hear something about the theatres in that strange 
 
 3 2 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 33 
 
 land. If life itself is so uncommon and funny in 
 that part of the non-Grecian world, their theatre, 
 reflecting life, must be unusually entertaining. Per- 
 haps you Aristotle, as the most renowned critic 
 of poetry and the drama, will be good enough to 
 give us an idea of the thing they call drama in 
 England." 
 
 Whereupon Aristotle rose from his seat, and treated 
 the immortals to a sight which no one had as yet 
 enjoyed : he smiled. And smilingly he said to the 
 almighty son of Kronos, ruler of the world : " O 
 Zeus, your wish is a behest, and if you insist I will 
 of course obey. But pray, kindly consider that I 
 have, with your consent, withheld from these people, 
 who call themselves moderns, and who might better 
 be called after lings, the second book of my c Poetics,' in 
 which I treat of the comedy, the farce, the burlesque, 
 and similar phlyakes, as we term them. If now I 
 should reveal my thoughts on the phlyakes of the 
 English, several of their sophists, whom they call 
 University professors, might still add to the lava 
 which my commentators have spurted out upon 
 my works, just as we see here the lava of angry 
 Vesuvius cover the beauteous fields in and around 
 Pompeii. 
 
 "May I propose the proper person to entertain 
 us about that sort of comedy of the English which, 
 at present, is more or less generally considered to be 
 their most valuable dramatic output ? If so," Aristotle 
 continued at a sign from Zeus, " I propose him who 
 over there at the right entrance of the stage lies 
 carelessly on the ground and seems to heed us as 
 little as in his time he heeded the Athenians and the 
 Corinthians." Aristotle, raising his hand, pointed 
 
34 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 to the shabby, untidy figure of Diogenes. When 
 the gods and heroes heard the name and looked at 
 the person of the Cynic, they all burst out in im- 
 mortal laughter, and the sea, catching the gay ripple, 
 laughed as far as Sorrento. 
 
 Diogenes, without moving from his position, and 
 putting one of his legs comfortably on one of the 
 low statues of a satyr, turned his head towards Zeus 
 and exclaimed : " Verily, I tell you, you only confirm 
 me in my old belief, that there is nothing sadder than 
 laughter. Why should you laugh? Are we not 
 here to enjoy ourselves? Is not this lovely spot one 
 where even we might and ought to feel perfectly 
 happy? Why, then, laugh? I mean, of course, 
 laugh at me. 
 
 "I do pooh-pooh all your glories. Olympus to me 
 is not a whit more agreeble than my tub at Corinth. 
 This is, you understand, the reason of my predilection 
 for the English. They, alone of all these Europeans, 
 live at least for five seconds each day in a tub. 
 
 " I also pooh-pooh your feasts, your ambrosia and 
 nectar. For having passed a few months in a large 
 village they call London, I have so completely 
 lost my palate and taste, that for the next two 
 thousand years, at any rate, I shall not be able to 
 distinguish nectar from stale ale, nor ambrosia from 
 cabbage. , 
 
 " Yes, I still pooh-pooh, disdain and neglect most 
 of the things that you and your worshippers hold in 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 35 
 
 great esteem. Alcibiades raved about the beauty of 
 women now limping about in the various cities of the 
 barbarians, and more particularly in the towns of the 
 English. A woman ! A mere woman ! What is 
 the good of a woman unless one is rid of her? I 
 still think what I used to teach, that between a man 
 and a woman there is only a slight difference, one 
 that is scarcely worth considering. 
 
 " You may laugh until Vesuvius again vomits scorn 
 upon you, but I tell you here, at Pompeii, what I used 
 to tell everybody at Corinth : your glories are all 
 gone, or ought to go. Just look at Venus. There 
 she sits displaying to eager-looking Pans and Sileni 
 the loveliness of her head and neck and figure. But 
 what does it mean after all ? Repentance and worm- 
 wood. Look at Ares (Mars). Does he not look 
 as if he ruled the world ? Does he not behave as if 
 all great things were achieved through and by him ? 
 And what is it in reality ? Mere butchery cowardly 
 butchery. You laugh; of course, you do. But I 
 mean to show you that all that I have ever taught is 
 nothing less than strictly true ; the only truth ; truth 
 the one. 
 
 "Aristotle, in pointing me out as the person 
 who can best tell you what this new Shavian drama 
 of England really is ; Aristotle, I say, may have acted 
 with malice. He has, nevertheless, acted with great 
 wisdom. I am indeed the only man out of the world 
 (there is none in it), who does clearly and fully 
 understand my little disciple who calls himself 
 Bernard Shaw. Of the other friends and admirers 
 of his, he might very well say what that great 
 German philosopher Hegel said in his last moments : 
 c One man alone has understood me well, and even 
 
36 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 he misunderstood me entirely.' He might with 
 reference to my Cynic lady friend Hipparchia also 
 say : ' One man alone understood me well, and she 
 was a woman.' 
 
 "The fact is, Shaw, the son of Pooh-Pooh, is 
 simply a goody disciple of my school, of the Cynics. 
 When I was still within that mortal coil which men 
 call skin and flesh, I did take all my sputterings and 
 utterings very seriously, or as they say in cultured 
 Mayfair : c Oh grant serio? I really thought, as 
 undoubtedly thinks my brave disciple in London, that 
 my criticism of social, political, or religious things 
 went deep into the essence of all that maintains 
 Society, the State, and the Temples. Good old 
 Plato, it is true, hinted at my vanity and conceit 
 . more than once, and I still feel the sting of his 
 remark when once, soaked all through by the rain, 
 I was surrounded by pitying folk : c If you want to 
 feel pity for Diogenes,' Plato said, c then leave him 
 alone.' 
 
 "But I then did not heed any satire directed 
 against me, being fully occupied with satirising others 
 all day long. However, since that time, and since I 
 have been given a corner in the palace of the immortals, 
 lying on one of the steps like a dog, as that Italian 
 dauber, whom they call Raphael, painted me in his 
 * School of Athens' ( a fresco which might be much 
 better had Raphael wisely chosen his age and 
 appeared as a Pros-Raphael ite ) ; ever since I have 
 learnt a great deal, not only about others, but also 
 about myself. 
 
 "While you superior people \drink nectar, and par- 
 take of ambrosia, I enjoy with infinite zest the mali- 
 cious pleasure of studying the capers, antics, and poses 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 37 
 
 of my posthumous selfs, the Diogeneses of that 
 speck on the mirror of eternity which the little 
 ones below call c our time.' Could anything be 
 more amusing to a Cynic of about twenty-two 
 centuries' standing like myself, who has heard and 
 taught all the most nerve-rasping eccentricities 
 imaginable, than to hear Tolstoy, Shaw, Ibsen, and 
 tutti quanti, teach with thunderous ponderosity, 
 and with penurious fulguration their doctrines as 
 the latest and hitherto unheard-of delivery of the 
 human or inhuman mind? I beg to assure you it 
 is excruciatingly funny. But I feel I must tell 
 you the whole story in due order. It happened 
 thus. 
 
 "I learnt from Momus that another posthumous 
 self of mine had arisen and, accordingly, I forthwith 
 repaired to the place called London. (By the way, 
 it is a queer place. It is neither a village, nor a 
 town; neither a country, nor a desert; it is some- 
 thing of all, and much of neither.) In one of the 
 streets I saw an inscription over a door 'Agency 
 for amusements, theatres, blue bands, green bands, 
 etc.' I did not quite understand what blue bands 
 had to do with amusement, but I entered. 
 
 " Behind the counter was a middle-aged man work- 
 ing busily at papers. I addressed him: 'Be cheerful!' 
 
 "He looked at me in a curious fashion, evidently 
 doubting the sanity of my mind. As a matter of 
 fact, after a little while I could not help seeing that 
 he was right. How could I imagine him to be 
 cheerful ? 
 
 " I asked him for the means of seeing a theatrical 
 piece by Shaw. He offered a ticket, and wanted 
 to know my name. I said c Diogenes.' 
 
38 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " He became impatient, and said : ' Diogenes 
 which ? I mean, your family name ? ' 
 
 UC I have no other name,' I said; 'don't you 
 know, I am Diogenes who cut Alexander the 
 Great?' 
 
 " c Alexander the Great?' he said c Why, I only 
 know of a tailor, called Alexander the Great. Do 
 you mean to tell me you cut him?' 
 
 " c No,' I said ; c I do not. I mean Alexander, 
 King of Macedon.' 
 
 " Whereupon he contemptuously said : ' I never 
 heard of the gentleman, and if he was a king of 
 Macedon he has made a jolly fine mess of his 
 country just read about the Macedonian question 
 in to-day's Daily Telegraph? I wanted to ask him 
 whether he was perchance Professor of History, 
 but other people came in, and so I left. 
 
 " On the same evening I was shown the way to a 
 theatre, and I understood that the piece given was 
 Arms and the Man. I enjoyed myself immensely. 
 
 "It is all very well to share the pleasures of 
 Olympus with the gods. Yet, by all the Graces, 
 whenever I hear or read reminiscences of my early 
 youth, those unforgettable events and ideas of the 
 time when I walked in the streets of Athens in the 
 wake of my revered master Antisthenes, it gives 
 me a thrill of pleasure, I might almost saj, a new 
 shiver. 
 
 " Just fancy, here I was sitting in far-off Britannia, 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 39 
 
 over two thousand years after my mortal existence, 
 listening to an oration of Antisthenes, my master, 
 which we used to call 'Kyros.' I see very well, O 
 Ares, you remember the famous oration directed 
 against you, against all the glories of War, because 
 even now you frown on me, and I must ask Venus 
 to keep you in check. I have received too many a 
 whipping while I was at Athens and Corinth pray 
 let me in peace here in our temporary Olympus. 
 
 "At present, as you well know, I have quite 
 changed my ideas about war, and much as I may 
 have disliked you before, at present I know that 
 Apollo, Venus, you Ares, and Dionysus keep all 
 mortal things agoing. But let us amuse ourselves 
 with the contemplation of an oration of Antisthenes 
 in modern Britannic. 
 
 "Antisthenes hated war so much that he attacked 
 the greatest and least doubted military glory of the 
 Athenians, their victories over the Persians. He 
 attacked it with serious arguments, he sneered at it, 
 he tried to reduce it to a mere sham. Did Antis- 
 thenes not say, that the victory of the Athenians 
 over the Persians at Salamis would have been 
 something admirable, had the Persians excelled the 
 Athenians in point of virtue and capability ? For 
 in that case the Athenians would have proved even 
 more virtuous and more capable. However, the 
 Persians, Antisthenes elaborately proves, were alto- 
 gether inferior. Nor did they have a true king, 
 Xerxes being a mere sham king with a high and 
 richly jewelled cap on his head, sittting on a golden 
 throne, like a doll. Had Xerxes not to whip his 
 soldiers into battle? What, then, is the glory of 
 the Athenians ? None ! Salamis, like all battles, 
 
40 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 was a mere butchery, and soldiers are mere cowards, 
 beating inferiors and running away from superiors. 
 So far Antisthenes. 
 
 "The Britannic version of Antisthenes' sally 
 against war, soldiers, and the whole of the military 
 spirit, I found comical in the extreme. ' Well done ' 
 I repeatedly exclaimed within myself, when I saw 
 the old capers of the Cynics of my mortal time 
 brought up again for the consumption of people 
 who had never heard of Cynics. That man Shaw 
 out-Cynics many a Cynic. He brings upon the 
 stage a number of persons, each of whom is, in turn, 
 a good soul first, and then a viper; an enthusiast, 
 and then a liar ; a virtue, and then vice itself. 
 
 "Take the girl Raina. She begins by being ideal 
 and enthusiastic; ideal, because she is pure, young, 
 and in love with her own fiancd; enthusiastic, be- 
 cause she is in raptures over the military glory of 
 her fianc^ as would be in all truth and reality a 
 hundred out of each hundred girls in most countries 
 of the sub-Shavian world. Not the slightest inkling 
 or fact is indicated that she is not pure, ideal, or 
 genuinely enthusiastic. In the next scene she is 
 suddenly made out to be a vicious girl, a coldly 
 calculating minx, and we are given to understand 
 that she has had no end of general and particular 
 adventures behind her, as she hopes to have a good 
 many in front of her. 
 
 " Why ? Why are we now to assume or believe 
 that Raina of yesterday is not Raina of to-day? 
 Where is the motive, I asked myself with grim 
 satisfaction with the brave Cynicism of the author. 
 Why ? Simply, for nothing. The comedy as such 
 does not require it ; no fact alleged to have happened, 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 41 
 
 substantiates it; no situation growing out of the 
 piece makes it a dramatic necessity. It is done 
 simply and exclusively, in true Cynic fashion, for the 
 sake of ridiculing a person that began by being 
 enthusiastic for War. 
 
 "It is the old story of the ugly sorceress in the 
 child's book of fables. ' If you praise the beauty of 
 yonder little girl in the garden, I will transform you 
 into a guinea-pig ; and if you still continue doing so, 
 I will make an old cock of you.' Even so Raina is 
 changed into a viper, a liar, a dissimulator, a sense- 
 less changer of lovers, an anything, without the 
 slightest inner coherence, or what the philosophers 
 call, psychological connection. 
 
 "The same old witch's wand is used, with the 
 freedom of a clown, with regard to the fiancg of 
 Raina, the young military hero. He had by a bold 
 cavalry charge captured a battery or two of the 
 enemy's artillery. How can he be forgiven such an 
 execrable deed ? How dare he succeed ? Out with 
 the old sauce of Antisthenes ! It is, of course, 
 exceedingly stale by this time. But the English, it 
 appears, are so thoroughly used to stale sauces. 
 They will not notice it at all. And thus all the 
 threadbare arguments of Antisthenes are dished up 
 again. I jubilated in my pride. 
 
 " Thejianc^, Sergius, took the batteries of cannon 
 because, we are told, by a mistake of their com- 
 mander, they were not charged. How witty ! 
 How clever ! Antisthenes merely said that the 
 Persians were much inferior to the Athenians, so 
 the latter easily got the better of the former. But 
 this twentieth-century dapper little Cynic goes one 
 better. He says, as it were, the Persians had no 
 
42 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 weapons to strike with. Who would have thought 
 of such an ingenious satire ? 
 
 " Please, Hermes (Mercury), do not interrupt me ! 
 I know very well what you mean to say. In all 
 actions of men, victory depends more on the short- 
 comings of their rivals and competitors than on their 
 own genius. It is no special feature of military 
 victories. Of two grocers in the same street, 
 one succeeds mainly because the other is neglect- 
 ful and unbusinesslike. Of two dramatists in the 
 same country, one succeeds because he gives the 
 people what they want, and not, as does the other, 
 what dramatic Art wants. And so forth ad in- 
 Jinitum. 
 
 "But my Cynical Shavian does not heed these 
 inconsistencies ; he knows the public will not notice 
 them. He wants simply to ridicule War, and the 
 whole military spirit. Accordingly out with the 
 witch's wand, and let us change the hero first into a 
 whimpering calf, and then suddenly into a lewd he- 
 goat, and then, for no reason whatever, into the 
 most mendacious magpie flying about, and finally into 
 a little mouse caught in a trap laid by a kitchen- 
 maid. For this is precisely what happens to the 
 hero Sergius. 
 
 "Returning from war, he is sick of it with a 
 nauseating sea-sickness. Why? Unknown; or, as 
 Herbert Spencer, the next best replica of Antisthenes 
 in Britannia, would have said, unknowable. 
 
 " Sergius is sentimentally idiotic about the nullity 
 of his military glory. A few moments later he can- 
 not resist the rustic beauties of a kitchen-maid, one 
 minute after he had disentangled himself out of the 
 embraces of his beautiful, young, and worshipped 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 43 
 
 Jiancde. The he-goat is upon him. Why? Un- 
 known, unknowable. 
 
 "Here in our fourth dimension we know very 
 well (do we not. Ares ?) that soldiers have done 
 similar escapades ? But have barristers done less ? 
 Have all solicitors proved bosom-proof? Has no 
 dramatist ever been sorely tempted by buxomness 
 and vigorous development of youthful flesh? One 
 wonders. 
 
 "Why then bring up such stuff, without the 
 slightest reason, without the slightest need, internal 
 or external ? But the soldier, do you not see, must 
 be run down. He must be ridiculed. It must be 
 shown that he is only a cowardly mouse caught in 
 the trap laid for him by that very kitchen-maid 
 whom at first he treats merely as a well-ordered 
 mass of tempting flesh, and whom in the end he 
 marries. 
 
 "This trait is delicious. I have frequently been 
 in Mysia, or what these people now call Bulgaria, 
 where Shaw's scene is laid. The idea of a Bulgarian 
 gentleman of the highest standing marrying a kitchen- 
 maid gave me a fit of laughter. In eccentric England 
 a high-born gentleman may very well marry a bar- 
 maid. In Bulgaria a nobleman will no more marry a 
 servant-girl than his own mother. He has known 
 too many of them; he can study her carefully, 
 encyclopaedically, without marrying her in the least. 
 For, she will never love him. 
 
 " Of course, my acolyte full well knows that the 
 English are not at all conversant with any nation 
 south of Dover Straits, and that one may tell them 
 anything one pleases about nations other than them- 
 selves. They will believe it. And so Sergius 
 
44 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 marries the girl by the same necessity that a mouse 
 may be said to have married the trap into which it 
 drops. 
 
 " Is not this fun indeed ? To call marrying what 
 simple people call getting morally insane ? How 
 clever ! How bright ! 
 
 "This is precisely what we Cynics used to do in 
 ancient Greece. We turned humanity inside out, 
 and then I walked in day-time in the streets with a 
 lamp in my hand in search of a normal man, of a 
 human being. If you vitriole a person's face or 
 character first, how can you expect him to have 
 unscathed features ? But that is precisely the point 
 with us Cynics. We take human nature ; we then 
 vitriole it out of all shape, and afterwards cry out in 
 sheer indignation, * How awful ! ' ' How absurd ! ' 
 This reminds me of my lawyer pupil who once, in 
 the defence of a fellow who had murdered his 
 parents, pathetically exclaimed to the jury: c And 
 - finally, gentlemen, have pity on this poor, orphaned 
 V boy! 5 
 
 " Not content with Sergius, another c type ' of 
 soldier is dragged up to the stage ; a Swiss. Now I 
 do not here mean to repeat our old Greek jokes 
 about people similar to the Swiss, such as the 
 Paphlagonians or Cilicians. I will only remark that 
 the French, who have for over four hundred years 
 had intimate knowledge of the Swiss, put the whole 
 of Swiss character into the famous mot: ' Which 
 animal resembles a human being most?' Answer: 
 'A Swiss.' 
 
 "From a Swiss you may expect anything. He 
 talks three languages ; all in vile German. He is to 
 his beautiful country like a wart on a perfect face. 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 45 
 
 In the midst of paradise he is worse than a Prussian 
 yokel born in the dreary heaths of North Germany. 
 He is a Swiss. He has been a mercenary soldier to 
 Popes and Lutheran princes alike. His aim was 
 money ; is money ; will always be nothing but money. 
 He sells his blood as he does the milk of his cows, 
 by the litre or the decilitre; preferably by the latter. 
 He likes war well enough ; but he prefers truces and 
 cessation of arms. He thinks the best part of death 
 is the avoidance thereof. He is, when a mercenary, 
 a military Cynic. 
 
 " I like him dearly ; he does me honour. When- 
 ever I see him on the grand staircase in the Vatican, I 
 grin 'way down in my heart. Here is a Cynic dressed 
 up like a parrot in gorgeous plumage. Diogenes 
 in Rococo-dress ! It is intensely amusing. 
 
 " Now this Swiss is made by Shaw a c type ' of a 
 soldier. This is quite in accordance with the pro- 
 cedure of the Cynical School. First, all real soldierly 
 qualities are vitrioled out of the man by making him 
 a Swiss mercenary; and then he is shown up in all 
 his callous indifference to Right, Love, or Justice; 
 which is tantamount to saying 'a distinguished 
 Belgian lady patrolling Piccadilly after midnight.' 
 That Swiss mercenary proves no more against the 
 worth of soldiers, than that Belgian woman proves 
 anything in disgrace of the women of Belgium. If 
 Shaw's figure proves anything, it proves the worth- 
 lessness of mercenaries in general, and of Swiss 
 mercenaries in particular. That is, it proves some- 
 thing quite different from what it means to prove. 
 This too is arch-Cynical. Why, who knows it better 
 than I, that we Cynics were not infrequently instru- 
 mental in bringing about the very reverse of what 
 
46 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 we were aiming at? But the more perverse, the 
 better the fun. 
 
 "And the fun is excellent beyond words. It is, 
 in fact, as grim as the grimmest Welshman. On my 
 way home from the theatre I thought of it, and 
 started laughing in the street with such violence that 
 a policeman wanted to take me to the station. The 
 grimness of the fun was this : inquiring about the 
 author, I learnt that he was an Irishman. I had no 
 sooner made sure of the truth of this statement than 
 I could not control myself for laughter. 
 
 " An Irishman reviling war, and soldiers, and the 
 military spirit! How unutterably grim, how un- 
 speakably grimy! The Irish, endowed by nature 
 with gifts of the body as well as the mind incom- 
 parably superior to those of the English, have made 
 the most atrocious failure of their history, of their 
 possibilities, of their chances, for that one and only 
 reason, that they never found means of character 
 and endurance to fight for their rights and hopes in 
 bitter and unrelenting wars. Not having made a 
 single effort in any way comparable to the sustained 
 armed resistance of the Scotch, the Dutch, the 
 Hungarians, or the Boers, in the course of over three 
 hundred years, they have fallen under the yoke of a 
 nation whom they detest. This naturally demoralised 
 them, as it demoralises a mere husband when he is 
 yoked to a hated wife. Being demoralised, they 
 have never, oh never, reached that balance of internal 
 powers without which nothing great can be achieved. 
 The English with lesser powers, being undemoralised, 
 got their powers into far greater balance. So did 
 the Scot through sustained, reckless fighting for 
 their ideals. Hence the misery of the Irish, who are 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 47 
 
 like their fairies, enchanting, but fatal to themselves 
 and to others ; unbalanced, unsteady in mind and 
 resolution to a sickening degree ; fickle, and re- 
 sembling altogether sweet kisses from one's lady- 
 love intermingled with knocks in the face from one's 
 vilest creditors. 
 
 " Their recoiling from making resolute war on the 
 enemy being the great cause of the failure of the 
 Irish, what can be more grimly Cynical than an 
 Irishman's indignation at all that appertains to war? 
 We Cynics always do that. Moderation having been 
 the soul of all things Hellenic, we Cynics told the 
 Greeks that the one fatal excess that man can commit 
 is moderation. Of music we taught that its only 
 beauties are in the pauses ; and of man we held that 
 he is perfect only by making himself into a beast. 
 
 " We taught people to contemplate everything in 
 a convex mirror and then to fall foul of the image 
 so distorted. This the idlers and the mob greatly 
 admire. They deem it marvellous originality. And 
 what can be nearer to the origin of new things than 
 to take man and nature always in the last agonising 
 stage of final decomposition ? 
 
 " In my own dramas I did all that with a vengeance ; 
 so did Crates, my revered colleague. What was a 
 plot to us ? What does a plot matter ? The other day 
 when I sauntered through the Champs Elysees of Paris, 
 I overheard a conversation between little girls playing 
 at ladies. By Antisthenes, that was the real model 
 of the plot and dialogue of all Cynic dramas ! 
 
 " Said one little girl to the other : < How are you, 
 madame ? ' 
 
 "'Thanks,' said the other, 'very well. I am 
 watching my children.' 
 
CC C 
 
 48 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 * How many have you ? ' 
 
 Seventy-five, please.' 
 " c And how old are you ? ' 
 " ' Twenty years, madame.' 
 " c And how is your husband ? ' 
 " ( T pensez-vous ? My husband ? Fancy that ! 
 Why, I have none ! ' 
 
 " This is precisely the plot and dialogue in Shaw's 
 Candida. 
 
 "I enjoyed Candida so intensely; I could have 
 kissed the author. How entirely like my own dramas ! 
 How closely modelled on the dialogue of the little 
 girls ! 
 
 "A husband of forty, vigorous, brave, honest, 
 hard-working in a noble cause, loving and loved, 
 father of two children, befriends a boy of eighteen, 
 who is as wayward and conceited and inconsistent as 
 only boys of eighteen can be. That boy suddenly 
 tells the husband that he, the boy, loved Candida, 
 the wife of the said husband. The boy, not satisfied 
 with this amenity, becomes intolerably impudent, and 
 the husband, acting on his immediate and just senti- 
 ment, wants to throw him out of the house. 
 
 " But this is too much of what ninety-nine out of 
 a hundred husbands would do. So instead of kicking 
 the impertinent lad into the street, the husband- 
 invites him to lunch. , 
 
 "I was so afraid the .husband would in the end 
 bundle the youth out of the room. To my intense 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 49 
 
 delight the author did not forget the rules of the 
 Cynic drama, aud the boy remained for lunch. 
 
 " Bravo ! Bravo ! I secretly hoped the husband 
 would solemnly charge the interesting youth to fit 
 Candida with the latest corset. To my amazement 
 that did not take place. But yet there was some 
 relief for me in store : the husband invites the boy 
 to pass the evening with his wife alone. 
 
 "This is, of course, precisely what most husbands 
 would do. 
 
 "This is what another disciple of mine in Paris 
 (a man called Anatole, and misnamed France), did 
 do in an even worse case. In Anatole's story, the 
 husband arrives in the most inopportune moment that 
 a forgetful wife can dread. He looks at the scene 
 with much self-control, takes up the Petit Parisien 
 lying on the floor, and withdraws gracefully into 
 another room, there to make sundry reflections on 
 the Petit Parisien and on the 'Petite Parisienne.' 
 
 "How classically Cynical! How Bion, Metrocles, 
 Menippus, and all the rest of our sect would have 
 enjoyed that ! Here is a true comedy ! Here is some- 
 thing truly realistic, and realistically true. That's 
 why Anatole is so much admired by Englishmen. 
 He too is, as we Cynics have been called, a philo- 
 sopher, of the proletariate. 
 
 "Much, O Zeus, as I enjoy the honour and 
 pleasure of being allowed to crouch on one of the 
 steps of your divine halls, I do also keenly appreciate 
 the pleasure of meeting my disciples of the hour. 
 One of these next days I will ask Momus to invite 
 Tolstoy, Ibsen, Shaw, Anatole, and a few others to 
 a lunch, to meet me in a Swiss hotel. Plato, you 
 better come and listen behind a screen. You might 
 
50 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 perhaps improve upon your Gorgias in which dialogue 
 you attempt to sketch the superman and super- 
 cynic. Ibsen will stammer and jerk his best in 
 deathly hatred of all Authority. Shaw will pinprick 
 to death the foundations of Marriage and Family. 
 Anatole will try to upset, by throwing little mud- 
 pellets at them, ideal figures such as Joan of Arc " 
 ( Diogenes had barely uttered this name, when 
 Zeus and all the other gods rose from their seats, 
 and bowed towards Pallas Athene, who held Joan in 
 her holy arms ). " Tolstoy, with a penny trumpet 
 in his toothless mouth, will bray against war; Oh, 
 it will be glorious. 
 
 " Of course, by this time I know very well that 
 the controlling principle of all mundane and supra- 
 mundane things is Authority. As we here all bow 
 to Zeus, so mortals must always bow to some 
 authority. Nothing more evident can be imagined 
 nor shown. It is the broadest result of all history, 
 of all experience. Just because this is so, and 
 unmistakably so, my disciples must naturally say 
 the reverse. They do not look at facts by a micro- 
 scope or a telescope; they telescope train-loads of 
 facts into a mass of pulverised debris. 
 
 " Instead of saying that in England, through her 
 social caste system, there are many, too many, 
 parvenus or tactless upstarts, my disciples must say : 
 'The greatness of England is owing to her tactless- 
 ness.' This is the real merchandise which I sold 
 at Corinth over two thousand years ago. 
 
 "Tolstoy thunders against War. I wonder he 
 does not thunder against mothers' breasts feeding 
 their babies. Why, War made everything that is 
 worth having. First of all, it made Peace. With- 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 51 
 
 out war there is no peace ; there is only stagnation. 
 The greater the ideal, the greater the price we have 
 to pay for it. And since we always crave for the 
 sublime ideals of Liberty, Honour, Wealth, Power, 
 Beauty, and Knowledge, we must necessarily pay the 
 highest price for it ourselves, our lives in war. 
 There is no Dante without the terrible wars of the 
 Guelfs and the Ghibellines. There could have been 
 no ideal superman like Raphael without the counter- 
 superman called Cesare Borgia. It is only your 
 abominable Philistine who squeaks : c Oh, we might 
 have many a nice slice from the ham of Ideals with- 
 out paying too dearly for it.' What do you think of 
 that, Hercules? Did you win Hebe by avoiding 
 conflicts and disasters ? " 
 
 Hercules groaned deeply and looked first at his 
 battered club and then at charming Hebe. The 
 gods laughed aloud and Apollo, taking up his lyre, 
 intoned a grand old Doric song in praise of the 
 heroes of war who, by their valour, had prepared the 
 palastra for the heroes of thought and beauty. He 
 was soon joined by a thousand harmonious voices 
 from the temple of Isis, and from his own majestic 
 sanctuary at Pompeii. Vesuvius counterpointed the 
 lithe song with his deep bass ; and, with Dionysus at 
 the head of them, Pan and the nymphs came waft- 
 ing through the air, strewing buds of melodies on 
 to the Olympian wreaths of tones sung by Phoebus 
 Apollo in praise of War. 
 
52 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 When the song had subsided, Zeus, in a voice full 
 of serenity and benign music, addressed the gods and 
 heroes as follows : " We are very much beholden to 
 Diogenes for his bright and amusing story of the 
 Cynical ants that at present run about the woods 
 and cottages of men, biting each other and their 
 friends. Their epigrams and other eccentric utter- 
 ances can affect none of us here assembled. You 
 very well know that I have not allowed Apollo, or 
 Reason to reign alone and unaided by Unreason, 
 or Dionysus. The Cynical critics of men want to 
 bring about the Age of Reason, or as these pre- 
 sumptuous half-knowers call it, the Age of Science. 
 This, I have long since laid down, shall never be. 
 
 "At the gate of the Future, at Delphi, Apollo 
 is associated with Dionysus, and so it has been ever 
 since I came to rule this Universe. Just as good 
 music consists of tones and rhythms, and again of the 
 cessation of all sound, or of measured pauses ; even 
 so my Realm consists of Reason, and of the cessation 
 of all Reason, or of Unreason. The Cynics who 
 ignore the latter, misjudge the former. This, I take 
 it, is perfectly clear to all of us. 
 
 " But while we here may laugh at the bites of the 
 Cynical ants below, we do not mean to state that in 
 their occupation there is no point, no utility at all. 
 These little ants may be, and undoubtedly are largely 
 sterile mockers. Yet even I have experienced it 
 on myself that the effects of their doings are not 
 always sterile." 
 
 And leaning back on his chryselephantine chair, 
 Zeus lowered his voice and said almost in a^ whisper: 
 " See, friends, why do we meet here in lonely places, 
 in a dead town, during the mysterious hours of 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 53 
 
 night ? You know very well who and what has 
 prevailed upon me to choose this temporary darkening 
 of our blissful life." 
 
 At this moment there came from the rushes near 
 the sea a plaintive song accompanied by a flute, and 
 a voice of a human sobbed out the cry : " Pan, the 
 Great Pan is dead ! " 
 
 A sudden silence fell over the divine Assembly. 
 A cloud of deep sadness seemed to hover over all. 
 
 The three Graces then betook themselves to danc- 
 ing, and their beauteous movements and poses so 
 exhilarated the Assembly, that the former serenity 
 was soon re-established. 
 
 Zeus now turned to Plato, calling upon him to 
 give his opinion on the Cynics. Zeus reminded 
 Plato that hitherto the Cynics had been treated by 
 him merely incidentally, mostly by hidden allusions 
 to Antisthenes, or by witty remarks on Diogenes. 
 At present Plato might help the gods to pass agree- 
 ably the rest of the beautiful night by telling them 
 in connection and fulness what really the ultimate 
 purport of these modern Cynics, Shavian or other is 
 going to be. Everybody turned his or her face 
 towards Plato, who rose from his seat, and bowing, 
 with a smile, towards Diogenes, thus addressed Zeus 
 and the Assembly of gods and heroes at Pompeii : 
 
 "It is quite true that in my writings I have not 
 devoted any explicit discussion to the views and 
 tenets of the Cynics. They appeared to me at that 
 
54 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 time far too grotesque to be worth more than a 
 passing consideration. Of their dramas I had, and 
 still have a very poor opinion. From what I hear from 
 Diogenes, the modern imitators of Cynic dramatists 
 are not a whit better. In addition to all their weary- 
 ing eccentricities, they add the most unbearable 
 eccentricity of all, to wit, that their dramas and 
 comedies represent a new departure within dramatic 
 literature. 
 
 "Shaw's dramas are no more dramas than his 
 Swiss, in Arms and the Man^ is a soldier ; or his 
 clergyman in Candida a husband, or a man. His 
 pieces are not dramatic in the least; they do not 
 exhibit the most elementary qualities of a comedy. 
 For, whatever the definition of a comedy may be, 
 one central quality can never be missing in it : the 
 persons presented must be types of human beings. 
 
 " Shaw's persons are no humans whatever. They 
 are homunculi concocted in a chemical laboratory of 
 pseudo-science and false psychology. They crack, 
 from time to time, brave jokes ; so do clowns in a circus. 
 That alone does not make a wax figure into a human. 
 
 "There may be very interesting comic scenes 
 amongst bees, wasps, or beavers ; but we cannot 
 appreciate them. We can only appreciate human 
 comicality, even when it is presented to us in the 
 shape of dialogues between animals, as Aristophanes, 
 the fabulists, and so many other writers have done. 
 
 "Who would care to sit through a comedy show- 
 ing the comic aspects of life in a Bedlam ? If madmen 
 have humour, as undoubtedly they have, we do not 
 want to see it on a public stage. The fact, that it is 
 a madman's humour deprives it of all humour. 
 
 "Hedda Gabler can appeal to no sound taste. 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 55 
 
 One never sees why she is so fearfully unhappy. If 
 she is not in love with her husband, let her work in 
 the house, in the kitchen, in the garden ; let her try 
 to be a mother ; let her adopt a child if the gods 
 deny her one of her own. Let her do something. 
 Of course, idling all day long as she does, will in the 
 end demoralise a poker; and far from wondering 
 that she ends badly at the end of the last act, one 
 only wonders that she did not do away with herself 
 before the first scene of the first act. By doing so 
 she would have done a great service to herself, her 
 people, and to dramatic literature. 
 
 " Of the same kind is Raina, in Arms and the 
 Man. She is a doll, but not a young girl. She has 
 neither senses, nor sense. She is made of cardboard, 
 and fit only to appear in a Punch and Judy show. 
 She is, in common with most of the figures in the 
 comedies of the modern Cynics, a mere outline 
 drawing of a human being from whose mouth hang 
 various slips of paper on which the author con- 
 veniently writes his variorum jokes and bright sayings. 
 All these so-called dramatic pieces will be brushed 
 away by the broom of Time, as happened to the 
 dramas and travesties of our Greek Cynics. Life 
 eternal is given to things only through Art, and in 
 these writings of the Cynics, old or modern ones, 
 there is not the faintest trace either of one of the 
 Graces, or of one of the Muses. 
 
 " Having said this much about Shaw's and the 
 other modern Cynics' alleged dramatic writings, I 
 
56 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 hasten to add, that when we come to consider 
 the effect these so-called dramas have, and pos- 
 sibly will continue to have on the mind of the 
 public, we are bound to speak in quite a different 
 manner. 
 
 "I have had plenty of time, since the days of 
 my Academy at Athens, to think out the vast differ- 
 ence between such works of the intellect as aim at 
 nothing but truth and beauty, or what we might 
 call a/ethology, on the one hand ; and such works as 
 aim at effect, or what may be generally termed as 
 effectology. 
 
 " It is from this all-important point of view that I 
 say that Tolstoy, Ibsen, Shaw and the others are, 
 effectologically, ] ust as remarkable as they are aletho- 
 logically without much significance. 
 
 " As to the latter ; as to their hitting off great or 
 new truths; as to their being philosophers; or to 
 put it in my terms, as to their having any alethological 
 value, Diogenes has already spoken with sufficient 
 clearness. Just consider this one point. 
 
 "Tolstoy, as well as Shaw, wants to reform the 
 abuses of civilisation. In order to do so they combat 
 with all their might the most powerful purifier and 
 reformer of men, War. Can anything be more 
 ludicrous, and unscientific ? 
 
 "Who gave the modern Germans that incompar- 
 able dash and 4lan, thanks to which they have in one 
 generation quadrupled their commerce, doubled their 
 population, quintupled their wealth, and ensured their 
 supremacy on the Continent? 
 
 " Was it done by their thinkers and scholars ? The 
 greatest of these died before 1870. 
 
 "Was it done by getting into possession of the 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 57 
 
 mouth of the Rhine, or of the access to the Danish 
 Sounds, which formerly debarred them from the sea ? 
 They do not possess the mouth of the Rhine, nor 
 Denmark to the present day. 
 
 "Nothing has changed in the material or intel- 
 lectual world making the Germany of to-day more 
 advantageous for commerce or power than it had 
 been formerly. 
 
 "Except the victorious wars of 1866 and of 
 1870. 
 
 " Can such an evident connection of fact be over- 
 looked ? And would Russia have introduced the 
 Duma without the battle of Mukden ? It is waste 
 of time even for the immortals to press this point 
 much longer. 
 
 " As in this case, so in nearly all the other cases, 
 Cynics revile abuses the sole remedies for which 
 they violently combat. In their negative attacks 
 they brandish the keenest edges of the swords, 
 daggers and pins of Logic; in their positive advices 
 they browbeat every person in the household of 
 logical thought. 
 
 "Yet, worthless, or very nearly so, as they may 
 be as teachers of truth, they are powerful as writers 
 of pamphlets. For this is what their literature comes 
 to. They do not write dramas, nor novels. They 
 can do neither the one, nor the other. But they 
 write effective pamphlets in the apparent form of 
 dramas and novels. 
 
 " They are pamphleteers, and not men of 
 letters. 
 
 cc In that lies their undeniably great force. They 
 instinctively choose as eccentric, as loud, and as 
 striking forms and draperies of ideas as possible, so 
 
5 8 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 as to rouse the apathetic Philistine to an interest in 
 what they say. They are full of absurdities; but 
 which of us here can now after centuries of ex- 
 perience venture to make light of the power of the 
 absurd ? 
 
 " Error and Absurdity are so powerful, so neces- 
 sary, so inevitable, that Protagoras was perhaps not 
 quite wrong in saying that Truth herself is only a 
 particular species of Error. 
 
 " Once, many years ago, I despised the Cynics, 
 and my own master Socrates made light of them. 
 But at present I think differently. When Socrates 
 said, with subtle sarcasm, to Antisthenes: 'I see 
 your vanity peeping out through the holes of your 
 shabby garment,' Antisthenes might have retorted 
 to him : c And I, O Socrates, see through these very 
 holes how short-sighted you are. 5 
 
 "For have we not lived to see that while all 
 revere Socrates in words, they follow the pupils of 
 Antisthenes in deeds? The Cynics, fathered by 
 Antisthenes, begot the Stoics ; and the Stoics were 
 the main ferment in the rise and spread of Chris- 
 tianity. Many of the sayings and teachings and 
 doings of the Cynics, which we at Athens made 
 most fun of, have long since become the sinews and 
 fibres of Christian ideas and institutions. There is 
 greater similarity and mental propinquity between 
 Antisthenes or Diogenes and St Paul, than between 
 Socrates and St Augustine of Hippo. 
 
 " I pray thee, O Zeus, to let us for a moment see 
 this town of Pompeii as it was a day before its 
 destruction, with all its life in the streets and the 
 Forum, so as to give us an ocular proof of the truth 
 of what I just now said about the Cynics and Eccen- 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 59 
 
 tries of Antiquity, and what I am going to apply to 
 the modern Cynics, literary or other." 
 
 Thereupon Zeus, by a wave of his hand, placed 
 the whole Assembly in the shadow as if encircled by 
 a vast mantle of darkness, and shed a strange and 
 supramundane light on the town of Pompeii, which 
 grew up at sight from the ground, putting on life 
 and movement and beauty on all its houses, narrow 
 streets, gardens, and squares. The ancient population 
 filled, in ceaseless movement, every part of the charm- 
 ing city. Richly dressed ladies, carried in sedan- 
 chairs by black slaves; patricians in spotless togas, 
 followed by crowds of clients; magistrates preceded 
 by lictors ; soldiers recruited from all nations ; trades- 
 men from every part of the Roman Empire ; all these 
 and innumerable others, visitors from the neighbour- 
 ing cities, thronged the streets, and the whole popu- 
 lation seemed to breathe nothing but joy and a sense 
 of exuberant life. 
 
 In one of the squares there was a hilarious crowd 
 listening, with loud derision and ironical applause, to 
 a haggard, miserably clad, old man who, addressing 
 them in Ionian Greek, with the strong guttural 
 accent of the Asiatics, stood on one of the high 
 jumping-stones of the pavement, and spoke with 
 fanatic fervour of the nameless sinfulness of the 
 people of Pompeii. With him were two or three 
 other persons of the same description, joining him 
 from time to time in his imprecations against the 
 "doomed town." 
 
60 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 The old man told them that their whole life was 
 rotten through and through, a permanent lie, a 
 contradiction to itself, a sure way to damnation. He 
 thundered against the soldiers jeering at him in the 
 crowd, calling them cowards, butchers, wretches, and 
 the sinners of all sinners. He sneered at one of the 
 priests of Isis present in the crowd, telling the people 
 that there was only one true belief, and no other. 
 
 The more the old man talked, the more the crowd 
 laughed at him; and when a Greek philosopher, 
 who happened to be there, interpellated and ele- 
 gantly refuted the old man in a manner approved by 
 the rules of the prevalent school of rhetoric and 
 dialectics, the crowd cheered the philosopher, and the 
 more accomplished amongst the bystanders said to 
 one another: "This old man is a mere charlatan, or 
 an impostor ; it's waste of time to take him seriously." 
 
 One man alone, in the whole crowd, a shy and 
 retiring disciple of Apollonius of Tyana, waited until 
 the crowd had dispersed, and then walking up to the 
 old man, asked him what sect of Cynics he belonged to. 
 
 The old man said : " I am no Cynic ; I am a 
 Christian." 
 
 Thereupon the disciple of Apollonius took the old 
 man's hand, pressed it with emotion, kissed him, 
 and turning away from him, walked off, plunged in 
 deep thought. 
 
 A minute later the supramundane light over 
 Pompeii disappeared, and the Assembly of the gods 
 and heroes was again in the mild rays of Selene. 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 61 
 
 " Can anyone here," continued Plato, " deny that 
 that crowd together with the philosopher was quite 
 mistaken in their appreciation of the eccentric old 
 man, and that the silent pupil of Apollonius alone 
 was right ? 
 
 " Cynics and Eccentrics have at all times been the 
 forerunners of vast popular movements. The flagel- 
 lants, the Beguins and Lollards, and countless other 
 Cynics in the latter half of the Middle Ages preceded 
 the Reformation. 
 
 "And was not the French Revolution, or the 
 vastest effort at realising Ideals ever made by the 
 little ones down here, preceded by a Cynic and his 
 pamphlets, by Jean Jacques Rousseau ? 
 
 " No Greek town would have endured within its 
 walls a youth so completely shattered in all his moral 
 build, as was Rousseau. He was thoroughly and 
 hopelessly demoralised in character, ddcousu and 
 eccentric in thought, and badly tutored in point of 
 knowledge. The clever woman that was his pro- 
 tectress, mistress, and guide, and who displayed a 
 marvellous capacity for devising jobs and an in- 
 exhaustible resourcefulness in turning things and 
 persons to practical use, could yet never discover any 
 usefulness in Jean Jacques. 
 
 "He wrote, later on, novels, political treatises, 
 botanical ones, musical ones. In truth he never 
 wrote a novel; he wrote nothing but pamphlets; 
 stirring, wild, eccentric, enchanting pamphlets. He 
 was not, like Beaumarchais, a pamphleteer and yet a 
 writer of a real, and immortal comedy, itself a politi- 
 cal pamphlet. Rousseau was a writing stump-orator 
 doing anticipative yeoman's work for the Revolution. 
 
 " So are all the Cynics. So are Ibsen, Tolstoy ; so 
 
62 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 is Shaw. Their dramas may be, say are no dramas at 
 all; their novels may be, say are no novels at all; 
 their serious treatises are neither serious nor treatises ; 
 and yet they are, and always will be great effectological 
 centres. They attack the whole fabric of the extant 
 civilisation ; by this one move they rally round them 
 both the silent and the loud enemies of WHAT Is, 
 and the eager friends of what OUGHT To BE. Of 
 these malcontents there always is a great number; 
 especially in times of prolonged peace. 
 
 "A war, a real, good national war would immedi- 
 ately sweep away all these social malcontents. 
 
 " That's why the leaders of the Cynics, and more 
 especially Tolstoy and Shaw, hate war. It is their 
 mar-feast, their kill-joy; their microbes do not 
 prosper in times of war. 
 
 " Without the fatal and all but universal peace 
 of the period from 50 A.D. to 1 90 A.D., Christianity 
 could never have made any headway in the Roman 
 Empire; just as we got rid of our Cynics by the 
 second Athenian Empire and its great wars. 
 
 "This, then, is in my opinion the true perspective 
 of our modern Cynics. As literature or truth, they 
 exhibit little of value, except that Shaw appears to 
 me ( if a Greek may be allowed to pass judgment 
 on such a matter ) to be the only one amongst 
 living writers in England who has real literary splen- 
 dour in his style. As men, however, exercising an 
 effect on a possible social Revolution, these writers 
 are of the utmost importance. 
 
 " Or to repeat it in my terms : alethologically nil 
 or nearly so, effectologically very important or , interest- 
 ing ; this is the true perspective of writers like 
 Tolstoy, Shaw, and other modern Cynics. 
 
DIOGENES AND PLATO 63 
 
 " Their influence is not on Thought, nor on Art, 
 but on Action. 
 
 "They may eventually, if Mars will continue 
 trifling with wood-nymphs and other well-intended 
 cordials, become a great power. They may beget 
 Neo-Stoics, who may beget Neo-Christians. They 
 themselves may then appear only as the tiny drum- 
 pages running in front or beside the real fighters 
 in battle. Yet their importance will be little impaired 
 thereby. 
 
 "The Church Fathers have frequently endeavoured 
 to honour me with the name of one of the lay 
 protagonists of Christianity. But I know much 
 better than that. The true protagonists were 
 Antisthenes or Diogenes ; and that is why the 
 Roman Catholic Church has at no time countenanced 
 me. And just as we now do not mind the jokes, 
 burlesques and boutades of Diogenes any more, ad- 
 mitting freely, as we do, that behind them was 
 the aurora borealls of a new creed, a new movement, 
 a new world ; even so we must not mind the 
 grotesque boutades of Tolstoy, Ibsen, Shaw, Anatole, 
 and other modern Cynics, for behind them is the 
 magnetic fulguration of new electric currents in the 
 social world. 
 
 "This, the public indistinctly feel; that's why 
 they continue to read and criticise or revile these 
 men. The public feels that while there may not 
 be much in what these men yield for the present, 
 the future, possibly, is theirs. 
 
 "The little ones below do not as yet know, that 
 there is no future; nor that all that is or can be, 
 has long been. Therefore they do not turn to 
 us who might point out to them what things are 
 
64 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 driving at ; but they want the oldest things in ever 
 new forms. 
 
 " We, however, know that plus cela change, plus 
 test la meme chose, as one of the modern Athenians 
 in Paris has put it. 
 
 " Do not frown on me, Heraclitus ; I well know 
 that you hold the very reverse, and that you would 
 say : 'plus fest la mme chose, plus cela change? 
 
 " I have gladly accepted that in my earthly time 
 when I made a sharp distinction between phenomena 
 and super-phenomena, or noumena. But I do no 
 longer make such a distinction. 
 
 " We are above time. We Hellenes are alive 
 to-day as we were over two thousand years ago. We 
 still think aloud or on papyrus the most beautiful and 
 the truest thoughts of men. Have we not but 
 quite lately sent down for one of us to while amongst 
 us for ever ? He too began as a Cynic. But having 
 learnt the inanity of the so-called c future,' he rose 
 above time and space, and soared on the wings of 
 eagle concepts to the heights where we welcome 
 him. He has just entered the near port in a boat 
 rowed by the nymphs of Circe. We cannot close 
 our meeting in a more condign fashion than by ask- 
 ing Hebe to offer him the goblet of welcome." 
 
 The eyes of all present turned to the shore, where 
 a man of middle age, who had evidently regained 
 his former vigour, walked up to the steps of the 
 amphitheatre. When he came quite near to the 
 Assembly, Diogenes exclaimed : " Hail to thee, 
 Frederick Nietzsche ! " 
 
THE THIRD NIGHT 
 
 ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN IN ENGLAND 
 
 IN the third night the gods and heroes assembled 
 at Venice. Where the Canal Grande almost dis- 
 appears in the sea, there on mystic gondolas the 
 divine Assembly met in the town of Love and 
 Passion, at the whilom centre of Power wedded 
 to Beauty. It was a starlit night of incomparable 
 charm. The Canal Grande, with its majestic silence; 
 the dark yet clearly outlined Palaces surrounding 
 the Canal like beautiful women forming a procession 
 in honour of a triumphant hero ; the grave spires of 
 hundreds of churches standing like huge sentinels 
 of the town of millions of secrets never revealed, 
 and vainly searched for in her vast archives ; and 
 last not least the invisible Past hovering sensibly 
 over every stone of the unique city; all this con- 
 tributed ever new charms to the meeting of the 
 gods and heroes at Venice. 
 
 Zeus, not unforgetful of the Eternal Feminine, 
 asked Alcibiades to entertain the Assembly with 
 his adventures amongst the women of England. 
 Alcibiades thereupon rose and spake as follows : 
 " O Zeus and the other gods and heroes, I am 
 still too much under the fascination of the women 
 with whom I have spent the last twelve months, to 
 be in a position to tell you with becoming calmness 
 what kind of beings 'hey are. In my time I knew 
 E 65 
 
66 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 the women of over a dozen Greek states, and 
 many a woman of the Barbarians. Yet not one 
 of them was remotely similar to the women of 
 England. I will presently relate what I observed of 
 the beauty of these northern women. 
 
 "But first of all, it seems to me, 1 had better 
 dwell upon one particular type of womanhood which 
 I have never met before except when once, eight 
 hundred years ago, I travelled in company with 
 Abelard through a few towns of Mediaeval France. 
 That type is what in England they call the middle- 
 class woman. She is not always beautiful, and yet 
 might be so frequently, were her features not spoilt 
 by her soul. She is the most bigoted, the most 
 prejudiced, and most intolerant piece of perverted 
 humanity that can be imagined. 
 
 "The first time I met her I asked her how she 
 felt that day. To this she replied, c Sir-r-r ! ' with 
 flashing eyes and sinking cheeks. When I then 
 added : c I hope, madame, you are well ? ' she looked 
 at me even more fiercely and uttered : ' Sir-r-r ! ' 
 Being quite unaware of the reason of her indignation, 
 I begged to assure her that it gave me great pleasure 
 to meet her. Thereupon she got up from her seat 
 and exclaimed in a most tragic manner : ' Si-r-r-r, you 
 are no gentleman ! ! ' 
 
 " Now, I have been shown out, in my time, from 
 more than one lady's room; but there always was 
 some acceptable reason for it. In this case I could 
 not so much as surmise what crime I had committed. 
 On asking one of my English friends, I learnt that 
 I ought to have commenced the conversation with 
 remarks on the weather. Unless conversation is 
 commenced in that way it will never commend itself 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 67 
 
 to that class of women in England. It is undoubtedly 
 for that reason, Zeus, that you have given England 
 four different seasons indeed, but all in the course of 
 one and the same day. But for this meteorological 
 fact, conversation with middle-class people would 
 have become impossible. 
 
 " The women of that class have an incessant itch 
 for indignation; unless they feel shocked at least 
 ten times a day, they cannot live. Accordingly, 
 everything shocks them; they are afflicted with 
 permanent shockingitis. 
 
 "Tell her that it is two o'clock P.M., and she will 
 be shocked. Tell her you made a mistake, and that it 
 was only half-past one o'clock, and she will be even 
 more shocked. Tell her Adam was the first man, 
 and she will scream with indignation; tell her she 
 had only one mother, and she will send for the 
 police. The experience of over two thousand years 
 amongst all the nations in and out of Europe has not 
 enabled me to find a topic, nor the manner of con- 
 versation agreeable or acceptable to an English middle- 
 class woman. 
 
 " At first I thought that she was as puritanic in 
 her virtue as she was rigid and forbidding in appear- 
 ance. One of them was unusually pretty and I 
 attempted to please her. My efforts were in vain, 
 until I found out that she took me for a Greek from 
 Soho Square, which in London is something like the 
 poor quarters of our Piraeus. She had never heard 
 of Athens or of ancient history, and she believed 
 that Joan of Arc was the daughter of Noah. 
 
 "When I saw that, I dropped occasionally the 
 remark that my uncle was Lord Pericles, and that 
 the King of Sparta had reasons to hide from me 
 
68 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 his wife. This did it at once. She changed com- 
 pletely. Everything I said was c interesting.' When 
 I said, c Wet to-day,' she swore that it was a capital 
 joke. She admired my very gloves. She never tired 
 asking me questions about the c swell set.' I told 
 her all that I did not know. The least man of my 
 acquaintance was a lord; my friends were all vis- 
 counts and marquesses ; my dog was the son of a 
 dog in the King's kennels; my motor was one in 
 which three earls and their wives had broken eleven 
 legs of theirs. 
 
 " These broken legs brought me very much 
 nearer to my goal ; and when finally I apprised her 
 that I had hopelessly spoilt my digestion at the 
 wedding meal of the Duke of D'Ontexist, she im- 
 plored me not to trifle any longer with her feelings. 
 I stopped trifling. 
 
 " This experience," Alcibiades continued, " did 
 much to enlighten me about what was behind all 
 that forbidding exterior of the middle-class woman. 
 I discovered Eve in the Mediaeval form of woman- 
 hood. I was reminded of the Spartan women who, 
 at the first meeting, seemed so proud, unapproach- 
 able and Amazonian ; at the second meeting they 
 had lost some of their prohibitive temper ; and at 
 the third meeting they proved to be women, and 
 nothing but women after all. 
 
 "Honestly, I preferred the English middle-class 
 woman in her first stage. It suited the somewhat 
 rigid style of her beauty much better. In the last 
 or sentimental stage she was much less interesting. 
 Her tenderness was flabby or childish. Then she 
 cried after every rendezvous. That annoyed me 
 considerably. One evening I could not help ask- 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 69 
 
 ing her whether she did not feel like sending five 
 pounds of conscience-money to the Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer. She drew the line on that, and cried 
 more profusely. Whereupon I proposed to send fifty 
 pounds of conscience-money and to be released of 
 any further tears. This seemed to pacify and to 
 console her ; and thus we parted. 
 
 " A few days after I had been relieved of my first 
 lady friend in England," Alcibiades continued, " I 
 made the acquaintance of a girl whose age I was 
 unable to determine. She said she was twenty-nine 
 years old. However, I soon found that all unmarried 
 girls d*un certain age in England are exactly twenty- 
 nine years old. 
 
 "She was not without certain attractions. She 
 had read much, spoke fluently, had beautiful auburn 
 hair and white arms. In her technical terms, which 
 she used very frequently, she was not very felicitous. 
 She repeatedly mixed up bigotry with bigamy, or 
 with trigonometry. My presence did not seem to 
 affect her very much, and after two or three calls I 
 discovered that she was in a chronic state of re- 
 bellion against society and law at large. 
 
 " She held that women were in absolute serfdom 
 to men, and that unless women were given the most 
 valuable of rights, that is, the suffrage, neither 
 women nor men could render the commonwealth 
 what it ought to be. I told her that shortly after 
 my disappearance from the political stage of Athens, 
 
70 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 about twenty-three centuries ago, the women of 
 that town, together with those of other towns, 
 clamoured for the same object. 'What?' she ex- 
 claimed. c Do you mean to say that suffragettes 
 were already known in those olden times ? ' I assured 
 her that all that she had told me about the aims and 
 arguments of herself and her friends was as old as 
 the comedies of Aristophanes. That seemed to have 
 a strange effect upon her. I noticed that what she 
 believed to be the novelty of the movement con- 
 stituted really its greatest charm for her. She 
 had thought that suffragettism was the very latest 
 fashion, in every way brand new. 
 
 " But after a time she recovered and said : e Very 
 well ; if our obj ects and aims are as old as all that, 
 they are sure to be even more solidly founded in 
 reason than I thought they were.' 
 
 "Reason, Right, Equity, and Fairness were her 
 stock-in-trade. She was the daughter of Reason; 
 the wife of Right ; the mother of Equity ; and the 
 mother-in-law of Fairness. It was in vain that I told 
 her that this world was not held together by Reason 
 or Right alone, but also by Unreason and Wrongs. 
 She scoffed at my remarks, and asked me to come to 
 one of her speeches in Hyde Park on one of the 
 next Sundays. I came. There was a huge crowd, 
 counting by the hundreds of thousands. My lady 
 friend stood on a waggon in the midst of about half- 
 a-dozen other women, who all hacf preferred single 
 blessedness to coupled bliss. They were, of course, 
 each of them twenty-nine years old; and yet their 
 accumulated ages brought one comfortably ,back to 
 the times of Queen Elizabeth. When my friend's 
 turn came, she addressed the crowd as follows : 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 71 
 
 " f Men and women. Excuse me, ladies, beginning 
 my speech in that way. It is mere custom, the 
 behests of which I obey. In my opinion there 
 are no men in this country. There are only cowards 
 and their wives. Who but a coward would refuse 
 a woman the most elementary right of citizenship? 
 Who but a wretch and a dastardly runaway would 
 deny women a right which is given to the scum of 
 men, provided they pay a ridiculous sum in yearly 
 taxes ? There are no men in this country.' (A voice 
 from the people : c None for you, m'um, evi- 
 dently ! ') 
 
 " * I repeat it to you : there are no men. I will 
 repeat it again. I can never repeat it too frequently. 
 Or, do you call a person a man who is none ? The 
 first and chief characteristic of a true man is his love 
 of justice. It is so completely and exclusively his, 
 that we women do not in the least pretend to share 
 in this his principal privilege. 
 
 " * But can the present so-called men be called just ? 
 Is it justice to deny justice to more than one half of 
 the nation, to the women ? Let us women have the 
 suffrage, so that men, by thus doing justice, shall 
 become true men worthy of their suffrage. For are 
 not all their reasonings against our wishes void of 
 any force ? 
 
 " c They say that the suffrage of women, by drag- 
 ging them too much into the political arena, would 
 defeminise them. Pray look at us here assembled. 
 Are we unwomanly ? Do we look as if we had lost 
 any of that down which hovers over the soul of 
 domesticated women as does the nap on a peach ? ' 
 (Stormy applause.) ' Thanks, many thanks. I knew 
 you would not think so. 
 
72 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " c No, it is indeed absurd to assume that a waggon 
 can change a woman into a dragon. Am I changed 
 by entering a 'bus ? Or by mounting a taxi ? Why, 
 then, should I be changed by standing on a waggon ? 
 I am no more changed by it, than the waggon is 
 changed by me.' (A voice : ' Good old wag- 
 gon!') 
 
 " ' We want to have a share in legislation. There 
 are a hundred subjects regarding which we are better 
 informed than are men. Take food-adulteration 
 who knows more about it than we do ? Take intem- 
 perance who drinks more in secret than we do? 
 Take the law of libel and slander who libels and 
 slanders more than we do? Who can possibly 
 possess more experience about it ? 
 
 " c Look at history. Repeatedly there have been 
 periods when a number of queens and empresses 
 proved to be more efficient than men. Politics, 
 especially foreign policy, spells simply lies and dis- 
 simulation. Who can do that better than ourselves ? 
 People say that if we women get the suffrage, the 
 House of Commons would soon be filled with mere 
 women. Let us grant that, for argument's sake. 
 Would the difference be really so great ? Are there 
 not women in trousers? And are there not more 
 trousers than men? 
 
 " c Nowadays most men cry themselves hoarse 
 over Peace, Arbitration, International Good Will, 
 and similar nostrums. Could we women not do that 
 too ? I ask you men present, could we not do that 
 as well? The men of this country think that they 
 will bring about the millennium by preaching and 
 spreading teetotalism, Christian Science, vegetarian- 
 ism, or simple lifeism. How ridiculous and petty. 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 73 
 
 "'Look at the "isms" we propose to preach 
 and spread: (i) Anti-corsetism ; (2) Anti-skirtism ; 
 (3) Anti-bonnetism ; (4) Anti-gloveism ; (5) Anti- 
 necktieism ; (6) Anti-cigarettism ; and finally (7) 
 Anti-antiism. 
 
 " ' On these seven hills of antis, or if you prefer it, 
 on these seven ant-hills, which are in reality anti-ills, 
 we shall build our New Rome, the rummiest Rome 
 that ever was, and more eternal than the town of the 
 Caesars and the Popes. Give us the suffrage ! Do 
 you not see how serious we are about it ? We know 
 very well that the various classes of men obtained 
 the suffrage only by means of great fights in which, 
 in some countries, untold thousands of men were 
 killed. But can you seriously think of putting us 
 women to similar straits ? 
 
 " ( Evidently, what men had to fight for in bitter 
 earnest, ought to be given to women in jest as 
 a mere gift. Do give us the suffrage ! Do not be 
 pedantic nor naughty. We mean it very seriously ; 
 therefore give it to us as a joke, by sheer politeness, 
 and as a matter of good manners. 
 
 " * Come, my male friends, be good boys ; let me 
 brush your coat, fix the necktie in the proper shape 
 and pour a little brilliantine on your moustaches. 
 There ! That's a nice little boy. And now open 
 the safe of the nation and give us quick the right of 
 rights, the might of mights, the very thing that you 
 men have been fighting for ever since Magna Charta 
 in 1215, give us the suffrage as an incidental free gift. 
 
 " * If you do so, we will pass a law that all barbers' 
 shops shall be in the soft, pleasant hands of young 
 she-barbers. Think of the downy satisfaction that 
 this will give you ! Think of the placid snoozes in 
 
74 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 a barber's chair when your face is soaped, shaven 
 and sponged by mellow hands ! Is it not a dear little 
 enjoyment? Now, look here my male friends, this 
 and similar boons we shall shower upon you, provided 
 you give us the suffrage. 
 
 " c Nay, we shall before everything else (provided 
 we have the suffrage !) pass a law abolishing breach-of- 
 promise cases. 9 
 
 " (Endless hurrahs from all sides Band Fire- 
 works St Vitus 5 Dances, until the whole immense 
 crowd breaks out in a song ' She is a jolly good 
 maiden, etc.') 
 
 " ' Thanks, you are very kind. Yes, we mean to 
 abolish breach-of-promise cases. Consider what ad- 
 vantages that would imply for you. A man will be 
 able to flirt round five different corners at a time, 
 without risking anything. He will be able to practise 
 letter-writing in all the colours of the rainbow, 
 without in the least jeopardising his situation, 
 purse or expectations. He will be in a position 
 to amuse himself thoroughly, freely, everywhere, 
 and at any time. What makes you men so stiff, 
 so tongue-tied, so pokery, but the dread of a 
 breach-of-promise case. Once that dread is removed 
 by the abolition of such cases, you will be amiable, 
 great orators, full of charming abandon, and too 
 lovely for words. As a natural consequence, 
 women will be more in love with you than ever 
 before. Your conquests in Sexland will be count- 
 less. You will be like Alcibiades, irresistible, 
 universally victorious. Now, could we offer you 
 anything more tempting? , 
 
 " ' I know, of course, that outwardly you affect to 
 be no ladies' men. But pray, entre nous, are you not 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 75 
 
 in reality just the reverse? Man is polygamous. 
 We women do not in the least care for men, and if 
 all my female contemporaries should die out, leaving 
 me alone in the world with 600,000,000 men, I 
 should myself speedily die with boredom. What 
 are men here for but as mere cards in our game of 
 one woman against the other ? If I cannot martyrise 
 a little the heart of my female friend by alienating her 
 man from her, what earthly use has her man for 
 me? 
 
 " * But you men, you are quite different. You do 
 wish that all the women, at any rate all the young 
 and beautiful women, shall be at your order. This 
 of course we cannot legislate for you. But we can 
 do the next best thing: we can abolish the chief 
 obstacle in your way: the breach-of-promise cases. 
 This we promise to do, provided you give us the 
 suffrage. You are, however, much mistaken if you 
 think that that is all we have in store for you. Far 
 from it. 
 
 " c If you give us the franchise, we pledge ourselves 
 never to publish a novel or a drama? 
 
 " (Applause like an earthquake men embrace one 
 another elderly gentlemen cry with joy a clergy- 
 man calls upon people to pray in the skies a rain- 
 bow appears.) 
 
 " c Yes, although with a breaking heart, yet we will 
 make this immense sacrifice on the altar of our 
 patriotism : we will henceforth not publish any 
 novels. I cannot say that we will not write any. 
 This would be more than I or any other woman 
 could promise. We must write novels. We are 
 subject to a writing itch that is quite beyond our 
 control. The less a woman has to say the more 
 
76 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 she will write. She must write; she must write 
 novels. 
 
 u< We write, we publish at present about five 
 novels a day. If you give us the suffrage, we pledge 
 ourselves not to publish a single novel.' 
 
 " (Universal cry : c Give them the suffrage, for 
 God's sake ! ') 
 
 " c And if you do not give us the suffrage, we shall 
 publish ten novels a day.' 
 
 " (Fearful uproar fierce cries for the police 
 twenty publishers present are mobbed Miss Cora 
 Morelli present is in imminent danger of life.) 
 
 " < Did I say, ten ? What I meant to say is, that if 
 you do not give us the franchise, we shall publish 
 fifteen novels a day.' 
 
 " (Revolution - - pistol shots the fire-brigade 
 comes.) 
 
 u ( Twenty thirty forty novels a day.' 
 
 " (The Big Ben is howling the Thames river 
 floods Middlesex the House of Commons suspends 
 the Habeas Corpus Act.) 
 
 " c Or even ten novels every hour.' 
 
 " (The Albert Memorial leaves its place and takes 
 refuge in the Imperial Institute the crowd, in 
 despair, falls on their knees and implores the speaker 
 to have mercy on them they promise the suffrage, 
 at once, or somewhat before that.) 
 
 " ' There ! I told you, we do mean what we mean, 
 and we have all sorts of means of making you mean 
 what we mean. It is therefore understood that you 
 will give us the franchise, and we shall stop publish- 
 ing novels. But should you change youi>mind and 
 go back on your present promises, then I must warn 
 you that we have in store even more drastic means 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 77 
 
 of forcing your hands. You must not in the least 
 believe that the pressure we can bring to bear upon 
 you is exhausted with the devices just enumerated. 
 There are other devices. But for evident reasons 
 of modesty I prefer calling upon my motherly guide, 
 Mrs Pancake, to tell you more about them.' 
 
 " With that my tender friend retired, and up got 
 a middle-aged woman with hard features and much 
 flabby flesh. She was received with mournful 
 silence. She began in a strident voice, which she 
 accentuated by angular gestures cutting segments 
 out of the air. She said : 
 
 " c You have, ladies and gentlemen, heard some of 
 the disadvantages that will inevitably be entailed 
 upon you by not granting us what Justice, Equity 
 and our Costume render a demand that none but 
 barbarians can refuse. I am now going to give you 
 just an inkling of what will befall you should you 
 pertinaciously persist in your obdurate refusal of the 
 franchise to women. We women have made up our 
 minds to the exclusion of any imaginable hesitation, 
 change, or vacillation. We shall be firm and un- 
 shakable. 
 
 " c We have done everything that could be done 
 by way of persuading you. We have published 
 innumerable pamphlets; we have trodden countless 
 streets in countless processions ; we have been 
 wearing innumerable badges and carrying thousands 
 of flags and standards; we have screamed, pushed, 
 rowdied, boxed, scuffled, gnashed our teeth (even 
 
78 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 such as were not originally made for that purpose), 
 and suffered our skirts to be torn to shreds ; we 
 have petitioned, waylaid, interpellated, ambushed, 
 bullied and memorialised all the ministers, all the 
 editors, all the clergymen, all the press-men; we 
 have suffered imprisonment, fines, scorn, ridicule ; 
 we have done, with the exception of actual fighting, 
 everything that men have done for the conquest of 
 the suffrage. 
 
 " ' Should all these immense sacrifices not avail us 
 any ; should it all be in vain ; then we the women of 
 this country, and I doubt not those of the other 
 countries too, will, as a last resort, take refuge in the 
 oldest and most powerful ally of our sex. Eternal 
 Time has two constituents : Day and Night. The 
 Day is man's. The Night is ours.' 
 
 "(Deadly silence men begin looking very serious.) 
 
 " c The Night, I repeat it in the sternest manner 
 possible, the Night is ours. We grant, indeed, that 
 sixteen hours are man's; but the remaining eight 
 are ours. The stars and the moon; the darkness 
 and the dream they are all ours. Should you men 
 persist in refusing us the franchise, you will wake in 
 vain for the moon and the stars and the dream. 
 You will see stars indeed, but other ones than you 
 expect. We shall be inexorable. No moon any 
 more for you ; neither cresent, half nor full moon ; 
 neither stars nor milky- way; neither galaxy nor 
 gallantry.' 
 
 " (A Salvationist : ' Let us pray ! ' A soldier : 
 'Hope, m'um, that Saturdays will be off-days?' 
 Solicitors, teetotallers, and three editors* of Zola's 
 collected works : ' Disgraceful ! shocking ! ' A 
 scholar: 'Madame, that's a chestnut, Aristophanes 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 79 
 
 has long proposed that ! ' General uproar a band 
 of nuns from Piccadilly hurrah the proposal and raise 
 prices of tickets Scotland Yard smiles the Daily 
 Nail kodaks everybody and interviews Mrs Pancake 
 on the spot Mrs Guard, the famous writer, at once 
 founds a counter-League, with the motto c Astronomy 
 for the people Stars and Stripes free the United 
 Gates of Love' the Daily Crony has an attack of 
 moral appendicitis.) 
 
 " I wish," continued Alcibiades, amidst the laughter 
 of the immortals, " Aristophanes had been present. 
 I assure you that all that he said in his comedies called 
 Ecclesiazusae and Lysistrata pale beside the tumultu- 
 ous scenes caused by the peroration of Mrs Pancake. 
 Her threat was in such drastic contrast to the stars 
 and moon she personally could exhibit to the desires 
 of men, that the comic effect of it became at times 
 almost unbearable. 
 
 " While the pandemonium was at its height a sten- 
 torian voice invited all present to another platform 
 where another woman was holding forth on Free 
 Love and Free Marriage. I forthwith repaired to the 
 place, and heard what was in every way a most inter- 
 esting speech delivered by a woman who consisted of 
 a ton of bones and an ounce of flesh. She was 
 between forty and seventy-nine. She talked in a 
 tone of conviction which seemed to come from every 
 corner of her personal masonry. Her gestures were, 
 if I may say so, as strident as her voice, which came 
 
8o NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 out with a peculiar gust of pectoral wind, unimpeded, 
 as it was, by the fence of too numerous teeth. She 
 said : 
 
 " ' Gentlemen, all that you have heard over there 
 from the platforms of the suffragettes is, to put it 
 mildly, the merest rubbish. We women do not 
 want the suffrage. What we want is quite another 
 thing. All our misery since the days of Eve comes 
 from one silly, absurd, and criminal institution, and 
 from that alone. Abolish that cesspool of depravity ; 
 that hotbed of social gangrene ; that degradation of 
 men and women ; and we shall be all happy and con- 
 tented for ever. 
 
 " * That institution ; that cancerous hotbed ; that 
 degradation is: Marriage. As long as we shall 
 endure this scandalous bondage and prostitution of 
 the most sacred sentiments and desires of human 
 beings, even so long will our social wretchedness 
 last. 
 
 " ' Abolish marriage. 
 
 " c lt has neither sense, nor object, nor right; it is 
 the most hapless aberration of humanity. How can 
 you uphold such a monstrous thing ? 
 
 " * Just consider : I do not know, and do not care to 
 know what other nations are like ; I only care for my 
 great nation, for England, for Englishmen. Now, 
 can anyone here present (or here absent, for the 
 matter of that), seriously contend that an Englishman 
 is by nature or education fit for marriage ? Why, 
 not one in ten thousand has the slightest aptitude 
 for it. 
 
 " c An Englishman is an island, a solitary worm, 
 morally a hermit, socially a bear, humanly a Cyclop. 
 He hates company, including his own. The idea 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 81 
 
 that any person should intrude upon his hallowed 
 circles for more than a few minutes is revolting to 
 him. When he is ill he suffers most from the inquiries 
 of friends about his condition. When he is success- 
 ful he is too proud to stoop to talking with anyone 
 under the rank of a lord. When he is unsuccessful, 
 he takes it for granted that nobody desires to speak 
 to him. He builds his house after his own character : 
 rooms do not communicate. He chooses his friends 
 among people that talk as little as possible and call 
 on him once a year. Any remark about his person 
 he resents most bitterly. Tell him, ever so mildly, 
 that the colour of his necktie is cryingly out of har- 
 mony with the colour of his waistcoat, and he will 
 hate you for three years. 
 
 " c And you mean to tell me, gentlemen, that such a 
 creature is fit for marriage ? That is, fit for a condi- 
 tion of things in which a person, other than himself, 
 claims the right to be in the same room with him at 
 any given hour of the day or the night ; to pass 
 remarks on his necktie, or his cuffs, or even on his 
 tobacco; to talk, ay, to talk to him for an hour, to 
 twit him, or chaff him good heavens, one might 
 just as well think of asking the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury by telephone whether he would not come to the 
 next bar round the corner for a glass of Bass. 
 
 " c And as to other still more personal claims of 
 tenderness and intimacy on the part of the wife, such 
 as embraces and kisses, one shudders to think how 
 any woman may ever hope to attempt doing them 
 without imminent risk to her life. 
 
 "'Fancy a wife trying to kiss her legal husband ! 
 He, prouder of his collar and cuffs than of his bank- 
 ing account, to stand calmly and willingly an assault 
 
82 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 on the immaculate correctness of the said collar and 
 cuffs! 
 
 " c It passes human comprehension. The mere idea 
 thereof is unthinkable. 
 
 " ' Perhaps in the first few weeks of married life. 
 But after six months ; after a year, or two by what 
 stretch of imagination shall one reach the possibility 
 of such an event ? After six months, he is indifferent 
 to the entire astronomy of his wife ; after a year or 
 so, he hates her. It is not so much that he wants 
 another woman, or another man's wife, or another 
 wife's man ; what he wants is to be left alone. 
 
 " c He has long since shaken off the State, the 
 Church, the Army, and, politically, the Nobility. 
 Nothing can be more evident than that he wants to 
 shake off the last of the old shackles: Marriage. 
 His motive is : shekels, but no shackles. 
 
 " c Some incomprehensibly modest people have pro- 
 posed marriage to last ten years only. It appears, they 
 contend, that the critical period of the modern marri- 
 age shows itself at the end of ten years. The 
 scandals that are usually cropping up at the end of 
 that period, they say, might very well be avoided by 
 terminating marriage legally at the end of the tenth 
 year. People proposing such stuff clearly manifest 
 their utter inability to see through the true character 
 of modern marriage. 
 
 " c If marriages were to last only ten years, then be 
 sure that the said critical period with its inevitable 
 scandals would set in at the end of the fifth year. 
 The cause, the real cause of these scandals is not in 
 the length of time, but in the very nature qf marriage. 
 If this iniquitous and barbarous contract were to last 
 only for five years, then its critical period and its 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 83 
 
 scandals would appear at the end of two years. And 
 by a parity of reasoning, if marriage were to last one 
 year only, it would by its inherent vice come to grief 
 at the end of six months. 
 
 " < The only cure for marriage is to abolish it. Does 
 marriage not demand the very quality that not one 
 English person in a hundred thousand possesses : 
 yieldingness ? Or can anyone deny that no English 
 person has ever really meant to admit that he or she 
 was wrong? 
 
 " * They are all of them infallible. People write 
 such a lot about the hatred of Popery in English 
 history. What nonsense. English people do not 
 hate Popery ; they despise the idea that there should 
 be only one infallible Pope, whereas they know that 
 in England alone there are at present over thirty 
 millions of such infallibles. This being so, how can 
 marriage be a success ? 
 
 " c Or take it,' the Free Love lady continued, 
 'from another standpoint. Most Englishmen enter 
 married life with little if any experience of woman- 
 hood. Only the other day a young man of twenty- 
 five, who was just about to marry, asked in my 
 presence whether it was likely that a woman gave 
 birth to one child early in the month of May, and to 
 the other in the following month of June ? He 
 thought that The Times instalment system applied to 
 all good things. 
 
 "'Other young men inquire seriously about the 
 strategy of marriage, and the famous song in the 
 Belle of New Tork, in which the girl asks her fianct 
 "When we are married what will you do?" was 
 possible only in countries of Anglo-Saxon stock. In 
 Latin countries the operette could not have been 
 
84 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 finished in one evening on account of the intermin- 
 able laughter of the public. In London nobody 
 turned a hair, as they say. Half of the men present 
 had, in their time, asked the same question of them- 
 selves or of their doctors. 
 
 " * Now if there is one thing more certain than 
 another in the whole matter of marriage it is this, 
 that the inexperienced fiancd generally makes the 
 worst husband. Being familiar only with the ways 
 and manners of men, he misunderstands, misconstrues, 
 and misjudges most of the actions or words of his 
 young wife. He is positively shocked at her im- 
 petuous tenderness, and takes many a manifesta- 
 tion of her love for him as mere base flattery or as 
 hypocrisy. Not infrequently he ceases treating her 
 as his wife, and goes on living with her as his 
 sister; and, since the wife, more loyal to nature, 
 rarely omits recouping herself, her husband acts 
 the part of certain gentlemen of Constantinople. 
 It is thus that the famous manage a trois does not, 
 properly speaking, exist in England. In England it 
 is always a ?n<*nage a deux. 
 
 "'If, then, instead of continuing marriage; if, 
 instead of maintaining an institution so absurd and 
 so contrary to the nature of an Englishman, we 
 dropped it altogether; if, instead of compulsory 
 wedding ceremonies, we introduced that most sacred 
 of all things : FREE LOVE ; the advantages accruing 
 to the nation as a whole, and to each person con- 
 stituting that nation, would be immense. 
 
 " c Free Love, ay : that is the only solution. 
 Nature knows what she is after. The * blue-eyed 
 crave the black-eyed ones ; the fair-haired desire the 
 dark-haired ; the tall ones the small ; the thin ones 
 
ALC1BIADES ON WOMEN 85 
 
 the thick ; the unlettered ones the lettered unfettered 
 ones. This is Nature. 
 
 " c If these affinities are given free scope, the result 
 will be a nation of giants and heroes. Affinities 
 produce Infinities. Free Trade in wedlock is the 
 great panacea. Since the only justifiable ground for 
 marriage is the child, how dare one marry anyone 
 else than the person with whom he or she is most 
 likely to have the finest babe ? That person is clearly 
 indicated by Nature. How, then, can Society, Law, 
 or the Church claim the right to interfere in the 
 choice ? 
 
 " c I know that many of you will say : " Oh, if men 
 should take their wives only from Free Love, they 
 would take a different one every quarter." But if 
 you come to think of it, it is not so at all. If men 
 took their wives out of Free Love, they could not so 
 much as think of taking another wife every quarter. 
 For, which other wife could they take? There 
 would be none left for them, since all the other 
 women would, by the hypothesis, long have been 
 taken up by their Free Lovers. Moreover, if a man 
 takes a wife out of Free Love, he sticks to her just 
 because he loves her. Had he not loved her, he 
 would not have taken her; and if he should cease 
 loving her, he would find no other woman to join 
 him, owing to his proved fickleness. 
 
 " ' Last, not least, women and men would form 
 elaborate societies for the prevention of frivolous 
 breaches of faith. At present no woman has a 
 serious interest in watching another woman's man. 
 It would be quite different in Free-Love-Land. The 
 unofficial supervision and control of men and women 
 would be as rigorous as in monastic orders. As a 
 
86 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 man will pay off debts contracted at a card -table with 
 infinitely greater anxiety than any ordinary debt of 
 his to a tailor or a grocer, just because such gambling 
 debts are not actionable; even so conjugal debts 
 would, in Free-Love-Land, be discharged with a 
 punctuality that now is practically unknown. 
 
 " * The commonplace assertion that legal marriage 
 preserves men and women in a virtuous life has been 
 refuted these six thousand years. To the present 
 day one is not able to deny the truth of what once a 
 Turkish woman replied to a Christian lady. The 
 latter asked the Oriental : " How can you tolerate 
 the fact that your husband has at the same time and 
 in the same house three other wives of his ? " The 
 Turkish lady replied : " Please, do not excite yourself 
 unduly. The only difference between me and you is 
 this, that I know the names of my rivals, and you do 
 not." 
 
 " e In Free-Love-Land alone is there virtue. Men 
 and women select freely, obeying only the dictates 
 of infallible Nature* The result is order, health, 
 joy, and efficiency. How can any person of sense 
 believe in the present marriage systems, when one 
 considers the countless lives of old maids sacrificed to 
 the Moloch of modern legal monogamy ? 
 
 " c In England there are about four times more 
 old maids than in any other country ; except in New 
 England, in the United States, where every second 
 woman is born an old maid. Has anybody ever 
 seriously pondered over the great danger to Society 
 and State implied in an excessive number of old 
 maids? I leave it to you, and I dare say to^ everyone 
 of you who has, no doubt, bitterly suffered at the 
 hands of some one old maid in his or her family. 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 87 
 
 " < Old maids are either angels of goodness, or devils 
 in human form; the real proportion of either must 
 be left to the Lord Chancellor to decide. But who, 
 or what produces old maids ? Our legal monogamy. 
 Give us Free Love, and you shall have heard the last 
 word of old maids. Refuse Free Love, and we shall 
 have to form our old maids into regiments and send 
 them against the Germans. Plato said that the 
 unsatisfied womb of a woman wanders about in all 
 her body like a ravenous animal and devours every- 
 thing on his path. Our present marriage system 
 makes more victims than victors.' 
 
 "The good bag of bones wanted to continue in 
 the same strain, but was stopped by a young police- 
 man who threatened to take her into custody unless 
 she discontinued her oratory. She threatened to 
 love him freely; whereupon he ran away as speedily 
 as he could manage, but was at once followed by the 
 valiant she-orator, who nearly overtook him, crying 
 all the time c I love you freely ' * I love you freely.' 
 The whole crowd followed, howling, screaming, 
 laughing, and singing songs of Free Love. So 
 ended the discourse on Free Love. 
 
 "A few weeks later," continued Alcibiades, "I 
 made the acquaintance of what they call a society 
 
88 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 lady. She was, of course, a specialist. She had 
 found out that her physical attractions were of a 
 kind to show off best at the moment of entering a 
 crowded room. She was, to use the phraseology of 
 the chef, an entree beauty. Her name was Entrea. 
 At the moment she entered a salon, she gave, just 
 for a few minutes, the impression of being strikingly 
 handsome. She walked well, and the upper part of 
 her head, her hair, forehead, and eyes were very 
 pretty. She knew that on entering a room, the 
 upper part of the head is precisely the one object of 
 general attention. This she utilised in the most 
 methodic manner. She entered with an innocent 
 smile and lustrous eyes. The effect was decidedly 
 pretty. 
 
 " In order to heighten it she always came late. 
 Her cheeks, which were ugly; her shoulders, which 
 were uglier ; her arms, which were still uglier, were 
 all cleverly disguised or made to appear secondary, 
 and as if dominated by her big eyes. She was very 
 successful. Most men considered her beautiful ; and 
 women were happy that her principal effect did not 
 last very long. She knew some fifteen phrases by 
 heart, which were meant to meet the conversation of 
 the fifteen different species into which she had, for 
 daily use, divided the different men she met in 
 society. Each of these phrases gave her the appear- 
 ance of much esprit and of an intelligent interest in 
 the subject. She did not understand them at all; 
 but she never mixed them up, thanks to her instinct, 
 which was infallible. 
 
 "The last time she had done or said Anything 
 spontaneously or naively was on the day she left her 
 nursery. Ever since she was the mere manager of 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 89 
 
 her words and acts. In everything there was a cool 
 intention. As a matter of fact she was meant by 
 Nature to be a salesgirl at Whiteley's. Failing 
 this, she sold her presence, her smiles, her manners 
 to the best social advantage. A rabid materialist, 
 she always pretended to live for nothing but ideals. 
 Sickened by music, she always gave herself out to be 
 an enthusiast for Wagner. Like many women that 
 have no natural talent for intellectual pursuits, she 
 was most eager to read serious books, to attend serious 
 lectures, and to engage a conversation on philosophy. 
 
 "I met her in my quality as Prince of Syracuse. 
 She first thought that Syracuse was the name of my 
 father; when I had explained to her that Syracuse 
 was the name of a famous town in Sicily, she asked 
 me whether I belonged to the great family whose 
 motto was qui s'excuse, s^iracuse. 
 
 " On my answering in the negative, she exclaimed : 
 'But surely you belong at least to the Maffia? Oh 
 do, it would be so interesting ! ' In order to please 
 her I at once belonged to that society of secret 
 assassins. However, I soon noticed that she thought 
 the Maffia was the Sicilian form of a society for 
 patriotic Mafficking. 
 
 " When we became a little more intimate, she told 
 me that I was never to speak of anything else than 
 Syracuse. That would give me a certain cachet, as 
 she put it, and distinguish me from the others. 
 Accordingly I placed all my stories and occasional 
 sallies of talk at Syracuse. I was the Syracusan. 
 She swore my accent was Syracusan, and that my 
 entire personality breathed Syracusan air. In society 
 she presented me as a member of a curious race, the 
 Syracusans, in Sicily, close to the Riviera. 
 
90 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "One day she surprised me with the question 
 whether the men of Syracuse were still in the habit 
 of marrying two women at a time. She had read in 
 some book of the double marriage of Dionysus the 
 Elder in the fourth century B.C. I calmed her in 
 that respect. I said that since that time things had 
 changed at Syracuse. 
 
 " On the other hand, I was unable to make out 
 whether she was a divorced virgin, or a deceased 
 sister's wife. It was not clear at all. When con- 
 versing with me alone, she was as dry as a Non- 
 conformist; but in a drawing-room, full of people, 
 she showered upon me all the sweets of passionate 
 flirtation. 
 
 " One day I told her that I had won great victories 
 in the chariot races at Olympia. She looked at me 
 with a knowing smile and said : c Come, come, why 
 did I not read about it in the Daily Nat/? 9 and, 
 showing me the inside of her hat, she pointed at a 
 slip of paper in it, on which was printed : ' I am 
 somewhat of a liar myself. 9 I assured her that I 
 had really won great prizes at Olympia. 
 
 " ' Were they in the papers ? ' she asked. 
 
 " I said, we had no papers at that time. 
 
 " c No papers ? ' she exclaimed. c Why, were you 
 like the negroes ? No papers ! What will you tell 
 me next ? Had you perhaps no top-hats either ? Do 
 you mean to tell me that this great poet of yours 
 what you call him? ah, Lord Homer, had no 
 top-hat ? ' 
 
 " I assured her that we had no hats whatever. 
 
 " c Oh, I see,' she said, < you were founded like the 
 blue boys, I see. But surely you wore gloves ? ' 
 
 " On my denying it, she turned a little pale. 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 91 
 
 " c No gloves either ? Then I must ask you only 
 one more thing : had you no shoes either ? ' 
 
 " ' No,' I said, calmly, ' some of us, like Socrates, 
 went always barefoot, others in sandals.' 
 
 " She smiled incredulously. I told her that in the 
 heyday of Athens men in the streets went about 
 over one-third nude. She did not mind the nude, 
 but she stopped at the word heyday. 
 
 " She asked me : ' On which day of the year fell 
 your heyday ? ' 
 
 " I did not quite know what to say, until it flashed 
 upon my mind that she meant ' hay-day.' I soon 
 saw I was right, because she added : 
 
 " e Does going barefoot cure hay-fever ? And is 
 that the reason why so many people still talk of 
 Socrates ? ' 
 
 " I stared at her. Was it really possible that she 
 did not know who Socrates was ? I tried to give 
 a short sketch of your life, O Socrates, but I could 
 not go beyond the time before you were born. For, 
 when I said that your mother had been a midwife, 
 my lady friend recoiled with an expression of terror. 
 
 " c What,' she exclaimed, ' he was the son of 
 a midwife ? a midwife ? Pray, do not let us talk 
 about such people ! I hoped he was at least the 
 son of a baronet. How could you ever endure 
 his company ? ' 
 
 "'That was just it,' said I, <I could not. His 
 charm was so great, that for fear of neglecting 
 everything else I fled from him like a hunted stag.' 
 
 " ' But pray,' she retorted, ' what charm can there 
 be in a son of a midwife ? I can imagine some interest 
 in a clever midwife, but in her son ? Oh, that is too 
 absurd for words ! ' 
 
92 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "'My charming friend,' I answered, 'Socrates 
 was, as he frequently remarked it, himself a sort 
 of midwife, who never pretended to be parent to 
 a thought, but only to have helped others to produce 
 them.' 
 
 " ' Oh, is that it, ' she said dryly, ' Socrates did 
 manual services in midwifery ? How lost to all shame 
 your women must have been to engage a man in 
 their most delicate moments. I now see why so 
 many of my lady friends deserted a man who had 
 announced lectures on Plato. He also talked about 
 Socrates, and when it became known that Socrates 
 was a wretched midwife's clerk, we left the lecture- 
 hall in indignation. Fancy that man said he talked 
 about Plato, and yet in his discourses he talked 
 about nurseries, teetotalism, Christian Science and 
 all such things as date only of yesterday, and of 
 which Plato could have known nothing.' 
 
 "'But my lovely Entrea,' I interrupted, 'Plato 
 does talk of all these things, and with a vengeance.' 
 
 " ' How could he talk of them ? ' she triumphantly 
 retorted. 'Did he ever read the Daily Nail or 
 Ladies 9 Woldl 9 
 
 " ' No,' I said, ' he never did, which is one of the 
 many reasons of his divine genius. But he does 
 speak of temperance, and simple life, and the super- 
 man, and all the other so-called discoveries of this 
 age, with the full knowledge of a sage who has 
 actually experienced those eccentricities.' 
 
 "My fascinating friend could stand it no longer. 
 Interrupting me she said: 
 
 " ' Why, every child knows that Plato talked of 
 nothing else than of Platonic love. We all expected 
 to hear about nothing else than that curious love 
 
ALCIB1ADES ON WOMEN 93 
 
 which all of us desire, if it is not too long insisted 
 upon. We went to the course to revive in ourselves 
 long-lost shivers not only of idealism, but even of 
 bimetallism, or as it were the double weight of it. 
 
 " ' We thought, since Plato is evidently named 
 after platinum, which we know to be the dearest of 
 precious metals, his philosophy must treat of such 
 emotions as cost us the greatest sacrifice. 
 
 " f Platonic love is the most comfortable of subjects 
 to talk or think about. It makes you look innocent, 
 and yet on its brink there are such nicely dreadful 
 possibilities of plunging into delightful abysses. 
 Each thing gets two values ; one Platonic, the other, 
 the naughty value. A whole nude arm may be 
 Platonic ; but a voluptuous wrist peeping out of fine 
 laces may be only a tonic. 
 
 "'Now these are precisely the subjects of which 
 we desired to hear in those lectures. Instead of 
 which the man said nothing about them, nothing 
 about that dear Platonic love; in fact, he said that 
 Plato never speaks of what is now called Platonic 
 love. And that man calls himself a scholar ? Why, 
 my very chamber-maid knows better. The other 
 day she saw the lecturer's photo in a paper and, 
 smiling in an embarrassed way, she said to the cook : 
 "That's the man what talks at Cliradge's about 
 miscarriages." Was she not right? Is not Platonic 
 love the cause of so many miscarriages, before, 
 during, or after the wedding ceremony ? 
 
 " c And then,' she added with a gasp, f we all knew 
 that Plato was a mystic, full of that shivery, half- 
 toney, gruesomely something or other which makes 
 us feel that even in everyday life we are surrounded 
 by asterisks, or, as they also call them, astral forces. 
 
94 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 Was not Plato an intimate friend of Mrs Blavatsky, 
 the sister of Madame Badarzewska, who was the 
 composer of " A Maiden's Prayer " ? There ! why 
 then did that lecturer not talk about palmistry, 
 auristry, sorcery, witchcraft, and other itch-crafts ? 
 Not a word about them ! We were indignant. 
 
 "'A friend of mine, Mrs Oofry Blazing, who 
 talks French admirably, and whose teeth are the 
 envy of her nose, declared: "Get homme est unfumiste" 
 Of course, he sold us fumes, instead of perfumes. 
 One amongst us, an American woman of the third 
 sex, told the man publicly straight into his face, and 
 with inimitable delicacy of touch : " Sir, what are you 
 here for ? " Quite so ; what was he there for ? We 
 wanted Plato, and nothing but Plato. One fairly 
 expected him to begin every sentence with P's, or 
 Pi's. Instead of that he wandered from one subject 
 to another. One day he talked about the general 
 and the particular ; the other day about the particu- 
 lar and the general. But what particular is there in 
 a general, I beg of you? Is an admiral not much 
 more important ? We do not trouble about the 
 army at all. And then, and chiefly, what has a 
 general to do with Plato? The lectures were not 
 on military matters, but on the most immaterial 
 matters, which yet matter materially. But, of 
 course, now that you tell me that Socrates, Plato's 
 master, was a he-midwife, I can very well understand 
 that his modern disciples are philosophical mis- 
 carriages ! ' " 
 
 * 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 95 
 
 The gods laughed heartily, and Sappho asked 
 Plato how he liked the remarks of Entrea. Plato 
 smiled and made Sappho blush by reminding her 
 what the little ones had at all times said of her, 
 although not a tittle of truth was in it. "No 
 ordinary citizen, nor his wife," he added, u ever 
 wants to know persons or things as they really are. 
 They only want to know what they imagine or desire 
 to be the truth. This is the reason why so many 
 men before the public take up a definite pose, the 
 one demanded by the public. This they do, not out 
 of sheer fatuity, but of necessity. A king could not 
 afford to sing in public, no matter how well he sang ; 
 it does not fit the image the public likes to form 
 about a king. In fact, the better he sang, the more 
 harm it would do him. I have always impressed the 
 little ones as a mystic, an enthusiast, a blessed spirit, 
 as you Goethe used to call me. Yet my principal 
 aim was Apollo, and not Dionysus; clearness, and 
 not the clair-obscur of trances." 
 
 Alcibiades, whose beautiful head added to the 
 charms of Venice, then continued : " Nothing, O 
 Plato, can be truer than your remark. My lady 
 friend was a living example of your statement. To 
 me, after so many hundreds of experiences, her 
 made-up little mask was no hindrance, I saw 
 through her within less than a week. She was, at 
 heart, as dry, as kippered, as intentionalist, and 
 coldly self-conscious as the driest of Egyptian book- 
 keepers in a great merchant firm at Corinth. 
 Nothing really interested her; she was only ever 
 running after what she imagined to be the fashion 
 of the moment. What she really wanted was to be 
 the earliest in ( the latest .' When she came to the 
 
96 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 bookshop, at five in the afternoon, when all the 
 others came, she would ask the clerk after the latest 
 fashion in novels. She did that so frequently, and 
 with such exasperating regularity, that one day the 
 clerk, who could stand it no longer, said to her: 
 ' Madame, be seated for a few moments the fashion 
 is just changing.' She, not in the least disconcerted, 
 eagerly retorted : < I say, is that " the latest " ? ' 
 The clerk gave notice to leave ! 
 
 "One day I found her in a very bad humour. 
 When pressed for an explanation, she told me that 
 just at that moment an elegant funeral was going on, 
 at which she was most anxious to attend. 'Why, 
 then, do you not go ? ' I asked. 
 
 " c Because,' she replied, c it is simply impos- 
 sible. Just fancy, that good woman died of heart 
 failure ! ' 
 
 C ? 5 
 
 " c You cannot see? Heart failure? Can you 
 imagine anybody to die of heart failure, when the 
 only correct thing to do is to die of appendicitis ? I 
 telephoned in due time to her doctor, imploring him 
 to declare that she died of that smart disease. But 
 he is a brute. He would not do it. Now I am for 
 ever compromised by the friendship of that woman. 
 Oh how true was the remark of your sage Salami, 
 when he said that nobody can be said to be happy 
 before all his friends have died ! ' " 
 
 Thereupon the gods and heroes congratulated 
 Solon upon his change of profession : having been a 
 sage, he was now a sausage. 
 
 "The next time I saw my lady friend," Alcibiades 
 continued, "I found her in tears. Inquiring after 
 the cause of her distress, I learnt : 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 97 
 
 " * Just imagine ! You know my little pet-dog. I 
 bought him of a lady-in-waiting. He has the most 
 exquisite tact and feels happy only in genteel society. 
 An hour ago my maid suddenly left my flat, and 
 expecting, as I did, a lady of very high standing, I 
 did a little dusting and cleaning in my room. When 
 my Toto saw that; when he watched me actually 
 doing housemaid's work, he cried bitterly. He could 
 not bear the idea of my demeaning myself with work 
 unfit for a lady. It was really too touching for 
 words. When I saw the refined sense of genteeldom 
 in Toto's eyes, I too began crying. And so we both 
 cried.' 
 
 " When I had lived through several scenes of the 
 character just described, I could not help thinking 
 that we Athenians were perhaps much wiser than 
 the modern men, in that we did not allow our women 
 to appear in society. They were, it is true, seldom 
 interesting, nor physically greatly developed. On 
 the other hand they never bored us with types of 
 what these little ones call society ladies. I cannot 
 but remember the exquisite evenings which I spent 
 at the house of Critias, "where one of our wittiest 
 hetairaiy or emancipated women, imitated the false 
 manners, hypocrisy and inane pomp of the society 
 ladies of Thebes in Egypt. We laughed until we 
 could see no longer. What Leontion, that hetaira, 
 represented was exactly what I observed in my lady 
 friend in London. The same disheartening dryness 
 
98 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 of soul; the same exasperating superficiality of in- 
 tellect; the same lack of all real refinement, that I 
 found a few centuries later in society in the times of 
 the Roman Csesars. 
 
 " London desiccates ; whereas Athens or Paris ani- 
 mates. When I gave up my relation to Entrea, I 
 met a woman of about thirty-four, whose head was 
 so perfect that Evaenetus himself has never engraved 
 a more absolutely beautiful one. Her hair was not 
 only golden of the most lovely tint, but also full of 
 waves, from long curls in Doric adagio, to tantalis- 
 ing Corinthian pizzicato frizzles all round. Her face 
 was a cameo cut in onyx, and both lovely and severe. 
 Her loveliness was in the upper part of her face ; her 
 severity round the mouth and the chin. This strange 
 reversal of what is usually the case gave her a 
 character of her own. Her stark blue eyes were big 
 and cold, yet sympathetic and intelligent-looking ; 
 and her ears were the finest shells that Leucothea 
 presented her mother with from the wine-coloured 
 ocean, and inside the shells were the most enchant- 
 ing pearls, which the sea-nymph then left in the 
 mouth of the blessed babe as her teeth. She was 
 not tall, but very neatly made; ufausse maigre. She 
 wrote bright articles, in which from time to time she 
 wrapped up a big truth in bon-bon paper. 
 
 "There was in her the richest material for the 
 most enchanting womanhood; a blend of Musarion 
 and Aspasia; or to talk modern style, a blend of 
 Mademoiselle PEspinasse with Madame Recamier. 
 She was neither. Not that she made any pre- 
 posterous effort to be, what Paris calls, a, Madame 
 Recamier. But London desiccated her. From dry 
 by nature, she became drier still by London. Being 
 
ALCIBIADES ON WOMEN 99 
 
 as dry as she was, she only cared for mystic things ; 
 for what is behind the curtain of things ; for the 
 borderland of knowledge and dream. As sand can 
 never drink in enough rain, so dry souls want to 
 intoxicate themselves with mystic alcohol. In vulgarly 
 dry persons that rain from above becomes mud ; 
 in refinedly dry souls it is atomised into an intel- 
 lectual spray. Her whole soul was athirst of that 
 spray. 
 
 " When I told her that I was the son of Clinias, 
 she wanted to know first of all, what had been going 
 on at the mysteries of Eleusis. I told her that, 
 like all the Hellenes, I had sworn never to reveal 
 what I had seen at the holy ceremonies. This she 
 could not understand. In her religion the priests 
 are but too anxious to initiate anybody that cares 
 for it. 
 
 "'Initiate me oh initiate me I beg you,' she 
 said, and looked more beautiful than ever. Her arm 
 trembled ; her voice faltered. Even if I did not 
 respect my oath, I should not have told her the 
 teachings of Eleusis. They were far too simple for 
 her mystery-craving soul. So I told her of the Orphic 
 mysteries, and the more she heard of the extravagant 
 and mind-shaking rites and tenets, the more interested 
 she became. Her mouth, usually so severe, swung 
 again in pouty lines of youthful timidity, and her 
 voice got a 'cello down of mellowness. 
 
 "'Let us introduce Orphism into this country,' 
 she exclaimed. 'Will you be honorary treasurer?' 
 
 "I accepted," said Alcibiades. "Within three 
 days Orphism was presented as the Orphic Science. 
 The members were called priestesses, archontes, or 
 acolytes, according to their degree. Within a month 
 
ioo NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 there were 843 members. Jamblichus was sent for 
 and made secretary. Costumes were invented ; 
 pamphlets printed ; cures promised ; shares offered. 
 It was declared that trances and mystic shivers would 
 be procured e while you wait ' ; dreams accounted for ; 
 inexplicables explained ; the curtain of things raised 
 every Friday at five, after tea. Finally the Orphics 
 gave their first dinner at the Hotel Cecil. 
 
 " That was the worst blow. After that I abandoned 
 Orphism." 
 
FOURTH NIGHT 
 
 ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 
 
 HESTIA now interrupted Alcibiades with the ques- 
 tion whether all the women in nebulous Britannia 
 were as grotesque as those that he had de- 
 scribed. 
 
 Alcibiades smiled and said : 
 
 " Not all of them, but all at times. Women must 
 necessarily adapt themselves to the nature of their 
 men, as clerks do to that of their patrons, or soldiers 
 to that of their generals and officers. The English- 
 man buys his liberty at the expense of much human 
 capital; which cannot but make him eccentric and 
 grotesque. The women attune themselves to him, 
 although no foreigner has a clearer nor a more 
 depreciative idea of Englishmen's angularity than 
 have English women. As women they do not, as a 
 rule, care for liberty at all, and hence consider the 
 sacrifices made by men for liberty as superfluous and 
 uncalled-for. A woman wants in all things the 
 human note, which the average Englishman hates. 
 Hence the surprising power of Continental men over 
 English women. A hundred picked Greeks from 
 Athens, Sicyon and Syracuse could bring half of all 
 English women to book for Cytherea. How could 
 it be otherwise? The animated, passionate, direct 
 talk of a Greek is something so novel to an English 
 woman that she is as it were hypnotised by it. She 
 
 101 
 
NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 .thinks: it 'is sh,e aad. her personality that has given 
 her Continental admirer that verve of expression 
 which she has never before experienced in the men 
 of her circle. This alone is such flattery to her that 
 she loses her head. 
 
 " If one resolutely goes on scraping off the man- 
 made chalk from the manners and actions of English 
 women, one is frequently rewarded with the pleasure 
 of arriving at last at the woman behind the chalk. 
 This is more especially the case in women of the 
 higher classes. The only time in England I felt 
 something of that painful bliss that mortals call love, 
 was in the case of a lady friend of mine who, under 
 mountains of London clay, hid away a passionate, 
 loving woman. She was tall and luxuriously built. 
 Her hands were of perfect shape and condignly con- 
 tinued by lovely arms, that attached themselves into 
 majestic shoulders with the ease of a rivulet entering 
 a lake by a graceful curve. Over her shoulders the 
 minaret of her neck stood watch. In charming con- 
 trast to the legato cantablle of her body was the 
 staccato of her mind. Her words pecked at things 
 like birds. Sometimes there appeared amongst the 
 latter an ugly vulture or two ; but there were more 
 colibris and magpies. I had met her for months 
 before I surmised that there was something behind 
 that London clay. But when the moment came and 
 the bells began sobbing in her minaret, then I knew 
 that here was a heart aglow with true passion and 
 with the dawn of hope divine. Like all women that 
 do truly love, she would not believe me that I 
 sincerely felt what I said. Doubt is to women what 
 danger is to men: it sharpens the delight of love. 
 She never became really tender; ay, she was 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 03 
 
 amazed and moved to tears at my being so. Her 
 heart was uneducated ; it was gauche at the game of 
 love. 
 
 " Amongst the persons dressed in female attire I 
 also met a number of beings whom, but for my long 
 stay at Sparta, I should hardly have recognised as 
 women. A French friend of mine remarked of 
 them : c Ce ne sont pas des femmes, ce sont des Amtri- 
 caines? The species is very much in evidence in 
 London. They reminded me violently of the Spartan 
 women. They are handsome, if more striking than 
 beautiful. I noticed that in contrast to European 
 women, American females gain in years what they 
 lose in dress at night. They look older when un- 
 dressed. They have excellent teeth, and execrable 
 hands; they jump well, but walk badly. Their 
 great speciality is their voice, which is strident, top- 
 nasal, falsetto^ disheartening. The most beautiful 
 amongst them is murdered by her voice. It is as if 
 out of the most perfect mouth, set in the most 
 charming face, an ugly rat would jump at one. 
 That voice, the English say, comes from the climate 
 of America. (This I do not believe at all; for I 
 have noticed that in England everything is ascribed 
 to the climate, as to the thing most talked about by 
 the people. Climate and weather are the most 
 popular subjects in England; the one that is never 
 out of fashion.) As a matter of fact it comes from 
 the total lack of emotionality in the Americans ; 
 
io 4 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 just as amongst musical instruments the more emo- 
 tional ones, like the 'cello, have more pectoral 
 tonality, whereas the fife, for instance, having no 
 deep emotions at all to express, is high and thin 
 toned. 
 
 "Nothing seemed to me more interesting than the 
 way in which the American female reminded me of 
 the Spartans and the Amazons. Could anything be 
 more striking than the coincidence between two con- 
 versations, one of which I had, far over two thousand 
 years ago, with the Queen of an Amazonian tribe in 
 Thracia, and the other with the wife of an American 
 flour dealer settled in London ? When I called on 
 Thamyris in her tent, one of her first questions was 
 as to the latest dramatic piece by Sophocles. I at 
 once saw that the Queen wanted to impress her 
 entourage with her great literary abilities. I gave 
 her some news about Sophocles, whereupon she 
 turned round to her one-breasted she-warriors and 
 said with a superior smile : 
 
 "'You must know that Sophocles is the latest 
 star in Athenian comedy.' 
 
 "She mixed you up, O Sophocles, with Aristo- 
 phanes. With the American flour dealer's wife my 
 experience was as follows: He had made my ac- 
 quaintance in a bar-room, and invited me to his 
 house. On the way there he said to me : 
 
 " ' My missus is quite a linguist. She talks French 
 like two natives. Do talk to her French.' 
 
 " When we arrived at the house and entered 
 the drawing-room, a rather handsome woman rose 
 from an arm-chair, and stepping up to me said 
 something that sounded like ' Monsieur, je suis ravie 
 d* faire votre connausance ' ; I thanked her, also in 
 
ALCIBI ADES CONTINUED 1 05 
 
 French, when suddenly she bowed over me and 
 whispered in American fifes : 
 
 " ' Don't continue, that's all I know.' 
 
 "When I left, the husband accompanied me to 
 the door. Before I took leave, he twinkled with 
 his right eye, and asked me with a knowing look, 
 'Well, sir, what do you think of the linguistic 
 range of my madame ? ' 
 
 "I did not quite know what to reply. At last 
 I said : ' Like a true soldier she fights on the 
 borderland.' 
 
 " One of the strangest things to note in London 
 society is the fascination exercised by American 
 women on Englishmen. Many of the really intelli- 
 gent men among the English are practically lost 
 as soon as the American woman begins playing 
 with the little lasso of thin ropes which she carries 
 about her in the shape of an acquired brightness 
 and a studied vivacity. The most glaring defects 
 of those women do not seem to exist for the average 
 Englishman. He takes her loud brightness for 
 French esprit dished up to him in intelligible English. 
 Her total lack of self-restraint and modesty he takes 
 for a charming abandon. The real fact is that he 
 is afraid of her. She may have many a bump : she 
 certainly has not that of reverence. Her irreverent 
 mind makes light of the grandezza of Englishmen, 
 and thus cows him by his fear of making himself 
 ridiculous. 
 
 "The first American woman ( sit venia verbo, 
 as you would say, O Cicero ) I met in London 
 was one married to an English lord. She was 
 tall, well-built, with rich arms and hips, an expres- 
 sive head, very fond of the arts, more especially of 
 
106 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 music. Even her head, which was a trifle square, 
 indicated that. When she learnt that I really was 
 the famous Alcibiades, her excitement knew no 
 bounds. She was good enough to explain it to 
 me: 
 
 " f Just fancy that ! Alcibiades ! (They pronounce 
 my name Elkibidees.) I am simply charmed ! I have 
 so far every year introduced some new and striking 
 personage into drawing-rooms, in order to stun the 
 natives of this obsolete island. I have brought into 
 fashion one-legged dancers ; three-legged calves ; 
 single-minded thought-readers ; illusionists ; disillu- 
 sionists ; disemotionists ; dancers classical, mediaeval, 
 and hyper-modern; French lectures on the isle of 
 Lesbos, after a series of discourses on the calves 
 of the legs of Greek goddesses in marble; not to 
 forget my unique course of lectures given at the 
 drawing-room of the dearest of all duchesses, on the 
 history of d^colletage. 
 
 uc This year, to be quite frank with you, Mr 
 Elkibidees, I meant to arrange in the magnificent 
 drawing-room of an Oriental English lady, the 
 uniquest and at the same time the boldest exhibition 
 ever offered to the dear nerves of any class of 
 women. I cannot quite tell you what it was going 
 to be. I can only faintly indicate that it was to 
 be a collection of all the oldest as well as latest 
 inventions securing the tranquillity of enjoying just 
 one child in the family. This, I have no doubt, 
 would have been the greatest sensation of the 
 season. 
 
 " < The city of Manchester and the town qf Leeds 
 would have publicly protested against so " immoral " 
 an exhibition. Of course their councillors would 
 
ALCIBI ADES CONTINUED 1 07 
 
 have done so after careful study of the things 
 exhibited. Three bishops would have threatened 
 to preach publicly in Hyde Park ; while five arch- 
 deacons would have volunteered to be the honorary 
 secretaries of so interesting an exhibition. 
 
 " c I communicated the idea to Father Bowan, a 
 virulent Jesuit, who in the creepiest of capucmades, 
 delivered on most Sundays during the season, gives 
 us the most delightful shivers of repentance, and 
 likewise many an inkling of charming vice of which 
 we did not know anything before we learned it 
 from his pure lips. He was delighted. "Do, my 
 lady, do do it. I am just a little short of horrors, 
 and your exhibition will give me excellent material 
 for at least four Sundays. I hope you have not for- 
 gotten to illustrate by wax figures certain methods, 
 far more efficient than any instrument can be, and 
 most completely enumerated and described in the 
 works of members of our holy Order, such as 
 Suarez, Sanchez, Escobar, and others. Should you 
 not have these works, I will send you an accu- 
 rate abridgment of their principal statements of 
 facts." 
 
 " ' When I heard the Rev. Father talk like that, 
 I could scarcely control myself with enthusiasm in 
 anticipating the huge sensation my exhibition was 
 sure to make. It would have been the best fed, 
 the best clad, and the most enlightened sensation 
 ever made in England since the battle of Hastings. 
 I really thought that nothing greater could be 
 imagined. 
 
 "'And yet, when I now come to think what a 
 draw you will be, Mr Elki, if properly taken in 
 hand, duly advertised, adroitly paragraphed, con- 
 
io8 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 stantly interviewed, and occasionally leadered, 
 when I think of all that, I cannot but think that 
 I shall have in you the greatest catch that has 
 ever been in any country under any sun. In fact, 
 I have my plan quite ready. 
 
 " ' I will announce a big reception, " to meet " 
 you. Some ladies will, by request, arrive in Greek 
 dress. The public orator of one of the great 
 Universities will address you in Greek, and you 
 will reply in the same language. Then three of 
 the prettiest daughters of earls and marquesses 
 will dance the dance of the Graces, after which 
 there will be a dramatic piece made by Hall Caine 
 and Shaw, each of them writing alternate pages, 
 the subject of which will be the Thirty Years' War, 
 in which you excelled so much.' 
 
 " I interrupted her," said Alcibiades, " remarking 
 that the Thirty Years' War was two thousand years 
 after my time ; my war was the Peloponnesian 
 War. 
 
 " 6 Very well,' she exclaimed, c the Peloponnesian 
 War. I do not care which. Hall Caine will praise 
 everything in connection with war, in his best Daily 
 Nail style. He is, you know, our leading light. He 
 always wants to indulge in great thoughts, and would 
 do so too, but for the awkward fact that he cannot 
 find any. 
 
 "'Shaw, on the other hand, will cry down in 
 choicest Gaelic all the glories of war. It will be 
 the biggest fun out. 
 
 " c And then, entre nous, could you not bring with 
 you a Lais, a Phryne or two, in their original 
 costumes as they allured all you naughty Greeks in 
 times bygone ? It would be charmingly revolting, 
 
ALCIBI ADES CONTINUED 1 09 
 
 When I dimly represent to myself how the young 
 eagles of society will tremble with pleasure at the 
 thought of adding to their lists of conquests, in pink 
 and white, a Corinthian or Athenian demi-mondaine 
 of two thousand years ago, I feel that I am a 
 Personality. 
 
 " c If I could offer such an unheard-of opportunity 
 I should get first leaders in the Manchester Guardian 
 and mild rebukes, full of secret zest, in the godly 
 Guardian^ let alone other noble papers read by the 
 goody-goody ones. The Record would send me a 
 testimonial signed by the leading higher critics. I 
 should be the heroine of the day and of the night.' " 
 
 The gods and heroes encouraged Alcibiades by 
 their gay laughter to tell them all that happened at 
 the " At Home " of his American lady friend, and he 
 continued as follows : 
 
 " When the evening of the Greek soiree came, 
 I went to the drawing-room in company with Phryne 
 and Lais, who were most charmingly dressed as flute- 
 girls. When we entered the large room we saw 
 a vast assembly of women and men, mostly dressed 
 in the preposterous fashion of the little ones. The 
 women looked like zoological specimens, some re- 
 sembling Brazilian butterflies, others reptiles, others 
 again snakes or birds of prey. The upper part of 
 their bodies was uncovered, no matter whether the 
 rest of the body had gone through countless cam- 
 paigns enlivened by numerous capitulations, or whether 
 it had just expanded into the buds of rosy spring. 
 The men looked like the clowns in our farces. They 
 wore a costume that no Greek slave would have 
 donned. It was all black and all of the same cut. 
 Instead of looking enterprising, they all looked like 
 
no NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 undertakers. Each of them made a nervous attempt 
 to appear as inoffensive, and as self-effacing as pos- 
 sible; just like undertakers entering the house where 
 a person had died. 
 
 " When we entered the room the whole assembly 
 rose and cried : * Cairo Cairo ! ' (they were told to 
 cry Chaire but in vain). I could distinctly hear 
 remarks such as these : < How weird ! ' ' Is it not 
 uncanny ? ' c It makes me feel creepy ! ' After a 
 few minutes there was a deep silence, and an elderly 
 gentleman came up through the middle of the room 
 and, bowing first to us and then to the people 
 assembled, stepped up to the platform and began a 
 speech in a strange language, which I vaguely 
 remembered having heard before. 
 
 " Phryne suddenly began to giggle, and so irre- 
 sistible was her laughter that both Lais and I could 
 not but join her, especially when in words broken 
 by continuous laughter she told us : 
 
 " ' The old gent pretends to speak Athenian 
 Greek ! ' 
 
 " It was indeed too absurd for words. There was 
 especially that vulgar sound / constantly recurring 
 where we never dreamt of using such a sound ; and 
 our beautiful ypsilon (y) he pronounced like the 
 English u, which is like serving champagne in soup- 
 plates. When he stumbled over an ou, he pronounced 
 it with a sound to which dentists are better ac- 
 customed than any Athenian ever was, and our deep 
 and manly ch (x) he castrated down to a lisping k. 
 I remember Carians in Asia Minor who talked like 
 that. Our noble and incomparable language, or- 
 chestral, picturesque, sculptural, became like the 
 Palace of Minos which they are excavating at 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 1 1 
 
 present : in its magnificent halls, eaten by weather 
 and worm, one sees only poor labourers and here and 
 there a directing mind. 
 
 " I imagined that the good man meant by his 
 speech to welcome me back into the world, and so 
 when my turn to answer him came, I got up and, 
 leaning partly on Phryne and partly on Lais, who 
 stood near me, I replied as follows, after speaking 
 for a little while in Attic, in the language of the 
 country : 
 
 " c It is indeed with no ordinary satisfaction that 
 I beg to thank you, O Sophist, and you here present 
 for the pleasant reception that you have given us. 
 My lot has on the whole not been altogether bad. 
 Your studious men, it is true, affect to condemn me, 
 my policy, and my private life. Perhaps they will 
 allow me to remark that the irregularity of my past 
 morals is a matter of temptations. Diogenes used 
 to tell us that one of my sternest historian-critics 
 in Syracuse left his wife, children and house on 
 being for once tempted by the chamber-maid of one 
 of my passing caprices ; and the historians of your 
 race who so gravely decry a Madame de Montespan 
 would, did Madame only smile at them, incontinently 
 fall into a fit of hopeless moral collapse. 
 
 " ' But if your men write against me, irrespective 
 of what they really feel about me, I am sure your 
 women take a much more lenient view of the case.' 
 
 " (Discreet applause.) 
 
 " c They feel that ambition did not eat up all the 
 forces of my soul, and that in worshipping Ares 
 (Mars), I never forgot the cult of Aphrodite (Venus) 
 either. We Hellenes ventured to be humans, and 
 that is why now we have become demi-gods. You, 
 
ii2 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 my friends, do not even venture to be humans, and 
 that is why you remain the little ones. 
 
 " c I notice in the northern countries of Europe men 
 do not, or to a very small degree care for women. 
 Perhaps that is the reason why the Roman Catholic 
 idea of the Holy Virgin has had no lasting hold 
 on these nations. 
 
 " ' I have seen,' continued Alcibiades, c too many 
 faces, masks, and pretences to be much impressed by 
 the apparent indifference of the northerner to the 
 charms of women. It never meant more than either 
 an unavowed inclination towards his own sex, or 
 sheer boorishness. Even we Hellenes had very 
 much to suffer from our political and social neglect 
 of women outside emancipated ones. The Romans 
 acted much more wisely in that respect; while 
 the nation of our hostess has practically become 
 what we called a gynacocracy or women's rule, where 
 man is socially what our Greek women used to 
 be: relegated to the background. I hear, this is 
 the privilege of Englishmen. I understand. When 
 I was young I learnt but too much about that 
 privilege. 
 
 " c But if I should be asked for advice I would tell 
 your men to take your women much more seriously. 
 I know that Englishmen are much more grave than 
 serious; yet with regard to women they ought to be 
 much more intent on considering them in everything 
 their mates, and in several things their superiors. 
 Of course, this is an unmilitary nation; and such 
 nations will always remain boors in Sunday dress. 
 
 " f One of your great writers who, being outside 
 the academic clique, has always been maligned by 
 the officials, has written a beautiful essay on the 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 1 3 
 
 influence of women. Poor Buckle he treated the 
 problem as a schoolroom paper. He came to the 
 result that women encourage the deductive mode 
 of thinking. However, women are more seductive 
 than deductive, and their real influence is to charm 
 the young, to warm the mature, and not to alarm 
 the old. 
 
 " * I, being now above the changes of time, I only, 
 contemplate their charm. And what greater poten- 
 tialities of charm could one wish for than those that 
 your women possess ? If those magnificently cut and 
 superbly coloured eyes learned to be expressive; 
 if the muscles of those fine cheeks knew how to 
 move with speedier grace; if that purely outlined 
 mouth were more animated what possibilities of 
 fascination, like so many fairies, might rise over the 
 dispassionate surface of those silent lakes ! As they 
 are, their several organs are positively hostile, or 
 coldly indifferent to one another. The forehead, 
 instead of being the ever-changing capital of the 
 human column, setting off their beautiful hair, as 
 ivory sets off gold ; the shoulders, the seat of human 
 grace, instead of giving to the head the pedestal 
 of the Charites ; and the arms and hands, instead of 
 giving by their movements the proper lilt and 
 cadence to everything said or done ; all these hate 
 one another respectively. The arms do not converse 
 with the face ; theirs is like other conversations : 
 after a few remarks on the weather all communica- 
 tion stops. So sullen is the antipathy of the arms, 
 that as a rule they hide on the back, as if begrudg- 
 ing the face or the bust their company. It is in that 
 way that English women who might be as beauti- 
 ful and charming as the maidens of Thebes or of 
 
ii 4 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 Tanagra, have made themselves into walking Carya- 
 tides, whom we invariably represented as doing 
 a slavish labour, with their arms on their backs, and 
 with a heavy load on their heads. 
 
 " ' Remove the arms, O women of England, from 
 your badly swung back and bring them into play 
 in front of your well-shaped bust and your beautiful 
 faces ! Let the consciousness of your power electrify 
 your looks, your dimples, and your gait ; and when 
 from musing Graces you will have changed into 
 graceful Muses, your men too will be much superior 
 to what they used to be. 
 
 " c See how little your influence is, as your language 
 clearly indicates. Is not your language the only 
 idiom in Europe that has completely dropped that 
 fine shade of sweet intimacy which the use of thou 
 and thy is giving to the other languages ? Is not a 
 new world of tenderest internal joy permeating the 
 French, German or Italian woman who for the first 
 time dares to tutoyer her lover ? You women of 
 England, the natural priestesses of all warmth and 
 intimacy, you have suffered all that to decay. 
 
 " < To your men we Hellenes say : " Imitate us ! " 
 To you women, we do not say so. We ask you to 
 exceed us, to go beyond us, and then alone when 
 women will be what we Hellenic men were, that 
 is, specimens of all-round humanity, then indeed you 
 too will rise to the higher status, and the golden age 
 will again fill the world with light and happiness ! ' 
 
 " After that speech of mine," continued Alcibiades, 
 "there was much applause. I mingled with the 
 public, and was at once interpellated by one of the 
 American ladies present : 
 
 "'Most interesting speech,' she said. 'What I 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 1 5 
 
 especially liked were your remarks about thou-ing. 
 And what I want to know most is whether Caryatides 
 were thou-ing one another ? ' 
 
 "I was a little perplexed, and all that I could 
 answer was: 'Their dimples did,' and this seemed 
 to satisfy my American lady marvellously well. 
 
 " Another lady asked me how many Muses we 
 had, and on hearing that their number was nine, she 
 was highly astonished. * Only nine ? Why in 
 London there are mews in every second street. 
 How strange ! ' 
 
 " A third lady asked me what I meant by shoulders 
 being a pedestal. Her shoulders, she was sure, were 
 no pedestals, and she would not allow anyone to stand 
 on them. She added, that she was aware of my 
 having said that the shoulders were the pedestal of 
 the Charites, but with her best intention she could 
 not allow even charity to be extended to her 
 shoulders. I smiled consent. 
 
 " A fourth lady, whose name was Valley, but who 
 was a mountain of otherwise rosy flesh, asked me 
 what I had meant by maidens of Podagra? She 
 was sure that young maids never suffered from that 
 ugly disease. I told her that I really meant Chiragra. 
 This satisfied her marvellously well. 
 
 "During that time Phryne and Lais were the 
 heroines of the evening, lionised by women, and 
 courted by men. The women asked them all 
 sorts of questions and seemed extraordinarily eager 
 to be instructed. One of them, a brilliant duchess 
 (who had three secretaries providing her with the 
 latest information about everything, the first preparing 
 all the catch- words from A to G, the second from H 
 to N, and the third from O to Z) asked Phryne 
 
n6 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 whether she would not permit her to convince herself 
 of the accuracy of the estimate in which Hyperides 
 held the exquisite form of Phryne's bosom. (A 
 middle-class woman thereupon asked Mr Gox, M.P., 
 what Hyperides meant. Mr Gox told her it was the 
 Greek for Rufus, son of Abraham.) Phryne volun- 
 teered to do so at once, and the women disappeared 
 in a special room, from where very soon cries of 
 amazement could be heard. The pure beauty of 
 Phryne enchanted the women. The sensation was 
 immense, ay immensest. 
 
 "The representative of the Daily Nail offered 
 first 2000, then ^3000, finally ^5000 for per- 
 mission to kodak Phryne. 
 
 "The Bad Times at once prepared a folio edition 
 of The Engravers' Engravings, payable in 263 
 instalments, or preferably at once. 
 
 "The Daily Marconigraph started a public dis- 
 cussion in its columns: 'Shall the lower part of 
 the upper anatomy of the female trunk be unveiled ? ' 
 
 "The excitement became so universal that Mr 
 Gigerl See at once convened a national meeting for 
 the erection of ten new statues to Shakespeare ; and 
 General Booth ordered an absolute fast of 105 
 hours' duration. 
 
 "All the directors of music halls, the next day, 
 stormed Hotel Ritz where Phryne had a suite of six 
 lovely rooms, and offered impossible prices for a per- 
 formance of five minutes. Phryne, after consulting 
 me, consented to appear at the Palace Theatre, in 
 the immortal scene when, in presence of the entire 
 population of Athens, she descended int6 the sea. 
 Half of the proceeds were to be given to a fund for 
 poor women in childbed. Endless advertisements 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 1 7 
 
 soon filled every available space on London's walls, 
 parks, newspapers, 'buses, railways, and shops. 
 Tickets sold at tenfold their original prices. 
 
 " At last the evening came. In the first two rows 
 there were practically nothing but clergymen. The 
 following rows were filled with lawyers, M.P.'s and 
 University professors. In the boxes one could see 
 all the aristocracy of the country. When Phryne's 
 turn came, the orchestra played Wagner's < Pilgrim's 
 Chorus,' toward the end of which the curtain rolled 
 up, and the scene represented the Piraeus with 
 apparently countless people, all in Greek dress. 
 When the expectation was at its height, Phryne 
 appeared clad only with the veil of her perfect 
 beauty, and descended into the sea. Before she 
 entered the water she said her prayers to Aphrodite, 
 and then slowly went into the waves. 
 
 "Everyone in the audience had come to the 
 theatre expecting to be badly shocked. To their 
 utmost astonishment they found that there was not 
 only nothing shocking in the scene, but even much 
 to fill the people with awe. JLike all the barbarians, 
 the little ones deem nudity a shocking sight. What 
 shocked them that night was the fact that they were 
 not shocked. They felt for a moment that many of 
 their notions and views must be radically wrong, and 
 that was the only shock they received. Phryne 
 triumphed over Londoners, as she did over the 
 Athenians. 
 
 "My American lady friend was in raptures. The 
 incredible sensation her Elki and his Athenian women 
 had caused in blast London society made her the 
 centre of all social centres for a fortnight. She 
 received innumerable letters from innumerable 
 
n8 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 people. The greatest writers that the world has 
 ever seen, such as Miss Cora Morelli, wrote to her 
 saying, that: 
 
 " c She had from her infancy onward taken a deep 
 interest in Alcibiades and his time, and that now, 
 having actually seen him, she would forthwith 
 publish a novel under the attractive title of "The 
 Mighty Elki," let alone another novel, full of the 
 most delightful shivers, called " Phry, the Pagan." ' 
 
 " Mr Hall Caine, in a thundering article, fulminated 
 against the row made over Phryne, and solemnly 
 declared that the charms of his Manxman were in- 
 comparably greater. One day Mr Caine called on 
 me. He implored me to become a Christian, and 
 assured me that the shortest way to that effect would 
 be to attend a performance of his piece of that nanrte. 
 I thanked him for his kind offer, but politely de- 
 clined it. Whereupon Mr Caine remained musing, 
 until at last he surprised me with the question : ' Mr 
 Alcib, you are the man to solve the problem of my 
 life. Do you not think I bear a remarkable re- 
 semblance to Lord Bacon?' 
 
 "I answered that I could discern no resemblance 
 between him and the witty Chancellor, but that I 
 was bound to confess that there was a striking 
 resemblance between him and Shakespeare. 
 
 " Mr Caine smiled a superior smile. c I wonder,' 
 he said, c you are not aware of the fact that Shake- 
 speare was written by Lord Bacon.' 
 
 " ' Very strange very strange,' I replied. ( We 
 in Olympus think that Shakespeare was written by 
 the victory over the Armada, and published by 
 Elizabeth and Co.' 
 
 "'Do you really think such stuff in Olympus?' 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 1 9 
 
 exclaimed Mr Caine ; f then I do not wonder that I 
 have never been invited to that place. What has 
 the Armada to do with Hamlet or King Lear ? You 
 might just as well say that my novels were written 
 by our victory at Colenso and Spion Kop. It is 
 revoltingly absurd. A book is a book and not 
 shrapnel or bombs. Sir, I am ashamed of you ; the 
 purple of red indignation rises swellingly into my 
 distended physiognomy, and my thought-fraught 
 forehead sinks under the ignominy of such life-bereft 
 incoherences ! ' 
 
 "I advised Mr Caine to drink Perrier; he thanked 
 me profusely, and assured me that he had always 
 done so. He evidently mixed it up with the Pierian 
 sources of literature which, I learn, provide the 
 innumerable papers of the Associated Press with the 
 necessary water under the name of Perrier. 
 
 " In my honour my American lady friend gave, a few 
 days later, a concert. The little ones call a concert 
 a series of instrumental and vocal pieces played for 
 sheer amusement, and without any relation to poetry, 
 dance, or religion. I have these three to four 
 hundred years accustomed myself to their music, 
 which is thoroughly different from ours, being poly- 
 phonous, whereas ours was never so. Dionysus, who 
 presides at their music, has often told us that he 
 introduced it into the modern world in order to show 
 his exceeding power even in times when the men and 
 women have lamentably fallen from the height of 
 
120 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 our Grecian culture. Our music was essentially 
 Apollinic; that of the moderns is Dionysiac. You 
 remember, O Zeus, that even Apollo was moved 
 when three of the moderns had the honour to 
 perform before him. Even he praised Mozart, 
 Chopin, and some pieces of Weber. You need not 
 blush, Frederic, and you might help me to entertain 
 and charm our holy circle by playing us one of your 
 compositions in which beauty of form is married in 
 tender love to truth of feeling." 
 
 Thereupon, at a sign of Zeus, Milo of Crotona, 
 the Olympian victor of all victors, carried a piano on 
 his mighty back, and put it down gently in one of 
 the mystic barks. Chopin, bowing to the gods, and 
 more particularly to Juno and Diana, sat down to 
 the instrument and played the second and the third 
 movement of his E minor Concerto. Round him 
 waved the three Graces, while Dionysus laid an 
 ivy wreath on his blessed head. Even the gods 
 were moved, and when Frederic had ended, they 
 applauded him with passionate admiration. 
 
 " I wish, O Chopin," continued Alcibiades, " I had 
 known you in my mortal time. What Terpander 
 and Thaletas, the great musicians, did for Sparta, 
 you might have helped me to do for Athens. It 
 was not to be. The thought saddens me still. 
 More than Sophocles and Aristophanes or Socrates, 
 your incomparable music would have helped to keep 
 the Kosmos of Athens in due proportions." 
 
 A short pause ensued, and all looked with timidity 
 on Zeus' immovable face. 
 
 "But let us drop these sorrowful reminiscences 
 and return to the London concert given by my 
 American hostess. 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 2 1 
 
 "She had engaged the best-known artists. For 
 the solo songs she engaged a woman who had to 
 be carried into the room in a motor chair, and 
 was not allowed to stand up, before three architects 
 had examined the solidity of the floor. Her range 
 was from the deep/> to'the high /. She sang baritone, 
 and soprano at the same time, and what her tone 
 wanted in width her tattle amply replaced. She 
 sang nothing but Wagner, whose music, it would 
 appear, is written for two-ton women only. No 
 smaller tonnage need apply. While she sang, 
 three dozen violins executed the tremolos of five 
 hundred whimpering children, while forty counter- 
 basses gave, every three minutes, a terrible grunt 
 in x minor. There were also fifteen fifes, and 
 twenty-one different kinds of brass instruments, 
 some of which had necks much longer than that of 
 the oldest giraffe. The music was decidedly sensual 
 and nerve-irritating. It was full of chords, both 
 accords and discords, and what little melody there 
 was in it was kneaded out into a tapeworm of 
 prodigious length and such hydralike vitality, that 
 no matter how frequently the strings throttled off 
 its head, it yet constantly recurred bulging out a 
 new head. 
 
 "The men present liked the singer; the women 
 adored the music. It gave them all sorts of shivers, 
 and although they did not understand it at all, they 
 yet felt that here was a new shiver. Or as one of 
 them, the bright Mrs Blazing, remarked : ' Quel 
 artiste que ce M. Wagner ! He has translated into 
 music the grating noise of a comb on silk, the creaking 
 of a rusty key in an old lock, and the strident rasp 
 of a skidding sleigh or motor on hard-frozen snow.' 
 
122 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "The next artist was a Belgian violinist. For 
 reasons that you alone, O Zeus, could tell us, the 
 Belgians are credited with a special gift for pulling 
 strings in general, and those of the violin in particu- 
 lar. Being a nation midway between the Germans 
 and the French, they are believed to possess much 
 of German musical talent and something of French 
 elegance. This would easily make them good 'cello 
 players. But not satisfied with the 'cello, in which 
 they have excelled more than one nation, they must 
 needs be great violinists too. However, the violin, 
 while not at all the king of instruments, is yet the 
 most vindictive and jealous amongst them. It is 
 like the Lorelei : it allures hundreds, only to dash 
 their bones against the rock of Failure. It wants 
 the delicacy of a woman and the strength of a man. 
 It requires the soul of spring and the heart of 
 summer to play it well. 
 
 " A Belgian is eo ipso debarred from reaching the 
 height of violin-playing; just as a Chinaman, with 
 his over-specialised mind, can never well play the 
 orchestral piano. A Belgian heart is moving in a 
 colourless and slouching andante ; the violin moves in 
 a profoundly agitated adagio or allegro. The violin 
 is the instrument of luckless nations, such as were 
 formerly the Italians, the Poles, and the Hungarians 
 who gave us Paganini, Wienavski and Joachim. The 
 Belgians have nearly always enjoyed the embonpoint of 
 fat prosperity. ' Leur jeu bedonne? as Mrs Blazing 
 would say. 
 
 "The Belgian played your Chaconne in D minor, 
 O Bach." 
 
 At these words of Alcibiades all the thinkers and 
 poets present rose from their seats and bowed to 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 2 3 
 
 John Sebastian, who stood near Strabo and Aristotle, 
 being exceedingly fond of geographical lore. Even 
 the gods applauded and Polyhymnia allowed him to 
 kiss her hands. 
 
 " You remember, O John Sebastian, when I met 
 you near Llitzen at one of your solitary walks and 
 you spoke to me of your Chaconne. I listened with 
 rapt attention and told you that your composition, 
 which you then played to me on a violin which the 
 old inn-keeper lent you and which had just arrived 
 from Steiner in Tyrol, rendered as perfectly as 
 possible the sentiments I had felt when for the first 
 time in my life I went to the Oracle at Dodona, 
 where the winds rush through the high oak-trees 
 with a fierce power such as can be heard in no other 
 spot in Europe. I re-imagined k my awe-struck medita- 
 tions in the holy grove ; I heard the stormy music of 
 Zeus' winds in Zeus' trees; I again felt all through 
 me the soul-moving chorus of the priests which ends 
 in a jubilating mood, and finally I left with deep 
 regret at having to re-enter my life of stress after 
 having spent a day in sacred and mystic seclusion. 
 
 " When the Belgian artist played it, I listened in 
 vain for Dodona. What I heard was the rustling of 
 silken tones through the wood of the chairs and 
 tables at the Carlton. Where was the Oracle? 
 Where the chorus of the priests ? Where their 
 jubilation? The only thing that I found were my 
 regrets. But the public was charmed. It is im- 
 perative to admire the Chaconne, chiefly because it is 
 played Violin solo. Mrs Blazing explained the matter 
 to me with her wonted rapidity of mind : * Why 
 wonder at our admiration of the Chaconne ? Do we 
 not say : " Chacun d son godt ? " ' 
 
i2 4 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "The next artist was a pianist, whose name 
 sounded like Pianowolsky or Forterewsky. He was 
 of course a Pole. The English have long found out 
 that -welsky or -ewsky goes with the name of a great 
 pianist, as the pedal goes with the piano. It was for 
 this reason that Liszt, the Orpheus of the last century, 
 never had any success in England. He ought to 
 have called himself Franzescowitch Lisztobulszky, 
 and then, no doubt, he would have scored heavily. 
 Rubinstein had indeed much success in England, but 
 it is patent that most English took his official name 
 as a mere abbreviation of Ruben Ishnajewich Stone- 
 hammercrushowsky. The English taste in music is 
 remarkable ; it is somewhat like their taste in fruit. 
 They prefer hothouse grapes to natural ones. In 
 the same way they prefer the piano music of Men- 
 delmeier, called Bartholdy, to that of Stephen Heller 
 or Volkmann. What they more particularly like are 
 the 'Songs without Words' of that composer, which 
 in reality are Words without Songs. His piano music 
 is nothing but congealed respectability, or frozen 
 shockingitis" 
 
 Aristoxenus, interrupting r Alcibiades, exclaimed : 
 " Do not, O son of Clinias, forget the man's marvellous 
 compositions for the violin as well as for the orchestra. 
 Diana frequently commands his Midsummer Nighfs 
 Dream when she dwells with her nymphs in the 
 mystic forest near Farnham Common, where Bartholdy 
 composed it under the trees of Canute." 
 
 " You are quite right, O master of all Harmony, 
 and I want to speak only of his piano music. The 
 pianist at the concert had a very fine profile and 
 beautiful hair. This helped him very much in a 
 country where the sense of stylishness is exceedingly 
 
ALCIBI ADES CONTINUED 1 2 5 
 
 acute. A coachman must have a broad back; a 
 pianist, a fine profile ; a violinist, long legs ; a 'cellist, 
 beautiful hands ; and a lady singer, a vast promontory. 
 Once these indispensable qualities are given, his or 
 her music is practically a matter of indifference. 
 
 " The pianist then performing played well, as long 
 as he played forte and staccato ; but he had neither a 
 legato nor, what was fatal, a piano , let alone a pianis- 
 simo. Fortunately his sense of rhythm was very well 
 developed ; otherwise he did not rise above a first 
 prizeman of a conservatory. 
 
 "He played a transcription or two by Liszt. 
 This the English condemn; it appears unlegitimate 
 to them. To please them, one must play one of the 
 last sonatas of Beethoven, preferably those composed 
 after his death, that is, those that the man wrote 
 when he had long lost the power of moulding his 
 ideas in the cast of a sonata, and when his vitality 
 had been ebbing away for years. A transcription 
 stands to the original as does an engraving of an oil- 
 colour picture or a statue to its original. Most 
 people will enjoy a fine engraving of the Transfigura- 
 tion or of Our Lady of Milo much more readily than 
 they would the original ; just as I now know that you 
 gave us, O Zeus, great artists like Scopas, Praxiteles, 
 Lionardo, or Domenichino, because we could not bear, 
 nor comprehend the sight of the originals of their 
 divine art, as long as we still move in our mortal coil. 
 The transcription of some of the ideas of Mozart's 
 Don yuan by Liszt is the best and most illuminating 
 commentary on that incomparable opera. 
 
 " More interesting than the play were the remarks 
 which I overheard from among the public. The men 
 dwelt exclusively on the big sums of money the pianist 
 
iz6 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 made by his 1526 recitals in 2000 towns of the United 
 States. The profits they credited him with ranged 
 from 15,000 to 100,000. A Viennese banker 
 present drily remarked that he wished he could play 
 the difference between the real and the imagined 
 profits of the virtuoso on a fine Erard piano. The 
 women made quite different remarks. Said one : 
 
 " c Herr Pianoforterewsky has been painted by 
 royalty.' 
 
 " c ls that so?' said her neighbour. 'What an 
 interesting face ! I wish I could procure a photo of 
 the picture.' 
 
 " c Do you know,' said a third, c that Herr Pina- 
 forewsky practises twenty-three hours a day? I 
 know it on the best authority; his tuner told me 
 
 so.' 
 
 " c Which tuner ? Herr Pinacothekowsky, my 
 dear, has three tuners : one for the high notes, the 
 second for the middle ones, and the third for the 
 low notes.' 
 
 " < How interesting ! But suppose one of the 
 tuners falls ill. What does he do then?' 
 
 " c Why, it's simple enough. In that case he only 
 plays pieces requiring two of the three ranges of 
 notes.' 
 
 " c How intensely interesting ! But pray, if you 
 do not take it amiss, my dear, I learnt that Herr 
 Pedalewsky has only two tuners : one for the black 
 keys, the other for the white ones.' 
 
 " ' My dear, that was so in bygone times when he 
 played sometimes a whole concert on the black keys 
 alone, being 231 variations on Chopin's Etude on the 
 black keys. But it made such a sad impression that 
 some nasty critics said his piano was in mourning 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 2 7 
 
 black ; other critics said that he was paid to do so by 
 Mr Jay of Regent Street.' 
 
 " ( How excruciatingly interesting ! Do you know, 
 my dear, I was told that Herr Polonorusky plays 
 practically all the time, and even when he travels he 
 carries with him a dumb piano on which he practises 
 incessantly.' 
 
 " ' How touching ! I have heard that too, and be- 
 lieved it, until that atrocious man who writes for the 
 Bad Times destroyed all my illusions. He said that 
 if Herr Pantyrewsky did that, he would for ever spoil 
 his touch. Just fancy that! It is not the touch, 
 but the pose of that languid, Chopinesque profile over 
 a dumb piano in a rattling car that was so interesting. 
 And now that horrid journalist spoils it all. Nay, 
 he added that the whole story was deliberately in- 
 vented by the artist's manager.' 
 
 " < How distressingly interesting ! You know, my 
 dear, I will not believe the story about the manager. 
 I know too much about the wonderful pianist. I 
 have learnt at Marienbad that he had ten teachers 
 at a time, one for each of his fingers, and that for 
 five years he lived in a tiny village in Bavaria, because, 
 don't you see, it was so central for the ten different 
 cities where his teachers lived. For the thumb he 
 rushed off to Frankfort on the Maine. There is no 
 town like Frankfort for the study of the thumb. 
 That's why they make such excellent sausages there 
 which resemble a thumb to perfection. For the 
 index he went to Rome. And so forth and so on. 
 It is most marvellous.' 
 
 "All during that time," Alcibiades continued, 
 "the pianist was playing the moonlight sonata of 
 Beethoven. At the end of the piece, the ladies who 
 
128 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 had carried on the lively conversation applauded 
 wildly. 'Was it not marvellous?' said one to the 
 other. ' Oh delightful ! ' was the answer. 
 
 " So ended the concert. On leaving my seat I met 
 Mrs Blazing. 
 
 " c mon cherj she said, c why do all these women 
 pretend to enjoy music? They very well know that 
 not one of them cares for it in the least. I frankly 
 admit that music to me is the anarchy of air, the 
 French Revolution of sounds, acoustic bankruptcy. 
 All our lives we have been taught to suppress our 
 emotions, and to consider it ungenteel to express 
 them in any way whatever. We were told that we 
 must hide and suppress them which we have done 
 so successfully that after some time we resemble to 
 a nicety the famous safe of Madame Humbert. And 
 then, in flagrant contradiction to all this genteel 
 education, we are supposed to accept with joy the 
 moanings, cries, sobs, sighs, and other unsuppressed 
 emotions of some middle-class Dutchman or Teuton 
 dished up to us in the form of a sonata. It is too 
 absurd for words. 
 
 " c If that lower-middle-class Dutchman Beethoven 
 (or as my Cynthia calls him : " Bete au vent ") wants 
 to exhale his moral distress and sentimental indigestion, 
 let him do so by all means, but in a lonely room. 
 Why does he interfere with the even tenor of our 
 well-varnished life ? If my charming Japanese china 
 figures, or my pretty girls and shepherds in vieux 
 Saxe suddenly began to roar out their sentiments, 
 I should have them destroyed or sold without any 
 further ado. Why should I accept such roarings 
 from an ugly, beer-drinking, unmannered Teuton? 
 Why, I ask you ? ' 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 29 
 
 " < Music is the art of poor nations and poor classes. 
 Outside a few Jews, no great musician came from 
 among the rich classes; and Jews are socially im- 
 poverished. I can understand the attraction of 
 ditties nursed in the music halls. They fan one with 
 a gentle breeze of light tones, and here and there 
 tickle a nerve or two. But what on earth shall we 
 do with such plesiosaurl as the monsters they call 
 symphonies, in which fifty or sixty instruments go 
 amuck in fifty different ways? The flute tries to 
 serpentine round the bassoon in order to instil in it 
 drops of deadly poison ; the violins gallop recklessly 
 a la Mazeppa against and over the violas and 'celli, 
 while the brass darts forth glowing bombs falling with 
 cruelty into the finest flower-beds of oboes and harps. 
 It is simply the hoax of the century. Would you at 
 Athens ever have endured such a pandemonium?' 
 
 " ' You are quite right, ma ires charmante dame" 
 I said, c we never had such music and we should have 
 little cared for it. Our way of making symphonies 
 was to write epics, crowded with persons, divine and 
 human, and with events and incidents of all colours 
 and shades. The Continental nations have lost the 
 epic creativeness proper, and must therefore write 
 epics in sound. Just as your languages do not allow 
 you to write very strictly metred poetry such as we 
 have written without impairing the fire and glamour 
 of poetry, and the only way left for you of imitating 
 the severe metres of Archilochus, Alcasus or Sappho 
 is in the form of musical canons, fugues, or other 
 counterpointed music. It seems to me that you 
 English have not done much by way of music epics, 
 because, like ourselves, you were busily engaged in 
 writing epics of quite a different kind : the epic of 
 
130 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 your Empire. The nations that have written musical 
 epics, did do so at a time when these were the only 
 epics they could write, the symphony of Empire 
 being refused them.' 
 
 " c I see,' said Mrs Blazing. c You mean to say 
 that our Mozarts and Beethovens are Lord Chatham, 
 Clive, Nelson and Wellington?' 
 
 " ' In a manner, yes. Few nations, if any, can excel 
 both in arts and in Empire-making, and had you 
 English been able to hold in your imperial power 
 considerable parts of Europe, say, of France, Germany 
 or Spain, you would never have had either Walter 
 Scott or Byron, Shelley or Tennyson. For the 
 efforts required to conquer and hold European 
 territory would have taxed all your strength so 
 severely that no resources would have been left for 
 conquests in the realm of the arts and literature. 
 
 " c This is why the Romans, who conquered, not 
 coloured races, but the mightiest white nations, could 
 never write either great epics or great dramas. They 
 wrote only one epic, one drama of first and to this 
 day unparalleled magnitude : the Roman Empire. I 
 meant to do a similar thing for Athens, but I failed. 
 I now know why. My real enemies were not in the 
 camp of my political adversaries, but in the theatre 
 of Dionysus and in the schools of the philosophers. 
 Do not, therefore, ma chere amie, begrudge the 
 Germans their great musicians. They are really 
 very great, and not even your greatest minds sur- 
 pass, perhaps do not even equal them. Your con- 
 solation may be in this, that the Germans too will 
 soon cease writing music worth the hearing. They 
 now want to write quite different epics. And no 
 nation can write two sorts of epics at a time.' 
 
ALCIBIADES CONTINUED 1 3 1 
 
 " ' I am so glad to hear you say so,' said Mrs Blazing. 
 c lt relieves me of a corvee that I hitherto considered 
 to be a patriotic duty. I mean, I will henceforth 
 never attend the representations of the new school 
 of soi-disant English music. Inwardly I never liked 
 it ; it always appeared to me like an Englishwoman 
 who tries to imitate the grace and verve of a 
 Parisian woman, with all her easy gestures, vivacious 
 conversation, and delicate coquetry. It will not do. 
 
 " c We English women do not shine in movement ; 
 our sphere is repose. We may be troublesome, but 
 never troublante. 
 
 " c Even so is English academic music. And I now 
 see why it must be so. It is not in us, because another 
 force takes its place. Like all people we like to 
 shine in that wherein we are most deficient, and the 
 other day I was present at a scene that could hardly 
 be more painful. At the house of a rich and highly 
 distinguished city man I met the famous Sir Some- 
 body Hangar, the composer. The question arose 
 who was the greatest musician ? Thereupon Sir 
 Somebody, looking up to the beautiful ceiling of the 
 room, exclaimed dreamily : " Music is of very recent 
 origin . . ." One of the gentlemen present then 
 asked Sir Somebody whether he had ever heard the 
 reply given to that question by the great Gounod ? 
 Sir Somebody contemptuously uttered: "Gounod? 
 It is not worth hearing." I was indignant, and 
 pointedly asked the gentleman to tell us Gounod's 
 reply. The gentleman, looking at Sir Somebody 
 with a curious smile, related : 
 
 " c Gounod, on being asked who in his opinion was 
 the greatest musician, said : " When I was a boy of 
 twenty, I said: moi. Ten years later I said : moi et 
 
1 32 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 Mozart. Again ten years later I said: Mozart et 
 moi. And now I say : Mozart" ' 
 
 " This reply," said Alcibiades, " has Attic perfume 
 in it. Having suffered so much, as I have, at the 
 hands of musicians in my time, when dramatic writers 
 were as much musicians as dramatists, I have in my 
 Olympian leisure carefully inquired into the real 
 causes of the rise of modern music. 
 
 <c c You said a few moments ago, ma tres spirituelle 
 dame, that music is the art of poor classes. There 
 is this much truth in that, that modern music has 
 indeed been almost entirely in the hands of middle- 
 class people. This being so, everything depends on 
 the nature and dispositions of the middle class in a 
 given country. In England, for instance, the middle 
 class is totally different from that of France or that 
 of South Germany, the home of German music. 
 The English middle class is cold, dry, gajfeur to 
 the extreme, afflicted with a veritable rage for 
 outward respectability, unsufferably formalist, and 
 deeply convinced of its social inferiority. In such a 
 class nothing remotely resembling German or French 
 music can ever possibly arise. Such a class furnishes 
 excellent business men, and reliable sergeants to the 
 officers of imperial work. But music can no more 
 grow out of it than can a rose out of a poker. 
 
 "'This middle class is the result of British Im- 
 perialism, and this is how Imperialism has prevented 
 and will, as long as it lasts, always prevent the rise of 
 really fine music in the higher sense of the term. 
 This is also why we Hellenes never achieved greater 
 results in music. Like the English, or the Americans, 
 we never had a real bourgeoisie, or the only possible 
 foster-earth of great music. However, bourgeoisie 
 
ALCIBI ADES CONTINUED 1 3 3 
 
 is only a historic phenomenon, one that is destined 
 to disappear, and with it will disappear all music. 
 Mr Richard Strauss is singing its dirge.' " 
 
 When Alcibiades had finished his entertaining tale 
 of women and music in England, the gods and heroes 
 congratulated him warmly, and Zeus ordered that, 
 under the direction of Mozart, all the nymphs and 
 goddesses of the forests and seas shall sing one of 
 the motets of Bach. This they did, and all Venice 
 was filled with the magic songs, which were as pure 
 as those produced by the nymph Echo in the 
 Baptistry at Pisa. All the palaces and the churches 
 of Venice seemed to listen with melancholy pleasure, 
 and St Mark's hesitated to sound the hour lest 
 the spell should be broken. When the motet was 
 ended, the gods and heroes rose and disappeared in 
 the heavens. 
 
THE FIFTH NIGHT 
 
 C-flSSAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 
 
 ON the fifth night the gods and heroes assembled in 
 the city of Rome. Their meeting-place was the 
 Forum. The eternal city lay dormant around them, 
 and Zeus, who had for the time recalled into exist- 
 ence the magnificent temple built in his honour, 
 which used to adorn the incomparable centre of 
 Roman might and splendour, sat in front of it, 
 surrounded by the Flamines and the last Pontifex 
 Maximus aided by the last Vestal Virgins. On the 
 via sacra there was an unending flow of thronging 
 Romans and Greeks, and Cicero was seen talking 
 with great animation with Julius Caesar, while 
 Augustus seemed to chide Tacitus with mild irony. 
 Cornelius Scipio Africanus was deeply engaged in a 
 conversation with Pericles, and Marcus Antistius 
 Labeo discussed law with Plato. From afar the 
 wind brought the sounds of the bells of the Vatican, 
 at the hearing of which all conversation stopped ; 
 and when a few minutes later a choir intoned a 
 hymn in a neighbouring church, the Pontifex and 
 the Flamines veiled their heads in dumb resignation, 
 and the Vestal Virgins looked up to Zeus as if 
 imploring him for help. A pause followed. But 
 soon the moon rose over the majestic Palatine hill; 
 the Graces performed a soulful dance, and finally 
 Zeus asked Caius Julius Caesar to entertain them 
 
C^ISAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 135 
 
 with his experiences during his third travel in Eng- 
 land which, as he said, he had, in addition to his two 
 landings during his mortal life, recently made after 
 nearly two thousand years. 
 
 Csesar, standing near the house of the Senate 
 of ancient Rome, thus addressed the divine 
 Assembly : 
 
 "It is, O Jupiter and all the other gods and 
 heroes, a singular pleasure and honour to me to 
 address you on a topic so important and interesting. 
 When I arrived in England for the third time ( I 
 started from Dunkerque to avoid giving offence to 
 the 112 scholars who have, each to his complete 
 satisfaction, proved 112 different spots on the French 
 coast between Boulogne and Calais wherefrom I am 
 supposed to have started for England in my mortal 
 time ) I was received by no wilder tribe than a few 
 customs officials, who asked me whether I had any 
 cigars in my toga. On my denying it, they searched 
 me, and finding none they let me go. Two hours 
 later I arrived in London, which I found ugly beyond 
 words. I can understand that you, O Canova, cried 
 on seeing it. What struck me most was its surpris- 
 ing silence, which contrasted very strongly with the 
 noise of Rome, or Paris. I mentioned this to a 
 casual acquaintance, who stared at me in despair, 
 exclaiming: 'Silence, sir? Why, the noises of 
 London drive half of us to madness. Here, take 
 that ( he handed me a bunch of printed papers ) 
 read it carefully and join us.' On looking into the 
 papers I found that they contained a prospectus of a 
 vast c Society for the Abatement of Street-Noises in 
 London.' 
 
 "This made me somewhat thoughtful. It was 
 
136 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 quite clear to me that the unattractiveness of London 
 is owing chiefly to its lack of animation, to its silence. 
 I soon found out that silence is the dominating institu- 
 tion of that country. To talk is to infringe the 
 principal law of their language. They want to see 
 their language noiselessly, and not to hear it. Hence 
 they constantly read printed language on wooden 
 paper, in a wooden style, on wooden matters. This 
 they call 'the daily Press.' I met one of the chief 
 writers on their most popular paper, and he assured 
 me that the editor solemnly warns each of his con- 
 tributors not to indulge in any attempt at esprit or 
 brilliancy of any sort ; for, should he do so, the 
 editor would be forced to dismiss him forthwith. 
 All that the contributor is allowed to do is to make 
 startling headlines, such as : 
 
 ' Delicious puddings made out of wood.' 
 
 f New aqueducts full of milk for the people.' 
 
 'Discovery of wireless telegraphy among the 
 
 ancient Egyptians.' 
 ' Discovery of the pin - cushion to Cleopatra's 
 
 needles.' 
 'Trunk murder: a man assassinates his widow.' 
 
 That same editor, on my asking him why he allowed 
 such crying stupidities in the headlines, and nothing 
 but the most platitudinous stuff in the body of the 
 article, gave me the following answer: 
 
 " ' My dear sir, our public has nerves but no 
 intellect. Hence we work for sudden, rapid shocks 
 to their nerves, and no fatigue to their intellect. 
 They not only do not think ; they do not want to 
 think. They are practically convinced that thinking 
 
CAESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 137 
 
 is the perdition of all common-sense. Just let me 
 give you an example. There is among the younger 
 writers one whose mind is singularly suggestive and 
 nimble. He really has something to say, and can 
 say it well. However, unfortunately, he says it in 
 what are, apparently, contradictory and circuitous 
 terms. This my readers cannot grasp; it fatigues 
 them. They complain of that man's writings as 
 being " heavy," " hard to follow." This is the conse- 
 quence of the vogue of music halls. One may say 
 that the popular University of this country, where 
 the average man gets most of his ideas from, is the 
 music hall. What, then, can we editors do better 
 than imitate the style and substance of the music 
 hall ? Shocks to the nerves and no fatigue to the 
 intellect. Voila \ 9 
 
 " On my way home I met Columbus. He told 
 me, and no man ever spoke with more solid right, 
 that he was the greatest benefactor to England. 
 But for him, who by discovering the New World 
 placed England in the very centre of the intelligent 
 and wealthy nations, while formerly England was 
 somewhere on the c other end of all the world ' ; but 
 for him, he said, England could never have had her 
 unique leverage. c You, Cassar,' he added, c dis- 
 covered England, as the Vikings discovered America ; 
 I did not discover it, I made it. But would you 
 believe me that thousands and thousands of English- 
 men have scarcely ever heard my name? They 
 
138 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 constantly talk of their race as born to rule. But 
 what would they have ruled without me? The 
 ponds in Lincolnshire. You wonder at their tongue- 
 tiedness. I will tell you what it means. The 
 English are neither talkers nor thinkers; they are 
 almost exclusively men of action ; or used to be. 
 They have no intellectual initiative. They have 
 started neither the Renascence, nor the Great Dis- 
 coveries of my time, nor the Reformation, or the 
 three greatest factors in the formation of modern 
 Europe. All this was first started by us Italians. 
 We can both talk and think and create ; but we are 
 not good at actions. The English are good only at 
 action. This is the be-all and end-all of their 
 history. Have you ever seen their Parliament ? 
 Do not omit attending it. You will there learn 
 something that no other Assembly can teach you. 
 It rarely contains a great orator, for oratory is of 
 little use in an Assembly with an iron party discipline, 
 and with members every one of whom is amenable 
 to no argument that has not had the august 
 privilege of being born in his own mind. And since 
 his mind brings forth none, he moves in a vicious 
 circle ! ' 
 
 " c Would you not, 5 1 asked Columbus, c accompany 
 me to the House of Commons ? ' 
 
 "< Readily,' said the great Genoese. And next 
 day we repaired to the ' first club of the country.' 
 
 " The hall was curiously unfit for the business of 
 a national Assembly. It is neither large, nor light 
 
CAESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 139 
 
 enough. The acoustics are fair, but superfluous. 
 For, who cares very much what any member other 
 than himself is saying ? In the midst there is a 
 porter's lodge, in which sits a gentleman in the attire 
 of the eighteenth century. This, as behoves a con- 
 servative Roman, did not meet with my disapproval. 
 The only objection I made was that in my opinion he 
 ought to have been clothed in all the various costumes 
 in use since Magna Charta. The English, and the 
 rest of the little ones, in utter contrast to ourselves, 
 constantly vary their dress. We preferred to vary 
 our inner selves. 
 
 "The subject of discussion, or rather of a score 
 or so of monologues, was one of which in my time I 
 have had the amplest experience. They proposed to 
 give weekly a certain sum of money to anyone of their 
 citizens who on reaching his seventieth year had arrived 
 at the end of his financial tether. In my day I had 
 given away millions to the populace, and my imperial 
 successors had gone even very much further. The 
 common people was thereby demoralised as is every- 
 body, even parents, who accepts, year in year out, 
 free gifts from a third person or his children. Being 
 demoralised, such a recipient of donations becomes 
 inevitably the most cruel enemy of his donor. No- 
 thing contributed more to the downfall of Rome. A 
 nation must consist of free and financially independent 
 citizens, or it loses its most precious asset. How 
 frequently, O Pericles, have you said to me, how 
 much you regretted having introduced the same injuri- 
 ous donations into Athens. But this is the melancholy 
 truth of all history : one learns from history one 
 thing only, to wit, that no statesman has ever learned 
 anything from history. 
 
1 40 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " In the midst of my sad reflections I could yet not 
 help being amused by the speech of one member of 
 the governing party, who belonged to that formidable 
 mixture of faddists, formalists, cocksure-ists, and 
 moral precisians who have in this country an influence 
 that we should not have given to the members of the 
 most exalted among the Roman patricians. Much 
 as they are laughed at, they yet have the power of 
 striking dread into the public and instilling hesitation 
 into the feeble nerves of statesmen. The name of 
 the orator in question was, if I am right, Harold Gox. 
 He said : 
 
 " * Mr Speaker, it is with a satisfaction and self- 
 complacency new even to me that I beg to submit my 
 remarks on a subject than which there is no greater 
 one ; a subject, sir, that has no predicate except that 
 of immensity ; an immensity, sir, that exceeds infini- 
 tude itself; and last not least, an infinitude vaster 
 than all other infinitudes : a moral infinity. This 
 country, sir, was built up by morals and righteous- 
 ness. Righteousness, I say, sir ; and I will repeat it : 
 righteousness. How did we come by our Empire ? 
 By righteousness. How did our colonists occupy vast 
 continents ? By righteousness. What was the guid- 
 ing principle even of our national debt ? Righteous- 
 ness, in that we contracted it mainly by paying 
 the foreigner to help us in beating our immoral 
 enemies. Righteousness is the A and the Z of our 
 glorious polity. 
 
 " * We cannot help being righteous ; it is in us, over 
 us, beside, beneath, and all through us. We have 
 sometimes tried to be unrighteous ; but, sir, we 
 could not. It is not given to us, and we have only 
 what is given to us. 
 
CLESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 141 
 
 " c Well then, sir, if that be so, as it undoubtedly 
 is, beyond the shadow of a doubt ; then I venture 
 to say that any person that opposes the present 
 bill of Old Age Pensions cannot but be an 
 enemy of England, in that he is an enemy of 
 righteousness. 
 
 " ' What indeed, sir, can be fairer, juster, and more 
 equitable than that they who have laboriously saved 
 up a few sovereigns, should share them with those 
 that have done everything in their power to have 
 none ? 
 
 " c Where there is nothing, there is death. Can a 
 country introduce death as a regular constituent organ 
 of its life ? What in that case would righteousness 
 do ? She would blush green with shame, sir. No- 
 thing would remain for her but to leave this country 
 and to go to Germany or Turkey. Could we allow 
 such a disaster ? Would it not be necessary to hold 
 or haul her back by ropes, strings, or any other in- 
 strument of our party machinery ? 
 
 " ' Just, pray, represent to yourself, sir, or to any 
 other person, the actualities of the case. Here is a 
 man of seventy. It is a noble feat of honourable 
 perseverance to reach that age. It is, I make bold 
 to submit, an evident proof of the favour and coun- 
 tenance of The Principle of All RIGHTEOUSNESS 
 that the man was allowed to proceed so far. 
 
 " ' He has worked all such days of his long life as 
 he did not spend in reverential contemplation of the 
 works of the Almighty. Who can blame him for 
 that? 
 
 " c I go much further : who can possibly blame him 
 for having focussed his attention rather on the liquid 
 than on the solid bodies of Creation ? 
 
142 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " c Each man has his own way of saying prayers. 
 
 " c Now, after having thus spent a long life in what 
 has at all times been considered the essence of life ; 
 or as the ancient Romans used to formulate it, after 
 having acted upon the noble doctrine of or a et labor a 
 (pray and work), he finds himself landed, or rather 
 stranded in the wilderness of penury. Sir, such a 
 state of things is untenable, unbearable, and un- 
 righteous. 
 
 " c I know full well that people who have never 
 given righteousness the slightest chance persist in 
 repeating the old fallacy, that a labourer ought to 
 save up for a rainy day. But, pray, sir, is it not per- 
 fectly clear that this principle is of Egyptian origin, 
 and comes therefore from a country where there is 
 no rain ? 
 
 " c ln England, sir, there are 362 rainy days a 
 year; therefore 3620 rainy days in ten years, 18,100 
 rainy days in fifty years. How shall, I ask you, that 
 unfortunate labourer, or grocer, or author, save up 
 for 18,100 days? That takes a capital of at least 
 25,000. Well, who has that capital ? No one. 
 The nation alone has it. Ergo, the nation must pay 
 for the rain. 
 
 " c I have, sir, in my locker a great many shots like 
 the preceding, but I will, out of modesty, not use 
 them all. I will only dwell on one point. Sir, our 
 opponents contend that the money needed for Old 
 Age Pensions is not available unless it be taken from 
 funds much more necessary for the public welfare. 
 Now I ask, which are those funds ? The answer I 
 receive is that the nation needs more defensive 
 measures against possible invasions on the part of a 
 Continental power. 
 
CAESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 143 
 
 " ' Sir, on hearing such nonsense one is painfully 
 reminded of what Lord Bacon used to say : " Difficile 
 est satiram non scribere" ' (A voice from the Irish 
 bench : c Juvenal, and not Lord Bacon ! ') ' Well, Lord 
 Percival, and not Lord Bacon, it amounts to the 
 same. 
 
 cc c An invasion ? Sir, an invasion ? How, for good- 
 ness' sake, do our opponents imagine such a thing to 
 be possible ? I know they say that Lord Roberts 
 has declared an invasion of England a feasible thing. 
 But has Lord Roberts ever invaded England ? How 
 can he know ? How can anyone know ? 
 
 " c They refer me to William the Conqueror. But, 
 sir, is it not evident that William could not have done 
 it had he not been the Conqueror ? Being the Con- 
 queror, he was bound to do it. Is there any such 
 William amongst the Williams of the day ? I looked 
 them all up in the latest Who's Who but not one of 
 them came up to the requisite conditions.' (A voice : 
 'William Whiteley ! ') C I hear, sir, the name of William 
 Whiteley ; and I reply that he is now too " Ltd." to 
 undertake such a grand enterprise. 
 
 " c And more than anything else militating in my 
 favour is the fact that the Germans do not so much 
 as dream of doing this country the slightest harm. 
 Look at the relationship between the Kaiser and the 
 King ; nephew and uncle. Who has ever heard that 
 a nephew made war on an uncle ? Take into con- 
 sideration how the Kaiser behaved when lately visiting 
 England. Did he not leave huge tips at Windsor? 
 Did he not stroke children's cheeks? Did he not 
 admire our houses ? Who else has ever done that ? 
 He talked English all day long, and during part of 
 the night. He read the Daily Telegraph and took 
 
144 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 his tub every morning. Can there be stronger 
 symptoms of his Anglophile soul ? 
 
 " c A few weeks after he left England he went so 
 far in his predilection of everything English that he 
 even curtailed his moustaches. 
 
 " c His moustaches, sir, these the beacons of the 
 German Empire, the hirsute hymn of Teutonia, her 
 anchor, her lightning rod, her salvation ! 
 
 " ' To talk of such a man's hostile intentions against 
 England is to accuse Dover Cliff, High Cliife, or 
 Northcliffe, or any other Cliff of base treachery. 
 No, sir, there is no need of new expenses for defence 
 on land ; and as to the sea, we have only to follow 
 the Chief Admiral's advice and go to sleep. Our 
 principal force consists of our power to sleep on land 
 as well as on sea. Once asleep, we can spend no- 
 thing. In that way there remains plenty of money 
 for the Old Age Pensions, that glorious corrective 
 of misery, that ventilator of property, and distillator 
 of other men's pockets. I have not a word to add ; 
 the subject itself talks to every person of sense in a 
 thousand tongues.' 
 
 "When the man had ended," Caesar continued, 
 " I asked one of the officials whether the orator was 
 the clown of the house. The official looked daggers 
 at me. He explained in a solemn voice that the 
 orator was a staunch Liberal and Cobraite. The 
 latter name was, I learnt, a little mistake in pronuncia- 
 tion; it ought to have been Cobdenite. Cobden, I 
 was told, was a very great man. He succeeded in 
 passing a measure which under the circumstances of 
 his time was not altogether bad, although it drove 
 the people away from the plough to the factories. 
 
 " However, he, like our Gracchi, imagined that 
 
CJESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 145 
 
 what was good for his time must necessarily be good 
 for all times. On the basis of a complete ignorance 
 of the Continent, that is, of the Power that has 
 always been and always will be the real regulator of 
 the fundamental policy of England, Cobden thought 
 he had got hold of an absolute truth, instead of a 
 merely passing and temporary measure. Like all 
 nations that have never gone through social and 
 political cataclysms and are necessarily highly con- 
 servative, the English are totally lacking in historic 
 perspective. Men of the class of Cobden, or such as 
 the orator I had heard, are like their most renowned 
 thinker, Herbert Spencer, absolutely devoid of 
 historic thinking. They think in categories of 
 quantity and matter; never in quality made by 
 history. 
 
 " Columbus, who was with me, said : 
 
 " ( You need not be unusually excited over what 
 you see. Each nation cuts a different caper to the 
 riddles and problems of life. The French, who used 
 to be des homines, while at present alas ! they are only 
 des omelettes, were in their prime of an aggressive 
 attitude to all that touched them ; the Germans were 
 of an idealising temper, while their present mood is 
 rather a tampering ideal ; the Americans are full of 
 the exploiting fever; and the English invariably take 
 up a posture of expectativeness. 
 
 " * They pretend to believe what the Spartan King 
 Archidamus always said : " One cannot by reasoning 
 disentangle the future." This attitude pays the 
 English best. First they let it be proved by the 
 Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and more particularly 
 by the French that India can be conquered, and 
 then they take it. Even so with Egypt, Canada, 
 
146 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 the West Indies, and South Africa. Expectativeness 
 is their motto. 
 
 "'When I came to England trying to persuade 
 them to help me in the discovery of America, they 
 acted the wise Archidamus, and would not give me 
 linen for one sail. When I had discovered it, then 
 they took as much of it, and more than they could 
 swallow. This method of expectativeness has had 
 much historic quality, to use your words, O Csesar, 
 for a time. But I am afraid it is beginning to be 
 worn out. 
 
 " * I for one know (and have you, and Pericles, and 
 Joan of Arc, and Napoleon, and so many others not 
 told me the same thing when we used to meet, at 
 the wish of Joan, at Rheims Cathedral ?), I for one 
 know what these little ones do not even dream of, 
 so infatuated are they with the power of Reason and 
 Science and similar machinery, namely, that our force 
 to forefeel things of the future is far greater, at least 
 in some of us, than our capacity to analyse or com- 
 prehend things of the present or the past. Our 
 whole being is not so much an upshot of the past as 
 a projection of the future. Hence the astounding 
 assurance with which all of us now assembled in 
 Olympus felt in advance what later on we actually 
 did carry out. I should have discovered America had 
 it never existed ; as I actually discovered it thinking 
 that I discovered the eastern side of Asia.' 
 
 " I very well see," said Caesar, " what you mean. 
 The English have no forefeeling of things to come. 
 They do not note that their whole situation in 
 historic space has in the last generation 'completely 
 changed, and that therefore their old method of 
 expectativeness, which lived mainly on the blunders 
 
(LESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 147 
 
 of other nations, has become quite obsolete. They 
 are where we were after Zama, after the end of the 
 Second Punic War, or the end of the third century 
 B.C., as they say. So they are at the end of their 
 second Hundred Years' War with France. But 
 while we distinctly felt that after the Carthaginians, 
 whom we had defeated, we were inevitably compelled 
 to reduce the Macedonians, and not shrinking from 
 our heavy task we did defeat them, though with tre- 
 mendous effort; the English do shrink from doing 
 what the uncommon sense of the future as well as 
 the common sense of the present but too clearly tell 
 them to do. 
 
 " The blunder of France and Spain which was the 
 chief ally of England in former times, I mean, the 
 blunder of these great nations in making war on 
 England only at times when they had four to ten 
 other wars on hand ; that capital blunder the domin- 
 ating Power of this moment will never commit. 
 
 " Germany will not embroil herself in any Contin- 
 ental war while fighting England. This is indis- 
 putable. 
 
 " For the first time in modern times England will 
 be at grips with a first-class Continental Power which 
 is in a position to concentrate all her strength on 
 England. This completely novel situation requires 
 completely novel methods of meeting it. Yet, the 
 average Englishman is quite unaware of all that. 
 What ruined mighty Macedon? Not the lack of 
 a powerful army, since our oldest generals, such 
 as ^Emilius Paulus, trembled at the thunderlike 
 onslaught of the famous Macedonian phalanx, or 
 infantry. But instead of joining the Carthaginians 
 full-heartedly while we smarted under the scourge of 
 
148 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 Hannibal, they misread the whole situation and 
 waited, and waited, until we were able to con- 
 centrate upon them, even to incorporate the best 
 Greek forces in our armies, and the end was disaster 
 for Macedon. 
 
 "Just listen to the speech now going on. The 
 Leader of the Opposition is speaking. 
 
 " 4 Mr Speaker, I am broadly astonished at the 
 statements of the hon. member for Alarmville, who 
 has just painted the international horizon in tints 
 of Indian ink. I cannot imagine where he takes 
 his tints from. Does he want to pose as a political 
 Tintoretto ? ' 
 
 " (Much applause most members send for the En- 
 cyclopedia Imperialis to find out what Tintoretto means.) 
 
 " c The horizon, as everybody knows, is only an 
 imaginary line, and each man has his own horizon. 
 If therefore the horizon of the hon. member be as 
 black as jet, I have not much to say against it, 
 and will send him my condolences. But why should 
 he obtrude his horizon on that of all the rest of 
 peace-loving humanity ? I also have my horizon.' 
 
 " (The hon. member : c Horizons, if you please.') 
 
 " < Horizons ? More than one horizon ? Perhaps ; 
 it probably needs more than one to descend to that 
 of the hon. member.' 
 
 " (Opposition members : ( Deucedly clever, by 
 Jove!') 
 
 " 6 On my horizon I see no cloud, no vapours, no 
 
C^ISAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 149 
 
 foundations of any belief in storms or tempests of 
 any kind. What conceivable reason should the 
 Germans have for attacking us ? I fail, I utterly fail 
 to see it. I know that my adversaries say that 
 whatever reasons Germany may or may not have 
 to attack us, we, these people say, we have a plethora 
 of motives to attack them. This point, this argu- 
 ment is so devoid of point or argument, that I cannot 
 waste the time of the House in refuting it. It 
 refutes itself. Why should we attack the Germans? 
 Because we have no reasons to do so. That is all 
 that one can advance. Do we want their colonies? 
 Why, we are eternally obliged to them for having 
 taken them and so rid us of a sterile investment. 
 Do we want part of Germany? Neither parts nor 
 the whole of it. Have we not ceded to them Heligo- 
 land? Sir, it is, as I said, impossible to detect a 
 single argument in favour of our attacking Germany. 
 The minds that counsel such a violent measure are 
 influenced by apprehensions arising out of future 
 developments. They are anticipative souls to whom 
 the secrets of the future have been revealed by the 
 timorousness of the present. I respect souls; I 
 respect timorousness; but I refuse to attribute to 
 it any oracular wisdom. The future is dark, three 
 shades darker than the present, which is impene- 
 trable enough as it is. 
 
 " c There remains, then, only the other alternative : 
 Germany seriously means to attack us. Well, sir, 
 let us analyse this statement. What earthly good 
 would such an attack do to the Germans ? I hear 
 they covet Denmark and Holland, as the natural 
 outlets of their Empire which at present is like a 
 muffled head ; and since England cannot permit their 
 
150 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 taking possession of Denmark and Holland, the 
 Germans must fight England. This argument, sir, 
 lacks all the elements of truth. It lacks geographi- 
 cal force, historical momentum, political sense. 
 Denmark, we all know, is quite in the east of 
 Germany between the Elbe river and the Lake of 
 Baikal.' 
 
 " (Uproarious hilarity in parts of the House. A 
 voice : ' Lake Baikal is in Siberia ! ') 
 
 " c I hear, sir, Lake Baikal is in Siberia. As if I 
 had not known it, sir ! I say Baikal as the scientific 
 term of Baltic, which is in reality Bi-Kalic, or 
 rapidly speaking: Baikal.' 
 
 " (Opposition members : c Deucedly clever he 
 got out of that scrape ! ') 
 
 " ' Denmark which, as I said, is in the east of 
 Germany does not muffle her at all. It is a highly 
 artistic country and in the Bay of Catgut are fished 
 the best strings for violins.' 
 
 " (A voice : < Sound of Kattegat ! ') 
 
 " ' I hear, sir, that it is the Sound of Kattegat, but 
 I think every patriotic Englishman says Catgut. But 
 to return to my argument : the Germans being 
 very musical, love violins, and consequently love the 
 Kattegat, as the hon. voice says, and love the Danes. 
 As long as the Danes give their fine catguts, the 
 Germans will certainly not think of doing them any 
 harm.' 
 
 " (An angry voice : c But Denmark is in the north 
 of Germany ! ') 
 
 " c I hear, sir, that Denmark has moved from her 
 ancient moorings. If that be so, then I can only 
 conclude that Germany has still less reason to covet 
 the possession of Denmark. For, is it not clear, or 
 
(LESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 151 
 
 luce clarius, that Denmark is a sort of nightcap to 
 Germany? The Germans themselves typify their 
 nation as a Deutscher Michel (Teuton Michael) with 
 a nightcap on his head. Why, this nightcap is 
 Denmark. The Teuton likes a nightcap.' 
 
 " (General laughter.) 
 
 " All Teutons do.' 
 
 " (Renewed laughter.) 
 
 " ' Need I say more ? 
 
 " c And as to Holland, I am bound to say that it 
 passes my comprehension how anyone can seriously 
 maintain that Germany covets Holland. I hear that 
 she covets Holland because it is exasperating to a 
 great Power like Germany that the entire delta of 
 her greatest river, the Rhine, belongs to a small 
 and hostile Power. It is asked of me, how I, or for 
 the matter of that any Englishman, would like to 
 see the mouth of the Thames in the power of the 
 Belgians? Sir, I should not like to see that, to be 
 sure. But the case is quite different. We English 
 have no river like the Rhine, which in its upper 
 course gives the most generous wine, and in its 
 lower course is nothing but a vile combination of 
 hydrogen and oxygen, commonly called water. If, 
 for better illustration, the Thames in her upper course 
 gave the finest whisky : 
 
 " (Great uproar among two- thirds of the members, 
 all teetotallers.) 
 
 " ' Or, I beg your pardon, ginger beer or cyder, 
 we should not greatly mind to whom the lower 
 course belonged. But, sir, it is a well-known and 
 a most patriotic fact that the Thames river contains 
 nothing else than water. Water, sir, is the panacea 
 of this nation ! ' 
 
152 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " (Violent applause from two-thirds of the House.) 
 " c Yes, the panacea, the salvation, the resurrection, 
 and the rehabilitation of this country.' 
 
 " (Cries : c Righteousness ! Righteousness ! ') 
 " ' We cannot get enough of it. Water in our 
 throats in our papers, books, and speeches. Water 
 in our dramas, novels, drugs ; water, water three 
 kingdoms for water ! ' 
 
 " (Wild and frantic applause of the whole House. ) 
 
 " 4 Now, sir, I maintain all this does not hold good 
 
 with our friends the Germans. They do drink wine 
 
 and beer and schnapps. They cannot be without 
 
 them. Their Rhine gives them wine in plenty in 
 
 that part of its course which belongs to them. 
 
 What does it, what can it matter to them to whom 
 
 the lower part of the Rhine, full of mere water, 
 
 does or does not belong?' 
 
 "('Hear! Hear!') 
 
 " c The Germans are a practical nation. Does any 
 person ; I say more than that, can any person say 
 that the Germans will wage a great war in order to 
 possess themselves of water, when all that time they 
 already have excellent wine? I could understand, 
 sir, that if the Germans occupied the watery mouth 
 of the Rhine only, and not its middle and upper 
 
 course full of noble wine ' 
 
 " (Several voices: 'Order! Order! Retract noble.') 
 " c Well, well, the House will allow me to say 
 " noble " wine, inasmuch as wine has not only four or 
 fourteen quarters, but innumerable ones.' 
 
 " (Opposition cries : ' Excellent! deucedly clever ! ') 
 
 " c To return to my argument : I could understand 
 
 that the Germans, if they had only the lower course 
 
 of the Rhine, would forthwith wage war to acquire 
 
CAESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 153 
 
 the middle and upper course of the river. We learn 
 from Tacitus that they are a very thirsty nation, 
 and this authentic news is, as readers of more 
 modern authors tell me, not given the lie by the 
 contemporary Germans either. But under the exist- 
 ing circumstances the Rhine or Hock argument, 
 meant to prove German hostility, falls into the 
 water near the Dutch border, wherever that may be. 
 
 " c There is finally, sir, another so-called argument 
 re Holland and Germany. It is stated that the 
 Germans covet Holland on account of the Dutch 
 colonies in Asia and South America. These colonies, 
 as everybody knows, are exiguous. 5 
 
 "(An angry voice : ' About 800,000 English square 
 miles.') 
 
 " C I hear, sir, the Dutch colonies are about 
 800,000 English square miles. Of course, my 
 information is taken from Tacitus ; and no doubt 
 since his time some additions have been made to 
 the colonial microcosm of the Dutch. But even 
 if that were so, and if the Dutch actually possessed 
 800,000 square miles of colonies, it is quite patent 
 that these colonies, if not exiguous in extent, are 
 exiguous in value : otherwise they would long ago 
 have been governed from Downing Street.* 
 
 " (Approving laughter half of the members smile 
 knowingly, while the other half pat themselves 
 on the backs of their neighbours.) 
 
 " c Do you mean to tell me that the Germans will 
 wage an immense war for the sake of what we 
 have not deigned to pick up ? They are, I know, 
 past masters in the use of offals for purposes of 
 food and drink. But surely in matters of politics 
 they want more than offals. 
 
154 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " c At the risk of wearying hon. members I should 
 like to add just a remark or two on another argument 
 of the alarmists. We have seen the Danish argu- 
 ment ; the Hock argument ; and the Dutch colonies 
 argument. There remains one more : the aerial 
 argument. I hear from my valet that one Chaplin or 
 Zebraline has made a flight or two through the air.' 
 
 " (Voices : ' Zeppelin ! ' ) 
 
 " ' I hear, sir, his name is Zeppelin ; probably an 
 abbreviation of Mazeppaline, whom Lord Byron has 
 sung so well.' 
 
 " (Opposition members : c Deucedly clever ! ' ) 
 
 "'The flight of Mazeppa has naturally much 
 agitated the Germans, all of whom can read English. 
 If they could not, what else would they read ? I 
 have never heard of a German literature. 
 
 "'But to resume: the Germans, excited by Mazeppa 
 behold in Herr Zeppelin an aerial Mazeppa. That 
 is all, as the French say. But, sir, is it likely that 
 Herr Zeppelin will so perfect his balloon or airship 
 as to make it available for the transportation of 
 an army corps or two to England? Suppose he 
 could do so ; what would be simpler than to render 
 his aerial landing in this country impossible? We 
 have simply to refuse him a patent for the British 
 Empire, and lo ! he can never set foot on the 
 clouds of England. 
 
 " c But the alarmists say that even if Zeppelin's 
 airship could not carry over whole army corps, they 
 might very well serve for German scouts and spies, 
 who might explore the secret preparations and 
 defensive measures made by this country ou land. 
 
 " e Well, sir, this apparently strong argument 
 has not an atom of vitality in it ; and for the simplest 
 
CAESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 155 
 
 of reasons too. The Germans might send their 
 trustiest Zeppelin No. 10 or No. 50, with their 
 best trained scouts in it. These scouts might pry 
 into anything in the shape of military preparations 
 in England ; but they will never discover anything. 
 
 " c Why, sir, this is why we make no preparations. 
 We do that simply to nullify any possible Zeppelin.' 
 
 " ( c Hear ! Hear ! Deucedly clever.') 
 
 " c Some critics say that we have lost the old 
 bold imperialist spirit. But, sir, is it not evident 
 that we are to-day of a greater military spirit than 
 we ever were formerly? Feeble nations, in order 
 to secure peace, constantly prepare for war; or as 
 the Latin adage holds it : " Si vis pacem para belhtm" 
 We, on the other hand, make no preparations for 
 war, because we are so strong as to consider war 
 or peace with equal equanimity. To sum up : 
 the aerial argument has no more force in it than 
 the other arguments of the alarmists. If a modern 
 William the Conqueror should be able to conquer 
 the air, and by a modern battle of Hazetings 
 (deucedly clever !) enter the mid-air of this country, 
 he will find Heroes and not Harolds to contest 
 every square inch of Margate winds, of Lincolnshire 
 rain, or of London smoke. This country, sir, can 
 be subjugated neither by land, nor by sea, nor 
 by air. Over these three elements hovers and 
 reigns supreme the indomitable spirit of the race.' 
 
 " (Tremendous applause.) 
 
156 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " When the speech of the Leader of the Op- 
 position was ended, Columbus turned to me," 
 continued Cassar, " and said : ' I have no doubt, 
 
 Cassar, that you are fairly sickened by that 
 speech. But, pray, consider that every word of 
 it was framed and uttered, not to discuss seriously 
 the German danger, but to get back into pow r er. 
 The speaker is neither so ignorant nor so foolish 
 as he appears. He made a special effort to appear 
 absolutely ignorant of geography, because the party 
 in power has won great renown by an imposing 
 ignorance in that subject. You must not smile. 
 
 1 say deliberately, imposing. The English hate 
 geography, maps, atlases, globes. Even in the 
 examinations for the diplomatic service they do 
 not admit geography as a subject. 
 
 " ' Being convinced of the exclusive importance 
 of their own country, they are simply bored with 
 geographical considerations of any other country. 
 Some time ago it occurred that not one member 
 of the House knew whether British Guiana was 
 an island or a peninsula. Of course, it is neither. 
 It belongs to the bon ton to be ignorant of all 
 geography; that is, to treat Germany or Denmark 
 or Russia as if one spoke of some internal province 
 of the Chinese Empire. For similar reasons, the 
 speaker affected not to see the slightest danger 
 from Germany. The party in power was elected 
 by the people mainly on the ground that with the 
 Goody-Goody ones " in," and the Imperialists " out," 
 the people were safe not to be embroiled in a European 
 war. In order to take the wind out of the tattered 
 sail of Pacifism the speaker acted as if the Germans 
 did not so much as dream of doing England any harm.' 
 
CAESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 157 
 
 "All this is most disheartening," said Csesar. 
 "To treat foreign policy merely as a card in the 
 little game of electioneering is most injurious to the 
 interests of a great country. England, like every 
 other country in Europe, has been made in her 
 Downing Street rather than at the polls or in 
 Committee-rooms. European currents determine 
 the minor currents of the home policies of the 
 several countries. You say, and with the utmost 
 right, O Columbus, that you have given the English 
 their most powerful leverage. But would you have 
 thought of doing what you did do, had not a vast 
 event in South-eastern Europe, the coming of the 
 Turk, driven your countrymen to the discovery of a 
 western route, the eastern being closed by the 
 Turk? 
 
 "I wish the Parthians in mid-Asia, in my time, 
 had been as strong as the Turks were in your time. 
 We should have had you while I lived, and by the 
 discovery of America over fifteen hundred years 
 before you did discover it, the whole trend of the 
 world's history would have been different. For 
 you would have given this immense new leverage to 
 the Roman Empire instead of to little England. It is 
 rather amusing to hear the English talk of the < Un- 
 speakable Turk,' a nation to whom they are, if 
 indirectly, more obliged than to any other nation of 
 the past or present, excepting the French. 
 
 " The truth is, that no nation makes itself. It is 
 made by itself only in so far as it reacts against the 
 powerful influence of the others, its neighbours and 
 their neighbours. If these neighbours are feeble, 
 and second-rate nations, the reacting nation itself 
 will remain feeble and second-rate. The greatness 
 
158 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 of the present Germans is a veritable godsend to the 
 English, since the decadence of the French. By 
 reacting against it properly, England will be newly 
 invigorated. 
 
 "The scribblers of the little ones ascribe the 
 downfall of the Empire which I founded to the 
 rottenness of my Romans. How untrue ! My 
 Empire decayed because, comprising as it did all the 
 then known civilised nations, it lacked a great 
 adversary by reacting against whom it might have re- 
 invigorated itself from time to time. They say the 
 Barbarians, chiefly the Teutons, overpowered us. 
 Alas ! I wish they had been much stronger than 
 they were. They never overpowered us. Had the 
 Greeks and Macedonians been able to concert great 
 military measures against us, we should have been 
 forced to give up the fatal idea of an all-compassing 
 Empire, and should have finally arrived at a fine and 
 vitalising balance of power in the Mediterranean. 
 
 "The English ought to welcome, although to 
 combat the rise of Germany. They imagine that 
 their principal force comes from their colonies. It 
 will come, not from their colonies, which is geo- 
 graphically impossible, but from their perennial rivalry 
 with great Continental Powers. These rivalries 
 made England, made her colonies. To give up these 
 rivalries, to cease combating great Continental 
 Powers, will be the end both of England and her 
 Empire. In my time I, together with all my friends, 
 gloried in my long-drawn conquest of Gaul, and 
 my final victory over the leader of the Gauls, 
 Vercingetorix. I now wish I had been defeated 
 at Alesia, and a strong and united Gaul had been 
 established under my unlucky adversary. What 
 
CAESAR ON THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 159 
 
 inestimable centre of healthy rivalry would Gaul 
 not have been for us ! To try to conquer it was 
 right; to have definitely deprived it of independ- 
 ence was a disaster. Strifeless bliss prospers only in 
 Olympus." 
 
THE SIXTH NIGHT 
 
 APOLLO AND DIONYSUS IN ENGLAND l 
 
 IT is many years ago that in the Bodleian at 
 Oxford I was shown into the beautiful room where 
 John Selden's noble library is placed. It is a lofty, 
 well-proportioned room, and on the walls are arrayed 
 the silent legions of the great scholar's books. 
 
 At that time I was still fonder of books than of 
 realities, and with breathless haste I ran over the 
 title-pages and contents of the grand folios in over 
 fifteen languages, written by scholars of all the 
 Western nations and of many an Oriental people. 
 
 Then I paused before the fine oil-painting near the 
 entrance of the room representing the face and upper 
 body of the scholar-patriot. The face is singularly, 
 touchingly beautiful. The delicately swung lines of 
 the lips tell at once, more especially in their discreet 
 corners, of the deep reticence and subtle tact of the 
 man. No wonder my Lady Kent loved him. The 
 combination of political power, boundless erudition, 
 and charming male beauty could not but be pleasing 
 to a knowing woman of the world. His eyes, big 
 and lustrous, yet veil more than they reveal. He 
 evidently was a man who saw more than he expressed, 
 and felt more than he cared to show. Living in the 
 troublous times of James the First and Charles the 
 
 1 Reprinted, with permission, from the Nineteenth Century and 
 After for July 1908. 
 
 1 60 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 161 
 
 First, he worked strenuously for the liberties of his 
 country, while all the time pouring forth works of the 
 heaviest erudition on matters of ancient law, religions, 
 and antiquities. 
 
 His printed works are, in keeping with the custom 
 of his day, like comets : a small kernel of substance, 
 appended to a vast tail of quotations from thousands 
 of authors. Like the unripe man I was, I liked the 
 tail more than the kernel. Yet I had been in various 
 countries and had acquired a little knowledge of sub- 
 stance. 
 
 And as I gazed with loving looks at the mild 
 beauty of the scholar, I fell slowly into a reverie. I 
 had read him and about him with such zeal that it 
 seemed to me I knew the man personally. Then also 
 I had walked over the very streets and in the very 
 halls where he had walked and talked to Camden, 
 Cotton, Archbishop Ussher, Sir Mathew Hale, Lord 
 Ellesmere, Coke, Cromwell. It was the period that 
 we, in Hungary, had been taught to admire most in 
 all English history. 
 
 And there was more particularly one maxim of 
 Selden's, which he carefully wrote on every one of 
 the books of his library, which had always impressed 
 me most. 
 
 It ran : " Liberty above everything " ; or as he 
 wrote it, in Greek : Trepl TTCIVTOS TV\V eXevOeptav. 
 
 Yes, liberty that is, political liberty above every- 
 thing else. I had, like all people born in the fifties of 
 the last century, believed in that one idea as one be- 
 lieves in the goodness and necessity of bread and wine. 
 I could not doubt it; I thought, to doubt it was 
 almost absurd. And so I had long made up my mind 
 to go one day to Oxford and to make my reverent 
 
1 62 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 bow to the scholar who had adorned the shallowest 
 book of his vast collection by writing on it the Greek 
 words in praise of liberty. 
 
 However, before I could carry out my pilgrimage 
 to the Bodleian, I had been five years in the States. 
 There indeed was plenty of political liberty, but after 
 a year or so I could not but see that the sacrifices 
 which the Americans had to make for their political 
 liberty were heavy, very heavy, not to say crushing. 
 
 And I began to doubt. 
 
 I conceived that it was perhaps not impossible to 
 assume that in Selden's maxim there were certain 
 " ifs " and certain drawbacks. My soul darkened ; and 
 when finally I arrived at the Bodleian, I went into 
 Selden's room, and to his portrait, prompted by an 
 unarticulated hope that in some way or other I might 
 get a solution of the problem from the man whose 
 maxim I had held in so great esteem for many a 
 long year. 
 
 So I gazed at him, and waited. The room became 
 darker; the evening shadows began spreading about 
 the shelves. The portrait alone was still in a frame 
 of strangely white light. It was as if Apollo could 
 not tear himself away from the face of one who had 
 been his ardent devotee. 
 
 After a while I observed, or thought I did, with a 
 sensation of mingled horror and delight, that the 
 eyes of the portrait were moving towards me. I took 
 courage and uttered my wish, and asked Selden out- 
 right whether now, after he had spent centuries in 
 the Elysian fields with Pericles and Plato, whether 
 he still was of opinion that liberty, political- liberty, is 
 the chief aim of a nation, an aim to be secured at all 
 prices. 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 163 
 
 Thereupon I clearly saw how his eyes deepened, 
 and how the surface of their silent reserve began 
 to ripple, as it were, and finally a mild smile went 
 over them like a cloud over a Highland lake. 
 
 That smile sent a shiver through my soul. Selden, 
 too, doubts his maxim? Can political liberty be 
 bought at too great a price? Are there goods 
 more valuable than political liberty? 
 
 After I recovered from my first shock, I boldly 
 approached the smiling portrait, and implored Selden 
 to help me. 
 
 And then, in the silence of the deserted room, 
 I saw how his lips moved, and I heard English 
 sounds pronounced in a manner considerably different 
 from what they are to-day. They sounded like 
 the bass notes of a clarionet, and there was much 
 more rhythm and cadence in them than one can hear 
 to-day. They were also of exquisite politeness, and 
 the words were, one imagined, like so many courtiers, 
 hat in hand, bowing to one another, yet with a 
 ready sword at the side. 
 
 To my request he replied : " If it should fall out 
 to be your fervent desire to know the clandestine 
 truth of a matter so great and weighty, I shall, for 
 the love of your devotion, be much pleased to be 
 your suitor and help. Do not hesitate to follow 
 
 me." 
 
 With that he stepped out from the frame and 
 stood before me in the costume of the time of 
 the Cavaliers. He took me by the hand, and in a 
 way that seemed both natural and supernatural, so 
 strangely did I feel at that moment, we left unseen 
 and unnoticed the lofty room, and arrived almost 
 immediately after that at a place in the country that 
 
1 64 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 reminded me of Kenilworth, or some other part of 
 lovely Warwickshire. 
 
 It was night, and a full moon shed her mysteries 
 over trees, valleys, and mountains. On a lawn, in 
 the midst of a fine wood of alders, Selden halted. 
 
 There were several persons present. They struck 
 me as being Greeks ; their costume was that of 
 Athenians in the time of Alcibiades. I soon saw 
 that I was right, for they talked ancient Greek. 
 Selden explained to me that they had left Elysium 
 for a time, in order to see how the world beneath 
 was going on. In their travels they had come to 
 England, and were anxious to meet men of the past 
 as well as men of the present, and to inquire into 
 the nature and lot of the nation of which they had 
 heard, by rumour, that it had something of the 
 nature of the Athenians, much of the character of 
 the Spartans, a good deal of the people of Syracuse 
 and Tarentum, and also a trait or two of the 
 Romans. 
 
 Of those Greeks I at once recognised Pericles, 
 the son of Xanthippus ; Alcibiades, the son of 
 Clinias ; Plato, the son of Ariston ; Euripides, the 
 son of Mnesarchos ; moreover, a man evidently 
 an arch on or high official of the oracle of Delphi ; 
 and in the retinue I saw sculpturesque maidens 
 of Sparta and charming women of Argos, set off 
 by incomparably formed beauties of Thebes, and 
 girls of Tanagra smiling sweetly with stately dainti- 
 ness. 
 
 Selden was received by them with hearty friendli- 
 ness, and conversation was soon at its be*st, just as 
 if it had been proceeding in the cool groves of the 
 Academy at Athens. 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 165 
 
 The first to speak was Pericles. He expressed 
 to Selden his great amazement at the things he had 
 seen in England. 
 
 " Had I not governed the city of holy Athena for 
 thirty years," he said, "I should be perhaps pleased 
 with what I see in this strange country. But having 
 been at the head of affairs of a State which in my 
 time was the foremost of the world ; and having 
 always availed myself of the advice and wisdom of 
 men like Damon, the musician-philosopher, Anaxa- 
 goras, the thinker, Protagoras, the sophist, and last, 
 not least, Aspasia, my tactful wife and friend, I am 
 at a loss to understand the polity that you call 
 England. 
 
 " What has struck me most in this country is the 
 sway allowed to what we used to call Orphic 
 Associations. In Athens we had, in my time, a 
 great number of private societies the members of 
 which devoted themselves to the cult of extreme, 
 unnatural, and un-Greek ideas and superstitions. 
 Thus we had thiasoi, as we called them, the members 
 of which were fanatic vegetarians; others, again, 
 who would not allow their adherents to partake of 
 a single drop of Chian or any other wine ; others, 
 again, who would under no circumstances put on 
 any woollen shirt or garment. 
 
 " But if any of these Orphic mystagogues had arro- 
 gated to themselves the right of proposing laws in 
 the Public Assembly, or what this nation calls the 
 Parliament, with a view of converting the whole 
 State of Athens into an Association of Orphic rites 
 and mysteries, then, I am sure, my most resolute 
 antagonists would have joined hands with me to 
 counteract such unholy and scurrilous attempts. 
 
1 66 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " I can well understand that the Spartans, who are 
 quite unwilling to vest any real power whatever in 
 either their kings, their assembly, their senate, or 
 their minor officials, are consequently compelled to 
 vest inordinate power in their few Ephors, and in 
 the constantly practised extreme self-control of each 
 individual Spartan. In a commonwealth like Sparta, 
 where the commune is allowed very little, or no, 
 power; where there are neither generals, directors 
 of police, powerful priests or princes, nor any other 
 incumbents of great coercive powers; in such a 
 community the individual himself must needs be his 
 own policeman, his own priest, prince, general, and 
 coercive power. This he does by being a vegetarian, 
 a strict Puritan, teetotaller, melancholist, and uni- 
 versal killer of joy." 
 
 Here Pericles was interrupted by the suave voice 
 of Selden, who, in pure Attic, corroborated the fore- 
 going statements by a reference to the people called 
 Hebrews in Palestine. " These men," Selden said, 
 " were practically at all times so fond of liberty that 
 they could not brook any sort of government in the 
 form of officials, policemen, soldiers, princes, priests, 
 or lords whatever. In consequence of which they 
 introduced a system of individual self-control called 
 ritualism, by means of which each Hebrew tied him- 
 self down with a thousand filigree ties as to eating, 
 drinking, sleeping, merrymaking, and, in short, as to 
 every act of ordinary life. So that, O Pericles, 
 the Hebrews are one big Orphic Association of 
 extremists, less formidable than the Spartans, but 
 essentially similar to them." 
 
 Selden had scarcely finished his remarks, when 
 Alcibiades, encouraged by a smile from Plato, 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 167 
 
 joined the discussion, and, looking at Pericles, ex- 
 claimed : 
 
 "My revered relative, I have listened to your 
 observations with close attention ; and I have also, in 
 my rambles through this country, met a great 
 number of men and women. It seems to me that 
 but for their Orphic Associations, which here some 
 people call Societies of Cranks and Faddists, the 
 population of this realm would have one civil war 
 after the other. 
 
 "Surely you all remember how, in my youth, 
 misunderstanding as I did the Orphic and mystery- 
 craving nature of man, I made fun of it, and was 
 terribly punished for it at the hands of Hermes, a 
 god far from being as great as Zeus, Apollo, or 
 Dionysus. Little did I know at that time that the 
 exuberance of vitality, which I, owing to my wealth 
 and station in life, could gratify by gorgeous chariot 
 races at Olympia under the eyes of all the Hellenes, 
 was equally strong, but yet unsatisfied, in the average 
 and less dowered citizens of my State. 
 
 " My chequered experience has taught me that no 
 sort of people can quite do without Orphic mysteries, 
 and when I sojourned among the Thracians, I saw 
 that those barbarians, fully aware of the necessity 
 of Mysteries and Orphic Trances, had long ago 
 introduced festivals at which their men and women 
 could give free vent to their subconscious, vague, 
 yet powerful chthonic craving for impassioned day- 
 dreaming and revelry. They indulge in wild dances 
 on the mountains, at night, invoking the gods of the 
 nether world, indulging freely in the wildest form 
 of boundless hilarity, and rivalling in their exuberance 
 the mad sprouting of trees and herbs in spring. 
 
1 68 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " You Laconian maidens, usually so proud and cold 
 and Amazonian, I call upon you to say whether in 
 your strictly regulated polity of Sparta you do not, 
 at times, rove in the wildest fashion over the paths, 
 ravines, and clefts of awful Mount Taygetus, in 
 reckless search of the joy of frantic vitality which 
 your State ordinarily does not allow you to indulge 
 in? And you women of Argos, are you too not 
 given to wild rioting at stated times? Have I not 
 watched you in your religious revivals of fierce 
 joy?" 
 
 Both the Laconian and Argive women admitted 
 the fact, and one of them asked : " Do the women of 
 this country not observe similar festivals ? I pity 
 them if they don't." 
 
 And a Theban girl added: "The other day 
 we passed over Snowdon and other mounts in a 
 beauteous land which they call Wales. It is much 
 like our own holy Mount Kithasron. Why, then, 
 do the women of this country not rove, in honour 
 of the god, over the Welsh mountains, free and 
 unobserved, as we do annually over wild Kithaeron? 
 They would do it gracefully, for I have noticed that 
 they run much better than they walk, and they would 
 swing the thyrsus in their hand with more elegance 
 than the sticks they use in their games." 
 
 At that moment there arose from the haze and 
 clouded mystery of the neighbouring woods a rocket 
 of sounds, sung by female voices and soon joined in 
 the distance by a chorus of men. The company on 
 the lawn suddenly stopped talking, and at the bid- 
 ding of the Delphic archon, whom they called 
 Trichas, they all went in search of ivy, and, hav- 
 ing found it, wreathed themselves with it. The 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 169 
 
 music, more and more passionate, came nearer and 
 nearer. 
 
 From my place I could slightly distinguish, in mid- 
 air, a fast travelling host of women in light dresses, 
 swinging the thyrsus, dancing with utter freedom of 
 beautiful movement, and singing all the time songs 
 in praise of Dionysus, the god of life and joy. 
 
 Trichas solemnly called upon us to close our eyes, 
 and he intoned a paan of strange impressiveness, 
 imploring the god to pardon our presence and to 
 countenance us hereafter as before. 
 
 But the Laconian, Theban, and Argive maidens 
 left us, and soaring into air, as it were, joined the 
 host of revelling women. 
 
 After a time the music subsided far away, and 
 nothing could be heard but the melodious soughing 
 of the wind through the lank alder-trees. 
 
 Then, at a sign of Trichas, Plato took the word 
 and said : 
 
 "You are aware, my friends, that whatever I 
 have taught in my Athenian days regarding the 
 punishment of our faults at the hands of the Powers 
 of the Netherworld, all that has been amply visited 
 upon me in the shape of commentaries written on my 
 works by learned teachers, after the fashion of 
 savages who tattoo the beautiful body of a human 
 being. 
 
 "I may therefore say that I have at last come to 
 a state of purification and castigation which allows 
 
1 70 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 one to see things in their right proportion. Thus, 
 with regard to this curious country in which we are 
 just at present, I cannot but think that while there 
 is much truth in what all of you have remarked, yet 
 you do not seem to grasp quite clearly the essence, 
 or, as we used to say, the ovo-ia of the whole 
 problem. 
 
 " This nation, like all of us Hellenes, has many 
 centuries ago made up its mind to keep its political 
 liberty intact and undiminished. For that purpose 
 it always tried to limit, and in the last three hundred 
 years actually succeeded in limiting, or even destroy- 
 ing, most of the coercive powers of the State, the 
 Church, the nobility, the army. Selden not im- 
 properly compared them to the Jews. And as in the 
 case of the Jews, so in the case of the English, the 
 lack of the coercive powers of State, Church, 
 nobility, and army inevitably engendered coercive 
 powers of an individual or private character. 
 
 "This is called, in a general word, Puritanism. 
 Our Spartans, who would not tolerate public coercive 
 corporate powers any more than do the English, 
 were likewise driven into an individual Puritanism, 
 called their ayooyrj, which likewise consisted of 
 fanatic teetotalism, mutisme, anti-intellectualism, and 
 other common features. 
 
 "This inevitable Puritanism in England assumed 
 formerly what they call a Biblical form; now it 
 feeds on teetotalism that is, it has become liquid 
 Puritanism. I have it on the most unquestionable 
 authority, that the contemporary Britons are, in 
 point of consumption of spirits and wine,.the most 
 moderate consumers of all the European nations; 
 and the average French person, for example, drinks 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 171 
 
 152 times more wine per annum than the average 
 Englishman. Even in point of beer, the average 
 Belgian, for instance, drinks twice as much as the 
 average Englishman ; while the average Dane drinks 
 close on five times more spirits than the average 
 Briton. 
 
 "Yet all these facts will convert no one. For, 
 since the Puritan wants Puritanism and not facts, he 
 can be impressed only by inducing him to adopt 
 another sort of Puritanism, but never by facts. 
 
 " Accordingly, they have introduced Christian 
 Science, or one of the oldest Orphic fallacies, which 
 the Mediaeval Germans used to call c to pray one- 
 self sound.' They have likewise inaugurated anti- 
 vivisectionism, vegetarianism, anti-tobacconism, Sab- 
 batarianism, and a social class system generally, 
 which combines all the features of all the kinds of 
 Puritanism. 
 
 "We in Athens divided men only on lines of the 
 greater or lesser political rights we gave them; but 
 we never drew such lines in matters social and purely 
 human. The freest Athenian readily shook hands 
 with a metic or denizen ; and we ate all that was 
 eatable and good. In England the higher class 
 looks upon the next lower as the teetotaller looks 
 upon beer, the vegetarian upon beef, or the Sabba- 
 tarian upon what they call the Continental Sunday. 
 
 "Moreover, there is in England, in addition to 
 the science of zoology or botany, such as my hearer 
 Aristotle founded it, a social zoology and botany, 
 treating of such animals and plants as cannot, accord- 
 ing to English class Puritanism, be offered to one's 
 friends at meals. Thus, mussels and cockles are 
 socially ostracised, except in unrecognisable form; 
 
172 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 bread is offered in homoeopathic doses; beer at a 
 banquet is simply impossible; black radishes, a 
 personal insult. 
 
 "In the same way, streets, squares, halls, 
 theatres, watering-places in short, everything in 
 the material universe is or is not 'class'; that is, 
 it is subject or not subject to social Puritanism. All 
 this, as in the case of the Hebrews, who have an 
 infinitely developed ritualism of eatables and drink- 
 ables, of things c pure' or 'impure'; all this, I 
 say, is the inevitable consequence of the unwil- 
 lingness of the English to grant any considerable 
 coercive power to the State, the Church, the nobil- 
 ity, the army, or any other organised corporate 
 institution. 
 
 "They hate the idea of conscription, because 
 they hate to give power to the army, and prefer 
 to fall into the snares of faddists. 
 
 "The coercive power which they will not grant 
 in one form, they must necessarily admit in another 
 form. They destroy Puritanism as wielded by 
 State or Church, and must therefore, since coercive 
 powers are always indispensable, accept it as Puritan- 
 ism of fads. 
 
 "What are the Jews other than a nation of 
 extreme faddists? Being quite apolitical, as we call 
 it, they must necessarily be extremely Orphic that 
 is, extreme Puritans. 
 
 "Political liberty is bought at the expense of 
 social freedom. Nobody dares to give himself freely 
 and naively; he must needs watch with sickly self- 
 consciousness over every word or act of- his, as a 
 policeman watches over the traffic of streets. And 
 lest he betray his real sentiments, he suppresses 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 173 
 
 all gestures, because gestures give one away at 
 once. One cannot make a gesture of astonishment 
 without being really astonished at all, and vice 
 versd. 
 
 "And so slowly, by degrees, the whole of the 
 human capital is repressed, disguised, unhumanised, 
 and, in a word, sacrificed at the altar of political 
 liberty. 
 
 " The Romans, much wiser than the Spartans, gave 
 immense coercive power both to corporate bodies, 
 such as the Roman Senate, and to single officials, 
 such as a Consul, a Censor, a Tribune, or a Praetor. 
 They therefore did not need any grotesque private 
 coercive institutions or fads. 
 
 " The English, on the other hand, want to wield 
 such an empire as the Roman, and yet build up their 
 polity upon the narrow plane of a Spartan aywyj. 
 In this there is an inherent contradiction. They 
 hamper their best intentions, and must at all times, 
 and against their better convictions, legislate for 
 faddists, because they lack the courage of their 
 Imperial mission. 
 
 " Empires want Imperial institutions, that is, such 
 as are richly endowed in point of political power. 
 Offices ought to be given by appointment, and not by 
 competitive examinations, if only for five or ten years. 
 The police ought to have a very much more compre- 
 hensive power, and the schools ought to be subject 
 to a national committee. Parliament must be 
 Imperial, and not only British. Very much more 
 might be said about the necessity of rendering this 
 Realm more apotelestic, as we have called it, but I 
 see that Euripides is burning to make his remarks, 
 and I am sure that he is able to give us the final 
 
174 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 expression of the whole difficulty in a manner that 
 none of us can rival." 
 
 Thereupon Euripides addressed the company as 
 follows : 
 
 "For many, many a year I have observed and 
 studied the most life-endowed commonwealth that 
 the world has ever seen, Athens. I watched the 
 Athenians in their homes, in the market-place, in the 
 law courts, in peace and war, in the theatre and in 
 the temple, at the holy places of Eleusis and Delphi, 
 their men as well as their women. 
 
 " Personally I long inclined towards a view of the 
 world almost exclusively influenced by Apollo. I 
 thought that as the sun is evidently the great life- 
 giver of all existence, so light, reason, system, liberty, 
 and consummately devised measures constitute the 
 highest wisdom of the community. 
 
 " In all I wrote or said I worked for the great god 
 of Light, and Reason, and Progress. I could not 
 find words and phrases trenchant enough to express 
 my disdain for sentiments and ideas discountenanced 
 by Apollo. I persecuted and fiercely attacked all 
 those dark, chthonic, and mysterious passions of 
 which man is replete to overflowing. I hated Im- 
 perialism, I adored Liberty; I extolled Philosophy, 
 and execrated Orphic ideas. 
 
 "But at last, when I had gone through'the fearful 
 experiences of the Peloponnesian War, with all its 
 supreme glories and its unrelieved shames, I learned 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 175 
 
 to think otherwise. I learned to see that as man has 
 two souls in his breast, one celestial or Apollinic, the 
 other terrestrial or Dionysiac, so there are two gods, 
 and not one, that govern this sub-lunar world. 
 
 " The two are Apollo and Dionysus. 
 
 " One rules the world of light, of political power, 
 of scientific reason, and of harmonious muses. The 
 other is the god of unreason, of passion, and wild 
 enthusiasm, of that unwieldy Heart of ours which is 
 fuller of monsters, and also of precious pearls, than 
 is the wide ocean. 
 
 "Unless in a given commonwealth the legislator 
 wisely provides for the cult of both gods, in an 
 orderly and public fashion, Dionysus or Apollo will 
 take fearful revenge for the neglect they suffer at 
 the hands of short-sighted statesmen and impudent 
 unbelievers. 
 
 " In the course of our Great War we have come 
 into contact and conflict with many a non-Greek 
 nation, or people whom we rightly term Bar- 
 barians. For while some of them sedulously, perhaps 
 over-zealously, worship Dionysus, they all ignore or 
 scorn Apollo. The consequence is that the great 
 god blinds them to their own advantages, robs them 
 of light and moderation, and they prosper enduringly 
 neither as builders of States nor as private citizens 
 in their towns. 
 
 " For Apollo, like all the gods, is a severe god, and 
 his bow he uses as unerringly as his lyre. 
 
 " It is even so witft Dionysus. 
 
 "The nation that affects to despise him, speedily 
 falls a wretched victim to his awful revenge. In- 
 stead of worshipping him openly and in public fashion, 
 such a nation falls into grotesque and absurd eccen- 
 
176 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 tricittes, that readily degenerate into poisonous vices, 
 infesting every organ of the body politic and de- 
 priving social intercourse of all its charms. The 
 Spartans, although they allowed their women a tem- 
 porary cult of the god Dionysus, yet did not pay 
 sufficient attention to him, worshipping mainly Apollo. 
 They had, in consequence, to do much that tends to 
 de-humanisation, and, while many admired them, no 
 one loved them. 
 
 " It was this, my late and hard-won insight into the 
 nature of man, which I wanted to articulate in the 
 strongest fashion imaginable in my drama called the 
 Baccha. I see with bitterness how little my com- 
 mentators grasped the real mystery of my work. If 
 Dionysus was to me only the symbol of wine and 
 merrymaking, why should I have indulged in the 
 gratuitous cruelty of punishing the neglect of 
 Bacchus by the awful murder of a son-king at the 
 hands of his own frenzied mother-queen ? All my 
 Hellenic sentiment of moderation shudders at such a 
 ghastly exaggeration. 
 
 " Neither the myth nor my drama refers to wanton, 
 barbarous bloodshed ; and such scholars as assume 
 archaic human sacrifices in honour of Dionysus, and 
 * survivals ' thereof in Dionysiac rites, ought to be 
 taken in hand by the god's own Maenads and suffer 
 for their impudence. 
 
 "Human sacrifices indeed, but not such as are 
 made by stabbing people with knives and bleeding 
 them to physical death. Human sacrifices in the 
 sense of a terrible loss of human capital, of a de- 
 humanisation caused by the browbeating of the 
 Heart this and nothing else was the meaning of my 
 drama. 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 177 
 
 " And what country is a fuller commentary on the 
 truth of my Baccha than England ? 
 
 "Here is a country that, had Dionysus been 
 properly worshipped by its people, might be the 
 happiest, brightest of all nations, a model for all 
 others, and living like the gods in perpetual bliss 
 that is, in perfect equilibrium of thought and action, 
 reason and sentiment, beauty and moderation. They 
 have done much and successfully for Pythian Apollo ; 
 they have established a solid fabric of Liberty and 
 Imperial Power; various intellectual pursuits they 
 have cultivated with glory; and in their paeans to 
 Apollo they have shown exquisite beauties of ex- 
 pression and feeling. 
 
 " But Dionysus they persistently want to neglect, 
 to discredit, to oust. 
 
 "Instead of bowing humbly and openly to the 
 god of enthusiasm, of unreasoned lilt of sentiment 
 and passion, and of the intense delight in all that 
 lives and throbs and vibrates with pleasure and joy ; 
 they affect to suppress sentiments, to rein in all 
 pleasures, and to cast a slur on joy. 
 
 "And then the god, seeing the scorn with which 
 they treat him, avenges himself, and blinds and 
 maddens them, as he did King Pentheus of Thebes, 
 King Perseus of Argos, the daughters of Minyas 
 of Orchomenos, Proitos of Tiryns, and so many 
 others. The god Dionysus puts into their hearts 
 absurd thoughts and fantastic prejudices, and some 
 of them spend millions of money a year to stop the 
 use of the Bacchic gifts in a country which has long 
 been the least drinking country in the white world, 
 and as a matter of fact drinks far too little good and 
 noble wine. 
 
178 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " Others again are made by angry Dionysus to 
 iJLaivea-Oai or rage by adding to the 250 unofficial 
 yearly fogs of the country, fifty-two official ones, 
 which they call Sundays. 
 
 "Again others, instigated by the enraged god 
 Dionysus, drive people to furor by their intolerable 
 declamations against alleged cruelties to animals, 
 while they are themselves full of cruel boredom to 
 human beings. 
 
 "There is, I note with satisfaction, one among 
 them who seems to have an inkling of the anger of 
 the god, and who has tried to restore, in a fashion, 
 the cult of Dionysiac festivals. 
 
 "He calls his Orphic Association the Salvation 
 Army. 
 
 "They imitate not quite unsuccessfully the doings 
 of the legs and feet of the true worshippers of 
 Dionysus ; but the spirit of the true cult is very far 
 off from them. 
 
 "And so Dionysus, ignored and looked down upon 
 by the people of this country, avenges himself in 
 a manner the upshot and sum of which is not in- 
 adequately represented in my Baccha. 
 
 " And yet the example of the Hellas of Hellas, or 
 of the town of Athens, which all of them study in 
 their schools, might have taught them better things. 
 
 "When, by about the eighth or seventh century B.C. 
 (as they say), the cult of Dionysus began to spread 
 in Greece, the various States opposed it at first with 
 all their power. All these States were Apollinic 
 contrivances. They were ordered by reasoned con- 
 stitutions, generally by one man. In them 'every thing 
 was deliberately arranged for light, order, good 
 rhythm, clearness, and system. It was all in honour 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 179 
 
 of Apollo, the city-builder. Naturally the leaders 
 of those States hated Dionysus. 
 
 " However, they were soon convinced of the might 
 of the new god, and, instead of scorning, defying or 
 neglecting him, the wise men at the head of affairs 
 resolved to adopt him officially. In this they 
 followed (O Trichas, did they not?) the example of 
 Delphi, which, although formerly purely Apollinic, 
 now readily opened its holy halls to the new god 
 Dionysus, so that ever after Delphi was as much 
 Dionysiac as it was Apollinic. 
 
 " At Athens they honoured the new god so deeply 
 and fully that, not content with the ordinary rural 
 sports and processions given in his honour, the 
 Athenians created the great Tragedy and Comedy 
 as a fit cult of the mighty god. The Athenians 
 were paid to go to those wondrous plays, where 
 their Dionysiac soul could and did find ample food, 
 and was thereby purged and purified, or, in other 
 words, prevented from falling into the snares of silly 
 faddists of religious or other impostures. But for 
 those Dionysiac festivals in addition to the cult of 
 Apollo, the Greeks would have become the Chinese 
 of Europe. 
 
 " Why, then, do not the English do likewise ? 
 Why do they not build a mighty, State-kept theatre, 
 or several of them? Why does their State try to 
 pension decrepit persons, and not rather help to 
 balance young minds? Why have they no public 
 agones or competitions in singing, reciting, and 
 dancing? They do officially, next to nothing for 
 music; and if one of their strategl or ministers was 
 known to be a good pianist or violinist, as they call 
 their instruments, they would scorn him as unworthy 
 
i8o NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 of his post. Yet few of such strategi are the equals 
 of Epaminondas, who excelled both in dancing and 
 playing our harp. 
 
 " But while they ignore music that is, Dionysus' 
 chief gift they crouch before the unharmonious 
 clamour of any wretched Orphic teetotaller, vege- 
 tarian, or Sabbatarian. 
 
 " This is how Dionysus avenges himself. 
 
 " I see how uneasy they are with regard to the 
 great might of the Germans. Why, then, do they 
 not learn to respect Dionysus, who was the chief 
 help to the powerful consolidation of the German 
 Empire? German music kept North and South 
 Germans intimately together; it saved them from 
 wasting untold sums of money, of time, of force, on 
 arid fads; it paved the way to political intimacy. 
 
 " Had the English not neglected Dionysus, had 
 they sung in his honour those soul-attaching songs 
 which once learned in youth can never be forgotten, 
 they might have retained the millions of Irishmen, 
 who have left their shores, by the heart-melting 
 charm of a common music. From the lack of such 
 a delicate but enduring tie, the Irish had to be 
 held by sterile political measures only. 
 
 " In music there is infinitely more than a mere 
 tinkling of rhythm ; there is Dionysus in it. Their 
 teachers of politics sneer at Aristotle because he treats 
 solemnly of music in his 'Politics.' But Aristotle 
 told me himself that he sneers at them, seeing what 
 absurd socialistic schemes they discuss because they 
 do not want to steady the souls of their people by 
 a proper cult of Dionysus. 
 
 "Socialism is doomed to the fate of Pentheus 
 at the terrible hands of Dionysus. Socialism despises 
 
APOLLO AND DIONYSUS 181 
 
 Dionysus ; the god will speedily drive it to mad- 
 ness. 
 
 "See, friends, we must leave yonder Apollo is 
 rising; he wants to join Dionysus, who passed us 
 a little while ago. Should both stay in this country, 
 and should they both be properly worshipped, we 
 might from time to time come back again. At 
 present I propose to leave forthwith for the Castalian 
 springs." 
 
THE SEVENTH NIGHT 
 
 SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO ON RELIGION 
 
 DURING the seventh night the gods and heroes met 
 again at Rome in the Coliseum. The splendid moon 
 hung deep from the sky like a huge lantern, and 
 shed her mild and plaintive rays over all the immense 
 building. The immortals, in their light dresses and 
 lighter movements, formed a gorgeous contrast to 
 the sombre stones of the vast edifice. When all had 
 taken their seats, Zeus rose in all his majesty and 
 spake : 
 
 " Gods and heroes ! We have derived much 
 exquisite distraction from the stories of Alcibiades, 
 Diogenes, Plato, Aristotle, Columbus and Caesar 
 about the various features of lay-life in England. If 
 now I call upon you, Socrates, to tell us something 
 about the religious life of the English, it is, I need 
 hardly assure you, not in a spirit of mockery that I 
 do so. What we here think about it all, we know, 
 and need not utter it. When Athena in her indig- 
 nation more than once asked me to hurl my lightning 
 into her former abode at Athens, into the remains of 
 the Parthenon, I told her something in secret she 
 knows what, and did not touch the holy temple. 
 Even so shall I deal with the temples of the little 
 ones. We shall listen to you, Socrates, Vdth sym- 
 pathy and attention." 
 
 Up rose the sturdy figure of the sage. His 
 
 182 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 183 
 
 features had become even more illuminated with 
 humanity, and thus more divine, and over his face 
 erred a mild smile. He spoke as follows : 
 
 " O Zeus and the other gods and heroes ! In my 
 mortal time I frequently listened to the marvellous 
 stories of Herodotus, and while I never permitted 
 myself to question his honesty, as later on Plutarch 
 did, yet I could not help doubting some of his tales 
 about the religions of the various peoples he describes. 
 Had I then known and learnt what I have learnt 
 since in England, I should not have felt the slightest 
 doubt regarding his statements. 
 
 "I had been in England for some time before 
 I began to understand something of their curious 
 religions. For, they have not one religion, but quite 
 a number of such. At first I thought they had 
 different religions according to the boundaries of 
 their different counties. I fancied that such a neat 
 geographical distribution might render the whole 
 matter more methodic. But I found that that was 
 not the case. In the same way I tried to find out 
 whether their religions were not distributed according 
 to their sixty different social classes. This too did 
 not work. I then tried their professions ; after that, 
 their dress ; after that, their income-tax ; then, their 
 private games. 
 
 " In that way I finally came to reach the true lines 
 of cleavage between their numerous religions. For, 
 to put it briefly, their religions are parallel to and 
 dependent on each man's hobbies. 
 
 "If, for instance, an Englishman dislikes wine, 
 and thus leans towards Puritanic ideas, he will be 
 much inclined to adopt the religion of one Calvin, 
 who taught to enjoy life by killing all its joys. 
 
1 84 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "Another Englishman, being very partial to 
 tobacco and to smoking, will have a natural bent 
 towards the High Church, in which much incense is 
 burnt and much smoke produced. 
 
 "Another, being very methodical and punctilious, 
 will regard Methodism with much sympathy. 
 
 " A fourth, being afflicted with great susceptibility 
 to moral shocks, goes among the Quakers. 
 
 " In that way I began to feel my way through the 
 maze of their religions. The strangest thing, how- 
 ever, was that all these multifarious believers staunchly 
 maintained that they took their divergent creeds 
 from one and the same book: from the Bible. In 
 that respect they reminded me of my whilom ad- 
 versaries at Athens, the Sophists, who could prove 
 the pro and con of any given assertion with equal 
 volubility. 
 
 "In order to imbue myself fully with the spirit 
 of their beliefs, I frequently went to church on 
 Sundays. 
 
 " To be quite frank, I do not very well see why in 
 England they call that day a Sunday. There is no 
 sun in it, and otherwise it resembles night more than 
 anything else. It ought to be called Un-day. I 
 concluded that everything arranged for that day was 
 done in order to bring out its resemblance to night 
 ever so strongly. Thus, lest people should forego 
 sleep on that drowsy day, the people of England have 
 introduced thousands of soporifics in the shape of 
 sermons. What other use that drug may have I 
 could never see. 
 
 " To me as an old Hellene it seemed a thing quite 
 beyond comprehension, why people should go out of 
 their way to salary a person for making them feel 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 185 
 
 creepy at the same place, and on the same day of the 
 week, by repeating the same admonitions in nearly 
 the same words hundreds of times a year. Evidently 
 their lives on the other days of the week are so 
 spiritless, dull and dry, that they want to get at least 
 on Sundays some moral hair-friction with spiritual eau 
 de Cologne. We Hellenes never thought of doing 
 such things. It would have struck us as a personal 
 insult to suppose that we needed such perpetual 
 moralisation at stated times. 
 
 "Hippocrates told me that some constitutions do 
 need the constant use of purgative waters. But do 
 all people suffer from ethical constipation ? 
 
 " I could not help smiling at the idea of my preach- 
 ing like that to the Athenians of my time. They 
 would have handed me the goblet with hemlock long 
 before they did do it. Each householder would have 
 considered my pretensions to moralise them as a 
 slander on his private life. Each of them tried to 
 make his own house a chapel full of constantly 
 practised piety, dutifulness, and humanity. What 
 need had he of my sermons? When he joined the 
 great festivals of the city, it was to do his duty by the 
 other Athenians, just as he joined the army on land, 
 or the navy on sea, for the same purpose. 
 
 " We knew of no dogmas. We did not think that 
 a man need stake all his soul on the belief in certain 
 abstract dogmas. If he did not feel inclined to linger 
 on one story told of Zeus, he might lovingly dwell 
 on any other of the numberless stories told of him. 
 If some said that Zeus was born in Crete, others 
 maintained that he was born elsewhere. It seemed 
 to us immaterial whether this fact or that was or was 
 not historically exact. 
 
1 86 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "Not so the little ones. For them religion is 
 viewed as a matter of documentary evidence, like a 
 bill of sale. They constantly clamour for evidence,' 
 * proofs ' and c verifications.' Their theologians are 
 solicitors and barristers, but not religious men. If I 
 had asked Pericles for c evidences' of the religious 
 cult practised by his family or gens, the Alcmaeonidse, 
 he would have indignantly told his slaves to put me 
 out of the house, just as if I had asked him to give 
 me c evidences ' of his wife's virtue. 
 
 "We held that Religion is not a matter of 
 'evidences,' any more than Life, Health, Sleep, or 
 Dreams stand in need of being c proved ' by c evi- 
 dences.' We know that we live, or that we are 
 in good health ; we do not care to listen to long- 
 winded arguments proving it. 
 
 "On my rambles in England I met many a 
 clergyman. I remember one who occupied a high 
 position at Canterbury, and was a very learned man. 
 I was rather curious to learn what he thought of the 
 religion of the Greeks. He treated me to the 
 following remarks : 
 
 " c The Religion of the Greeks ? Why, my dear 
 sir, they had none. The Greeks were pagans, 
 heathens. They believed in all sorts of immoral 
 stories about immoral gods and goddesses ; they were 
 sunk in wholesale corruption and rottenness. Their 
 vices smelt to heaven. Did ever any Greek say that 
 he who smiteth you on your left cheek, ought to 
 be offered your right cheek too ? ' 
 
 " ' No,' I said, continued Socrates, ' we never 
 said that, because we knew that nobody Would ever 
 do it. We did so many noble actions at home 
 and in war that we never felt the urgency of 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 187 
 
 exaggerating actions in words, that we never did 
 in fact.' 
 
 " c ls that it?* he answered. 'Do you mean to 
 say that we only say such things, because we never 
 practise them ? ' 
 
 " c Precisely,' said I. c " Incapable of the deed, 
 you try to embrace its shadow, the word," as 
 Democritus said.' 
 
 " c Even if we never practised them, is it not 
 sublime to say them ? Is it not increasing our moral 
 worth when we profess to be gentle and generous 
 and superhumanly good, not exactly on the day 
 when we make such professions, but possibly on 
 some subsequent day ? ' 
 
 " c I am afraid,' said I, c this we used to call the 
 talk of sycophants and hypocrites.' 
 
 " 4 But for my Religion, sir, I should reply in very 
 offensive terms. We are no hypocrites. We believe 
 what we say, and all that is required is to believe. 
 We do not trouble about the application of our 
 beliefs, any more than the mathematician troubles 
 about the practical application of his theorems.' 
 
 "'This is my very objection to your belief. 
 Religion is not a theorem but an action, an active 
 sentiment. Our religion was like our language : all 
 active verbs, all movement and energy, all expression 
 and sentiment, but no theorems.' 
 
 " c But just look at the superstition and downright 
 fiction m all your mythology ! Who has ever seen 
 Apollo, Dionysus, the Graces, Aphrodite, or any 
 other of your numberless gods ? They are all mere 
 phantasies, meant to amuse, but not to elevate. 
 They belong to the infancy of the religious senti- 
 ment, and are only a more artistic form of Fetishism.' 
 
1 88 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "<I quite believe you,' I said, 'that you never 
 met the Graces, nor Aphrodite. Perhaps they 
 avoided you as carefully as you did them.' 
 
 "'Sir, this is frivolous. In our Religion there is 
 nothing frivolous. Allow me to be quite frank with 
 you. It is stated that you confessed to having felt 
 the touch of some Phryne's beautiful hand on your 
 shoulder for several days. Sir, this characterises 
 you, and all the heathen Greeks. My mind staggers 
 at the idea that one of our bishops should ever 
 confess to such a frivolous sentiment. We too have 
 shoulders ; and there are still alas ! Phrynes amongst 
 us. But none of our class would ever confess to 
 having felt what you admitted to have felt. There 
 you have precisely the difference between you and 
 us.' 
 
 " c You are ashamed of your humanity, and we were 
 not ; this is the whole difference. We were so full 
 of our humanity, that we humanised even our gods. 
 You are so ashamed of your humanity, that you de- 
 humanise and supra-humanise your god.' 
 
 " ' Disgraceful, sir, most disgraceful. Our humanity 
 is in God ! ' 
 
 " ' And only in Him ; so that none is left in you.' 
 
 " At these words," continued Socrates, " the man 
 left me. 
 
 u A few days later I was at a place which they 
 call Oxford, and where dwell and teach many of their 
 Sophists. A young man is there taught to assume 
 that callous look which is very imposing to Hindoos 
 and negroes. Nothing surprises him, as nothing 
 stirs him, except the latest shape of a Cuff or a 
 collar. He becomes in due time a curious blend of a 
 monk, a fop, and a pedant. 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 189 
 
 " I was led to one of the most renowned of their 
 theologians, whose name in our language means a 
 coachman. He received me with a curious smile. 
 Before I could say anything he spoke as follows : 
 
 " * I understand, sir, that you pose as the late 
 Socrates. Well, well come, come ! I must tell you 
 in confidence that I, being a higher critic, am a 
 perfect adept in the great science of the vanishing 
 trick. Suppose you bring forward a famous person- 
 age of history, and want him to disappear. Nothing 
 is easier to me. I ask the man first of all very 
 simple questions, such as : 
 
 " 4 Who asked him to exist ? 
 
 " c Why did he choose his mother in preference to 
 many other able women ? 
 
 " c What made him prefer his father to so many 
 other capable men ? 
 
 " c For what reason did he fix his particular place of 
 birth, let alone the time of the year, month, week 
 and day where and when he was born ? 
 
 " ( What motive had he in filling the air with his 
 screamings soon after his birth ? 
 
 " c Could he give any satisfactory explanation of his 
 various illnesses as a child? That is, whether he 
 had measles and whooping-cough out of malice 
 prepense, out of cussedness, or out of any hopes of 
 receiving more attention ? 
 
 "'When the man cannot satisfactorily answer 
 these clear and positive questions, I put him down 
 first as a suspect. Then I proceed to further 
 questions. 
 
 " c If he is said to have won a battle, I ask him why 
 he fought it on land and not on sea ? Or vice versa. 
 
 "'Why he did not, while fighting the battle, 
 
1 90 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 accurately determine the degrees of longitude and 
 latitude of the locality of the battle ? 
 
 " c Or why his chief general's name began with an 
 L and not with an S ? 
 
 " c If he is said to have been an ancient legislator, 
 I ask him why he took his laws from his neigh- 
 bours ? 
 
 "'What mode of registration and publication of 
 the law he observed ? 
 
 " ' Whether the paper of his code was hand-made, 
 or wood-pulp ? 
 
 " * Whether the water-marks on it were original or 
 were imitations? 
 
 " ' Whether he used ink or paint ? 
 
 " < Whether he wrote them standing or sitting ? 
 
 " ( Whether he used the same pen for writing his 
 nouns and verbs ? Or whether he had different pens 
 for the different parts of speech ? 
 
 "'Whether he really knew what a noun was? 
 Whether he liked male terminations, or preferred 
 to revel in female endings? Whether he was not 
 prejudiced against pronouns, or felt an idiosyncracy 
 against the letters b, k, and z ? 
 
 " ( If the man cannot satisfactorily answer all these 
 pertinent questions, I declare him to be a fraud. I 
 tell him straight into his face that he never existed, 
 and then I revile him as a low character for pretend- 
 ing an existence that is totally unfounded. Now, 
 as to your case. You say, you are Socrates. Can 
 you answer any of the questions I enumerated ? Let 
 us take the first question : " Who asked you to 
 exist ? " ' 
 
 " c Athens, I presume,' said Socrates. 
 
 " * Athens ? To dispose of this answer, we must 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 191 
 
 first of all see whether Athens existed. I put it to 
 you, sir, can you prove that Athens existed ? ' 
 
 " ' I can ; for, it still exists.' 
 
 " c Note the glaring fallacy ! A thing that now 
 exists, now, that is, on the brink of the present and 
 the future, can that be said to have eo ipso existed in 
 the past? I put it to you most seriously, is the 
 brink of the present, the past ? Is the brink of the 
 future, the past? Can, then, the brink of the 
 present and the future be called the past ? Athens 
 may have existed. That is, a number of houses and 
 streets, once called Athens, may have existed. But 
 can you say, I put it to you most mostly, can you say 
 that the houses of Athens asked you to exist? Or 
 did the streets do so?' 
 
 " c By Athens we mean the Athenians.' 
 
 " ' Oh, I see, the Athenians. Who were they ? 
 Two-thirds were foreign slaves ; one-fifth were metiks, 
 that is, denizens of foreign extraction. Conse- 
 quently, two-thirds and one-fifth being thirteen- 
 fifteenths, the overwhelming majority of the town 
 being uitlanders, you cannot possibly be said to have 
 been asked into existence by them. Remain two- 
 fifteenths of Athenians proper. Of these the great 
 majority were your enemies, who drove you into 
 death. Can they, who furiously clamoured for your 
 death, be said to have violently wished for your 
 birth? 
 
 " c Remain, therefore, only a handful of Athenians 
 who may have desired you to exist. How could 
 they give due expression to their wish? In the 
 Assembly matters were decided by a majority, 
 which they did not control. In the law courts were 
 hundreds, nay thousands of judges in each case, of 
 
1 92 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 whom, as per supra, the great majority were your 
 enemies, who would have decided against your birth. 
 In the Temples such decisions were never taken. 
 
 " ' The intention of your prenatal friends could 
 thus remain but a mere private wish of a few 
 citizens, but could not possibly be an inherent 
 tendency or desire of Athens. Quod erat demon- 
 strandum. And since you have been unable to give 
 a satisfactory answer to the first of the crucial 
 questions, I put you down as a suspect.' 
 
 " I did not say anything," said Socrates. " I was 
 amazed beyond expression that such nonsense could 
 be allowed to pose as searching and ' scientific ' 
 analysis of facts. But he triumphantly continued : 
 
 " ' You say nothing ? Qui facet consentlre videtur, 
 silence means consent. I can see in your face 
 how overawed you are by my sagacity, I have 
 unmasked you. We unmask everything and any- 
 thing. We unmask stones, pyramids, crocodiles, 
 ichneumons, princes, kings, prophets, and heroes. 
 We strike terror into the common people by our 
 vast erudition and our penetrating sagacity. 
 
 " ' We are the Sherlock Holmes of theology. 
 
 < We run down any pretender, any scribe, any man 
 who has the impudence of posing as a somebody. 
 Given that we are not much; how can he be any- 
 thing ? 
 
 " ( If you will stay here for some time, you will soon 
 know a lot about what did not happen in ancient 
 Israel. 
 
 " c Oxford is the Scotland Yard of all those hum- 
 bugs that pass by the name of Abraham, Moses, 
 King David, Samson, the Prophets, and other im- 
 postors. We have pin-pricked them out of existence ! 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 193 
 
 " ' At present we have proved that all the Religion 
 of Israel was stolen from Babylon. In a few years 
 we shall prove that the Babylonians stole it all from 
 the Elamites, farther east. This, once well estab- 
 lished, will give us a welcome means of proving that 
 the Elamites stole it all from the Thibetans; who 
 stole it from the Chinese; who stole it from the 
 Japanese; who stole it from the Redskins in 
 America ; who stole it from the Yankees ; who stole 
 it from Oxford. And so we shall return to this 
 great University and provide occupation and fame 
 for the higher critics of the next three hundred 
 years. Where are you now, O Pseudo-Socrates ? ' 
 
 "I was unable to say a word for some time. 
 When I collected myself to a certain extent, I 
 said: 
 
 " ' O Sophist, if our Religion in ancient Greece had 
 had no other advantage than that of saving us 
 from the works of "higher critics," it has de- 
 served well of us. We were immune from that dis- 
 ease, at any rate. Dion of Prusa and others wrote 
 declamations against the historicity of the Trojan 
 War; but nobody took them for more than what 
 they were, for rhetorical exercises. No Hellene 
 would have paid the slightest attention, nor accorded 
 the slightest recognition to men like yourself. The 
 English must be suffering from very ugly religious 
 crochets and spiritual eczemas, to have recourse to 
 drugs and pills offered by such medicine-men.' 
 
194 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " Other friends in England to whom I expressed 
 my profound aversion to this puny scepticism in 
 matters of Religion, advised me to attend the sermons 
 given by a relatively young man with white hair in a 
 temple in the city. They said that in him and his 
 addresses there was religious sentiment. I accepted 
 their advice and went repeatedly to hear what was 
 called The New Religion. 
 
 "The young man talked well and impressively. 
 He told them that two and two made four, and 
 absolutely refused to make five. 
 
 "With much emphasis he declared that he could 
 not believe in miracles, because of the miraculous 
 way in which they happened. If, he said, a miracle 
 should happen in an orderly fashion, performed 
 under police revision, say, in Regent Street in front 
 of Peter Robinson's, the arrangement and whole 
 sequence of the procedure being duly anticipated 
 and announced by the Daily Nail or the Daily X- 
 Rays, then indeed he would say : c O Lord, O Lord, I 
 am convinced.' 
 
 " c But,' the white-haired young man said, e how can 
 you, the rest of the world, or anyone else suppose 
 that I could believe a miracle, that pops in from mid- 
 air, in the most disorderly and unreasonable fashion, 
 without having given notice either to the police 
 or to the editor of the Daily Nail or the Daily 
 X-Raysi 
 
 " c Such a miracle is a mere vagrant, a loafer, a 
 ddclassd or dtracine', as we say in Burmese. It has 
 neither documents to legitimate itself with, nor any 
 decent social connections. It disturbs the professor 
 of physics at that great seat of untaught knowledge, 
 the London University; it annoys all chemists, and 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 195 
 
 confirms my colleagues in the other pulpits in their 
 preposterous superstitions. 
 
 u c My brethren and sithren^ I tell you there are no 
 miracles ; there never were any ; there never can be 
 any. Just let me tell you an interesting experience I 
 had the other day with a man who travelled in the 
 south of France, a country which, but for the fact 
 that England is good enough to patronise her, would 
 long since have disappeared from the surface of this 
 or any other planet. 
 
 " c The gentleman in question spoke of Lourdes, and 
 the miracles he had seen there. I listened for a while 
 with patience ; at last I could bear it no longer, and 
 the following dialogue arose between us : 
 
 " He : * " Lourdes is the most convincing case of the 
 miraculous power of the true Church." 
 
 " I : c " The true Church is in the city of London, 
 sir, and there is no miracle going on there whatever." 
 
 " He : ' " I completely differ, especially if, for argu- 
 ment's sake, I accept your statement that the temple 
 in the city is the true Church. If that be so, then 
 the miracles wrought there are even greater than 
 those observable at Lourdes." 
 
 " I : c " I thank you for your rapid conversion. I 
 am glad to see that you feel the power of my Church. 
 This power comes from the great truths I teach. 
 But as to miracles proper, I must, if reluctantly, 
 decline the honour. I repeat it, there are no miracles 
 in my Church, neither taught nor wrought." 
 
 " He : c "Come, come ! Not only are there miracles 
 in your Church, but they are also of the very same 
 type that I noted at Lourdes." 
 
 " I : c " Sir, how can you insult me so gratuitously ? 
 Lourdes swarms with so-called miracles, which are no 
 
196 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 miracles at all, but only the effects of auto-hypnotisa- 
 tion. A person who can believe in the healing power 
 of St " 
 
 "He: '"Steady, steady, my dear sir. I do not allude 
 to that healing power at all. Again, placing myself 
 on your standpoint, I will, for argument's sake, admit 
 that the waters at Lourdes have no miraculous healing 
 power owing to the influence of this saint or that. 
 You might permit me to remark, nevertheless, that it 
 is just as much of a miracle as when the drugs pre- 
 scribed by our doctors happen to cure us. For, what 
 could be more miraculous than that? But this is 
 only by the way. I allude to quite another miracle, 
 and I can only express my amazement that you do 
 not guess it more quickly." 
 
 " I : ' " I am quite out of touch with miracles." 
 
 " He : ' " Bravo ! This is precisely what the great 
 Lessing used to say : the greatest of all miracles is 
 the one that people do not notice as such at all. 
 Just consider: do you not draw vast masses of 
 people to your sermons? Have you not persuaded 
 most of them that you have founded a new Religion ? 
 What on earth could be more miraculous than 
 that! 
 
 " ( " In your sermons you dance on a thin rope of 
 logic made out of the guts of a few anaemic cats 
 dropped from the dissecting table of science. If 
 therefore you had won a reputation as a rope- 
 dancer, one could readily understand it. But you 
 have won the reputation of a founder of a new 
 religion, which is to a logical rope what catguts are 
 to a great violinist. Is that not marvellous'? Savona- 
 rola would have charged you, at best, with blacking 
 his shoes, and yet people take you for a modern 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 197 
 
 Savonarola. Is that not marvellous ? Is it anything 
 short of a miracle ? Is not this the very miracle of 
 Lourdes? Hundreds of thousands of intelligent 
 Frenchmen believe in the healing power of water in 
 consequence of its canonisation by a saint. Is this 
 not a miracle in our time ? " 
 
 " I : ' " If I am to be infinitely less worthy a man 
 than Savonarola because I believe in the infinity and 
 truth of Science, I gladly forego the honour. The 
 more light we pour into the human heart, the nobler 
 it will be." 
 
 " He : c " So you believe that your hearers follow 
 you on account of the light you give them? Pray, 
 abandon any such idea forthwith. They cling to you 
 because of your interesting personality, and because 
 you give satisfaction to their vanity. In persuad- 
 ing them that the life-blood of the c old' Religion is 
 mere stale water, they congratulate themselves on 
 their being intellectually superior to the orthodox 
 believers. 
 
 " c " Is there no one who has the courage to say 
 aloud that the canker of all Religions in England is 
 their constant toadying to Reason and Science ? The 
 theory of Evolution, first rightly condemned by the 
 clergy, is now an established costume without which 
 no bishop would dare to officiate in sermons or 
 books. Naturalists all over the world lustily attack 
 and combat Evolution; but no English clergyman 
 ventures to doubt it. He will and must toady to 
 what he thinks is ' Science.' 
 
 " < Formerly Science was the ancilla^ or maid of 
 Theology ; now Theology is the mere charwoman of 
 any physiologist or biologist." 
 
 " I : c " And so it shall be. I see, my good man, I 
 
198 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 must talk to you a little more plainly. We theo- 
 logians want nothing but authority. We have long 
 since learned that this world is governed by authority, 
 and by nothing else; just as is the next world, if 
 there be any. Now, in former times Science was 
 not imposing enough. Being, as it was, in its 
 infancy, it had little authority. So we trampled upon 
 it, and side-tracked it with disdain. At present, oh 
 the other hand, Science has become quite an influ- 
 ential member of society. It goes on doing 
 marvellous things and inventing incredible feats 
 of physical, chemical, or biological triumph. 
 
 " ' "What is more natural than that we now not only 
 receive the homo novur, the man of Science, but that 
 we also try to avail ourselves of the authority his 
 exploits give him ? 
 
 " c " Take this nation. It is thoroughly materialist 
 and on its knees before Science. For the last sixty 
 years Science, and nothing but physical Science has 
 been knocked into its head. This nation thinks that 
 any study outside Science proper is pleasant hum- 
 bugging. They are completely ignorant of human 
 history. Give us Science ! Give us facts, facts ! Of 
 course they say so, because facts save them the 
 trouble of thinking, and do not allow one to pose as 
 a thinker. 
 
 c p ac t Sj scientific facts, that is all that they want. 
 Human thought, they think, is a physical excretion 
 from the brain, j ust as tears are from the lachrymal 
 glands, or other liquids from the kidneys. Hence, 
 they infer, all that is needed is to study, in a 
 physiological laboratory, the brain. 
 
 " c " What's the use of literary history, for instance ? 
 If you want to know it, you have only to study the 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 199 
 
 brain which is the cause of at least some portions of 
 literature. 
 
 " c " What is the use of military history ? Study, 
 in a physiological laboratory, the arm, not arms; 
 since it is the arm that fights. 
 
 " c " What is the use of Sociology, say, the study 
 of the Family ? Study, in a physiological laboratory, 
 the nerves of certain organs which constitute the 
 true cause of families. And similarly with all other 
 studies relating to the humanities. Science ; it is all 
 a matter of Science proper." 
 
 u ' Under these conditions, 9 the white-haired one 
 continued, ' what can we do but take the requisite 
 authority there where we find it best developed, in 
 Science ? Anything that pleases the grand seigneur, 
 we hasten to acquiesce in while shoe-licking him. 
 Science proper, that is, Physics, Chemistry, and Physi- 
 ology disavow Imponderables, Tendencies, Present 
 Projections of the Future, Incomprehensibles, etc., 
 etc. ; so do we. 
 
 " c Science cannot move from certain mathematical 
 principles; speedily we too cry aloud that we cannot 
 cease hugging these dear principles. 
 
 " c Science can never analyse or reconstrue the 
 mystery of all mysteries : Personality ; at once we 
 novel theologians exclaim, beating our worn breasts, 
 that Personality is no historic force at all. 
 
 "'Science cannot possibly so much as approach 
 the problem of creativeness, creation, or origin of 
 life ; hence we gallop after it like newsboys, scream- 
 ing at the top of our voices : " Latest news ! No 
 creation ! No origins ! Bill just passed ! Enormous 
 majority ! One penny ! Latest news ! " 
 
 " c Cannot you see that ? Can you not grasp that 
 
200 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 as in Republican countries we are Republicans, and 
 in Monarchical ones, Monarchists; even so in an 
 age overawed by the surface-scratchers of physical 
 Science, we too must feel the itch and scratch away 
 with violence ? 
 
 " 4 We cannot possibly afford to forego the 
 authority at present in the gift of Science. How 
 could I dare to treat Jesus as one of those mysterious 
 persons that bring to a head both vast and secular 
 tendencies of the Past, and Present Projections of an 
 immense Future ? He, I hear from a certain humanist, 
 was the heir of all that marvellous Power of Person- 
 ality, called Cephalism, which shaped all classical 
 antiquity ; and at the same time He was the Anti- 
 cipative Projection of a vast Future. 
 
 " Perhaps. 
 
 " ' But could any process approved by Science 
 proper be applied to such a mode of thinking ? None. 
 Consequently I am bound to belittle, to ignore it. 
 
 "'As long as Jesus is not amenable to that mode 
 of biography or to that kind of reflections which we 
 apply to the life of cockroaches or gnats, we cannot 
 seriously speak of Him. 
 
 "'Or is not His preaching like the laying of 
 eggs by a bird, out of which eggs new birds arise 
 in due time ? 
 
 " ' Is not His Church like the nest of a spotted 
 woodpecker made in the hollow of some ancient tree ? 
 
 "'Are not His apostles like the watch-birds 
 amongst wandering cranes? 
 
 " If, then, we want to study Him scientifically, we 
 must treat Him and His exactly as we treat a hoopoe or 
 a jackdaw. Not that we really know anything about 
 a hoopoe or a jackdaw. But in treating Him in that 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 201 
 
 fashion we can use all the sounding terms of Science, 
 and thus, don't you see, secure all the authority 
 of which Science to-day has so plentiful a share. 
 
 " c I have so far founded the New Religion. But I 
 am not quite satisfied with it. I feel we need a Newest 
 Religion. Ever since my birth the world has stepped 
 into a new era. Something has been wrenched from 
 its former place. I must at once see to it. 
 
 " c Meanwhile I am preparing a Life of Jesus on 
 a truly scientific basis. The Lives hitherto published 
 are completely out of date. They lack the true 
 scientific spirit. 
 
 " c My " Life of Jesus " will have three sections. 
 The first will contain the Antecedents. I will start 
 with the soil, the air, and the waters of Palestine. I 
 will investigate the influence which the geology of 
 Palestine had on Jesus; especially, whether the 
 stratification of that soil does not correspond to the 
 stratification of the mind of Jesus. In that way 
 I will obtain the precise nomenclature of the various 
 layers of the intellect, human and Messianic, of Jesus. 
 
 " c Thus, I will determine his palaeolithic, neolithic, 
 pliocene, miocene and other tertiary mental forma- 
 tions. That will be inestimable. 
 
 " < I will then proceed to a close analysis of the 
 air in Palestine, and try to determine how much 
 argon it contains. This, together with the jargon 
 talked round Bethlehem, and a close study of the 
 remains of the King Sargon will give me a solid 
 foundation for my researches into the feelings of 
 Jesus. I will thus make sure whether these feelings 
 were subconscious, auto-hypnotic, auto-Rontgenising, 
 aeroplane sque, or zeppelinury. 
 
 " c Should I find some radium in the stones near 
 
202 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 Bethlehem or Nazareth, I shall be enabled to account 
 for the precociousness and light-emitting gift of Jesus, 
 
 " c Once I have thus settled the Antecedents, 
 I will proceed to His life. In accordance with the 
 method of zoologists and biologists, to whom one 
 fox is as good as another, and one rabbit as service- 
 able as another, I will study the daily life of a 
 modern rabbi in Sichem, or Jerusalem. 
 
 " ' I will measure his nose, his lips, the width and 
 height of his mouth when yawning and when asleep, 
 his weight, his rapidity of walk, the loudness of 
 his voice, his pulse, his heart, his meals, and his 
 drinks. This will give me valuable data for the 
 life of Jesus. I will reduce all these data to finely- 
 drawn statistical tables. 
 
 " c As soon as I shall be in possession of these 
 tables I will attack the most important part of my 
 work : I will not tire until I discover the microbe 
 which imparted to all that Jesus said an extraordinary 
 power of captivation. That microbe, I have no 
 doubt, can be distilled from a comparative solution 
 of Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet and Jesus. 
 I name it microbus prophetizans Huxley L I shall, I 
 trust, isolate it and send specimens to the South 
 Kensington Museum, I will ' 
 
 " When the white-haired one," said Socrates, " had 
 arrived at that stage of his wanderings, I left the hall. 
 I felt sea-sick. These little ones think that they 
 can triangulate the human personality, because they 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 203 
 
 have triangulated many of their countries. They 
 never consider that triangulation, and all scientific 
 methods, refer, and can refer only to quantity or 
 material quality. There is no geometry of love, 
 hatred, or spiritual power. It is the old error of the 
 Pythagoreans which you, O Pythagoras, admitted to 
 me after having whiled in Olympus for a few hundred 
 years. 
 
 " Numbers are not the souls of things. 
 
 " Personality is the soul of things. 
 
 "We humans are pre-eminently creative. Our 
 chief force is not intellect nor will-power. We are 
 neither Hegelians nor Schopenhauerians. In point 
 of sagacity many an animal transcends us; and did 
 you not avow to me, O Leibniz, that the difference 
 between you and a yokel is not so much in your 
 being more intellectual, or in your having more brain- 
 power, but in your having more creative power ? 
 
 " Intellect, or the force of close thinking, may be 
 found in abundance in the city of London. Had 
 people devoted as keen an interest to science or 
 philosophy as city men do to money transactions, we 
 should be much further than we are. 
 
 "But people differ very much less in power of 
 intellect than in strength of originality. 
 
 " The great men of Literature or Science or Art 
 are not very much cleverer in point of intellect than 
 is the rest of the people. They exceed them in 
 point of originality ; that is, they exceed them be- 
 cause they devote themselves to digging in unbroken 
 ground. It is in this way they create. 
 
 " It is in this sense that each human is, to a certain 
 extent, new ground; and consequently, that the 
 Great Humans are absolutely new phenomena. In 
 
204 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 other words, they are new creations. They have an 
 X in them that no x-rays can penetrate into. 
 
 " Science can comprehend averages only. Nova 
 she cannot approach. This is -why Great Humans 
 have invariably been disavowed, rejected, and pooh- 
 poohed by men of Science. 
 
 " Why has a lily of the valley bell-like blossoms ? 
 Science will never explain it. Those bells are part 
 of the personality of the lily ; and Science can under- 
 stand it as little as a crofter could understand a 
 refined Athenian. 
 
 " You may imagine, O gods and heroes, what I felt 
 when I heard so many clergy men talk so 'scientifically ' 
 of The Greatest of Humans, who by His being so 
 was eo ipso Supra-human too. 
 
 "Science is unable to account for a lily of the valley; 
 and yet shall Science be able to reconstruct Jesus ? 
 
 I should have shrunk from the task of reconstruct- 
 ing, in the manner of men of Science, my Phrygian 
 slave. 
 
 "One can re-recreate, as it were, many of the pheno- 
 mena of Personality, but not by the methods of 
 Science. Personalities belong to the Humanities, 
 whose methods are totally different from those of 
 Science proper. 
 
 " It was said of me that in my mortal time I brought 
 Philosophy from Heaven to Earth. I wish, O Zeus, 
 you would allow me to mix again with the people 
 in order to raise their Philosophy from Earth to 
 Heaven." 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 205 
 
 When Socrates had finished, a deep silence fell 
 over the Assembly. In the divine face of Zeus 
 there was no movement to be noticed, and not an 
 encouraging word fell from his lips. Suddenly one 
 heard a loud laughter. Everybody turned towards 
 the place where the laughter came from, and felt 
 relieved to see that Diogenes was preparing to 
 address the Assembly. Zeus nodded consent, and 
 the whilom Cynic spake as follows : 
 
 " Few things have afforded me greater pleasure 
 than your tale, O Socrates. Verily I believe that 
 your renewed presence among the little ones is much 
 less needed than is mine. lam the only man that 
 could set right the wrenched religious fibres of these 
 mannikins and womenfolk. But for my respect for 
 you and the Assembly, I should have burst into an 
 unseemly laughter while you were talking of their 
 New Religion, which is but a resurrection-pie less 
 the resurrection. 
 
 " To talk to them seriously about the incapacity 
 of any physical Science or its methods to cope with 
 the problems of Religion is to waste precious time. 
 Let them have their Evolution, Convolution, or 
 Devolution, by all means. The more they welter in 
 it, the more my pupils on earth have a welcome 
 chance of success. The official clergy think wonders 
 of their cleverness in trying to make Religion into a 
 Centaur, half man, half horse, or half Science and 
 half Belief. While they are at it, my pupils, infin- 
 itely cleverer than all the clergy, make glorious 
 headway in all directions. 
 
 " Is it not side-splitting to note how these clergy- 
 men are unable to see that the more people learn 
 of Science proper; the more they accustom their 
 
206 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 minds to the dry biscuits of scientific methods ; the 
 more they will inwardly long for the drinks of 
 Mysticism ? 
 
 "The Roman clergy, trained by two thousand 
 years, knows all that but too well. 
 
 " Your plain soul, your hard-working, scientifically 
 untutored peasant or small bourgeois is quite satisfied 
 with a little, hearty Belief, and is indifferent to 
 Mysticism and religious Extravagancies. It is your 
 high-strung, modern, scientifically trained mind that 
 impatiently craves more than sober Science can give 
 it. 
 
 "Just look at the Europoids in the western con- 
 tinent. In the United States everything is reasoned 
 out, systematised, methodised to a nicety. Their 
 whole life looks like their towns: regular squares; 
 straight streets, named after the consecutive numbers ; 
 labelled, docketed, built and shaped according to 
 definite rules. In an American town nothing sur- 
 prises one, except that the people themselves do not 
 have each his respective number painted on his 
 back. 
 
 "As the streets, so are the Constitution, the 
 Schools, the Territory, everything is ruled like a 
 sheet of music. In the 250,000 schools, in the 
 500,000 Universities, and the 600,000 libraries, all 
 founded (or confounded ?) by a few multis, you hear 
 nothing but Reason, Reason, Reason. You get 
 Reason boiled, roasted, fried or stewed. You get it 
 from injectors, from which it will jet out in smaller 
 or larger jets, so that if it be too much for you, 
 one can, by pulling the piston backwards, again store 
 it up in the injector. 
 
 (( Instead of traditions, unarticulated tendencies, 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 207 
 
 latent sous-entendus, and delicate imponderables, there 
 are only machines, ledgers, and registers, articulated 
 with a vengeance, cryingly explicit and loud and 
 indelicate. Everything is bound in the leather of 
 reasonableness, in the hide of method, and in the 
 wooden boards of Logic. Instead of on the rich 
 soup of sentiments, men and women in the States 
 are fed on scientific tabloids containing sentiments 
 reduced to their ultimate chemical essences. A 
 woman laughs at romance ; her relations to men are 
 'reasonable.' A child laughs at piety; his or her 
 relations to parents are tanned by c sense ' ! A 
 servant sneers at loyalty ; her relations to the masters 
 are macerated in the vinegar of ' inalienable right of 
 
 reason.' 
 
 " All this is excellent for me. For, what 
 happens ? 
 
 " The Americans indulging in too many orgies of 
 Reasonableness ; the Americans having thrown over- 
 board all motives of historic truth in order to live 
 under the banner of reasoned truth only, have long 
 since become sick of Reason. They resemble a crew 
 on a big ship that has stored its pantries and larders 
 with nothing else than meat-extracts and tabloids. 
 That crew, after a month's journey or so, will un- 
 failingly sink or else eat the most loathsome fish 
 rather than continue feeding on its scientific food. 
 
 " After all, when all is said and done, the Ameri- 
 cans too are humans. They too want more than 
 tabloids and meat-extracts. Tons of tins will not 
 replace one fresh cabbage. On this eternal truth 
 my disciples go to work in the States. 
 
 "Fully aware, as they are, that the Americans 
 must be and are deadly c tired * of Reason, they 
 
208 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 hasten to give the people of the States the most 
 exciting devices of Unreason. One of them invents 
 Mormonism; the other. Spiritualism; the third, 
 Zionism; the fourth, Oneidaism, or general Promis- 
 cuity ; the fifth, Christian Science ; the sixth, Incar- 
 nationism ; and so forth, and so on, ad iiifinitum. 
 
 " Can my triumph be greater ? I will carefully 
 avoid telling them that by worshipping Apollo ex- 
 travagantly while neglecting the great god Dionysus, 
 they have fallen wretched victims to the wrath of 
 the latter. Just let them go on writing contemptuous 
 reflections on Greek Mythology, and glory in the 
 c wonderful century ' in which Dionysus is declared 
 to be a mere myth. As long as they do that, I shall 
 not lack plenty of successful disciples, and my name 
 will wax greater and greater, until nobody shall be 
 able to find, even did he use the latest Edison lamp, 
 a single well-balanced human in all the States. 
 
 "Why, then, take so many English clergymen 
 and their evolutions round Evolution so gravely, O 
 Socrates ? They do what the Americans do : they 
 overdo Reason. Do let them do it, and do not dis- 
 turb my circles, as Archimedes said. I promise you, 
 when next they introduce the 'latest' evolution, 
 I will invite you to the sight, and you will enjoy the 
 fun as you have rarely enjoyed anything. I have 
 instructed a new set of pupils of mine to start The 
 new Religion in England. The ' New Religion ' of a 
 year or so ago is out of fashion. What these de- 
 cadent vibrants want is another Religion. I have 
 just received a Marconigram from below, and am in 
 a position to tell you all about the latest capers of 
 my pupils. May I do so ? " 
 
 Diana and Aphrodite and Pallas Athena at once 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 209 
 
 applauded, and their silvery laughter was joined by 
 the rest of the gods and heroes. Dionysus sent two 
 beautiful nymphs to make the resting-place of 
 Diogenes more comfortable, and to offer him a cup 
 of the wine of Capri, shining like gold and full of 
 mirth. Diogenes, deeply bowing to the Great God, 
 and to Zeus, then proceeded : 
 
 "I learn that The Religion now to be started 
 is based on what my dear disciples have agreed to 
 call Elysiograms ; a word formed a la ' telegram,' 
 ' marconigram,' and meant to denote messages from 
 Elysium. 
 
 " It is quite evident that a generation of impatient 
 eels such as the present instalment of the little ones, 
 cannot possibly wait until after death for news from 
 the other world. The sub-lunar world they have 
 ransacked and swallowed, hair and flesh, and all. 
 Before, in the morning, they have quite recovered 
 from their sleep ; and before they have quite finished 
 their nerve-destroying first cup of Ceylon cabbage, 
 they have, in their ' papers,' learnt all that has been 
 going on in every quarter of the globe terrestrial. 
 
 "That globe begins to bore them. They must 
 have a daily (or hourly ? ) column or two about what 
 is going on in Elysium, let alone in Hades. It is 
 indispensable for their digestion. 
 
 " Just fancy how very much more easily one could 
 swallow one's lunch with just a little dose of Hades 
 in it ! While one tries to make a tunnel through 
 the stony meat from Patagonia called Scotch beef, 
 one would read with grim satisfaction how one's late 
 creditor is maltreated in the torture-chamber of 
 Hades. Why, one would feel so buoyant that one 
 would even be able to finish a meal at the Cecil. 
 
2io NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "You said, O Socrates, that their clergy adopt 
 Evolution because of the authority it gives them. 
 Surely, they can tarry no longer in adopting the im- 
 proved means of communication. If Marconi can 
 wire wirelessly to New York, how can the clergy 
 stay lagging behind ? They must needs go one better, 
 and wire wirelessly to Elysium. Nothing can be 
 plainer. 
 
 " People want it. 
 
 " Soon Messrs Wright will ascend the Rainbow 
 and sit astride on it. Even before that, Herr Zeppelin 
 will land the first German street-band on Mars ; and, 
 probably, ere that is done, Madame Curie will by 
 means of a rock of Radium as big as St Paul's 
 illumine and read all the vast depths of the un- 
 explored Heavens. 
 
 " How, under these circumstances, can the clergy 
 remain behind? It is unthinkable. Accordingly, it 
 is understood that the Daily Nail and the Crony will 
 have every day a column called Elysiograms. It will 
 consist of single words, numbers, signs, exclamations, 
 and pauses, elysiogrammed from over there. Some 
 paragraphs will consist of commas, colons, semi- 
 colons, and dots only. They will be the most 
 interesting. These messages will be carefully dis- 
 tinguished from massages. They will be quite 
 different. They will give the most astounding news. 
 My principal pupil, Professor Oliver Nodge, just 
 marconied me the latest Elysiogram, which he was 
 fortunate enough to receive to-day : 
 
 " c Rather hot day to-night. Feel depressed as if 
 I had exchanged ideas with Mr H. C. 4, o, : ! 
 Place here somewhat out of date. Do send me 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 211 
 
 Times more regularly. Can now see that flannels do 
 not conduce to health. Never forget to wind up 
 your watch ! Death is a mere incident in Life. If 
 you can avoid it, don't die ! It is a failure. 34, 56, 
 
 78,90,12 ' 
 
 When Diogenes had finished reading the Elysio- 
 gram of his pupil, even Hephaestus (Vulcan), other- 
 wise so grave, broke out in a tremendous laughter 
 which made one of the tiers of the Coliseum shake 
 like an elm-tree in a gale. 
 
 " I am delighted to see," continued Diogenes, 
 " that my pupils contribute to your amusement. It 
 is indeed beyond a doubt that without them this 
 world would be considerably staler and duller than it 
 is. You may imagine that my pupils will not rest 
 contented with a daily column in a newspaper. 
 
 " They will found Elysiogram papers of their own ; 
 found Elysiogram Churches; build up Elysiogram 
 congregations ; deliver Elysiogram sermons ; in short, 
 they will establish The New Religion of E/ysionism. 
 
 " In this marvellous Religion the believer is given 
 all the shivers, cardiac vibrations, nervous shocks 
 and prostrate contritions, pleasantly alternated with 
 ecstatic exuberance, that he may wish for. 
 
 "In that respect it is far superior to any music 
 hall. 
 
 " These funny clergymen rage against the music 
 halls. But why have they abolished all public, gay, 
 and variegated Church festivals, such as the Middle 
 Ages had introduced in plenty? The public do 
 want to have their shocks and shivers. If the 
 Church does not provide some of them, music halls 
 will. 
 
212 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 " We Hellenes did everything to render Religion 
 attractive and enjoyable. Our religious processions 
 and public festivals were gorgeous with colours, fun, 
 art, music, and touching piety. 
 
 " How could any Hellene have felt the need of a 
 modern music hall, this the last degradation of the 
 human intellect, worse than the Roman gladiatorial 
 games, worse than the Spanish bull-fights, worse 
 than the worst of French novels. 
 
 "If, therefore, the clergy will take our New 
 Religion into the least consideration, they will 
 forthwith see the immense advantages thereof. 
 In Elysionism the most languorously delicate of the 
 elegant ladies will at last find what she has all this 
 time been hankering for. 
 
 "In the morning when she gets up between 
 twelve and two o'clock, she will with religious 
 shivers reach after the Elysiogram press. With 
 burning eye she will run over the columns in search of 
 the latest Elysiogram. Just think of her excitement on 
 finding, in one paragraph or another, some indiscre- 
 tion of one of her departed friends, male or female, 
 regarding her. Just imagine how she will devoutly 
 run to the editor of the paper, or to the Elysiop, 
 that is, the chief bishop of the New Religion, offering 
 him 100, 200, nay 500 for the c tranquillity ' of 
 the poor soul in Elysium from whom came that 
 disquieting par. The Elysiop will promise to do 
 his best and will enter the 500 pour les frais de 
 Pdglise. What a delightfully exciting experience to 
 have ! 
 
 "Later on in the day, the same lady will enjoy 
 the anxiety of a lady friend of hers who is waiting 
 for an Elysiogram from her husband who disappeared 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 213 
 
 a few months before without sending his faithful 
 wife the correct official statement of his departure. 
 What exquisite moments of nervous expectation to 
 pass ! 
 
 " For a few further bank-notes pour les frais de 
 Fdglise, the liberating Elysiogram appears. 
 
 "Imagine the interest with which sermons de- 
 livered by the Elysiop, Elysiarch, or the Elyseacon, 
 will be attended by the beau monde. The preacher 
 after the customary introduction will pull from his 
 pocket the latest Etysiograms, which are notoriously 
 frequent on Saturdays. Artistically pausing before 
 he begins reading them out, he will fill all these 
 vibrants with the most dainty nervous wrenchings 
 and twistings. 
 
 "Then slowly he will report to them the latest 
 news from Elysium and Hades. With that justice 
 so characteristic of the Powers of the Other World, 
 the pleasant news, full of consolation and comfort, 
 is addressed to such members as have proved 
 zealous in deed and alms to the Church. On the 
 other hand, members whose zeal left much to be 
 desired, are treated to news that makes both kinds 
 of their hair stand on end. 
 
 " Where is the music hall or even the theatre that 
 will be in a position to vie with such a Church in 
 intense attractiveness ? Once the classes as well as 
 the masses are drawn to it, some Oxford or Liverpool 
 professor will speedily come forward with the new 
 dogmatics of Elysionism ; and in less than three years 
 Prof. Harnack of Berlin will write its history of 
 dogmatics, and publish maps about its geographical 
 distribution. 
 
 "Amongst the innumerable blessings of this 
 
2i 4 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 Religion there is one the value of which cannot 
 be exaggerated, let alone properly estimated. I 
 mean, of course, its vast resources for healing all 
 diseases. It is patent that once we stand in con- 
 tinuous and direct communication with Elysium, we 
 can easily inquire from our departed ones what we 
 ought to do in case of illness. Since a given indi- 
 vidual in Elysium who died of, say, hay-fever has 
 traversed all its stages, and is naturally more conver- 
 sant with it than any terrestrial doctor can ever be, 
 knowing thereof not only the stages passing on earth 
 but also those going on beyond the Rainbow; he is 
 in the best of positions to advise a patient what to 
 do and what not to do. Especially, when one takes 
 into consideration that according to the most authentic 
 Efysiograms, written by Prof. Nodge's own Elysio- 
 typer, all departed people agree that hay-fever, 
 appendicitis, pneumonia, etc., are only the noms de 
 flume of Dr Smith, Dr Jones, Dr Jenkinson, and so 
 on. 
 
 "We shall, accordingly, in any case of illness, 
 simply communicate the symptoms to Elysium and 
 ask for detailed instructions from such of the Elysians 
 as have died of that disease. In that way we are sure 
 to heal all diseases much more rapidly than even 
 Christian Science or Mahometan Chemistry could do. 
 
 " We shall sell Elysio - pills, with which no 
 Beecham's Pill will be able to compete ; and using 
 the indications we shall receive from over the 
 Acheron, we shall have depots of Elysian Waters 
 triumphing over Hunyady Janos, Carlsbad Sprudel, 
 Contrexeville, or Aix-les-Bains. 
 
 " In fact, since the Kaiser is well known to be in 
 close relations to the Upper World, and an intimate 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 215 
 
 friend of Providence, we shall arrange through him 
 an Elysian Bath, somewhere near Nauheim. 
 
 " Then our Religion will be complete. 
 
 "It will have its unique Press, its hierarchy, its 
 liturgy, sermons, pills, waters, and watering-places, 
 let alone its Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, moral 
 gymnasiums, self-denial weeks, and special wireless 
 costumes. 
 
 "The extant religions will all disappear; religious 
 unity will reign over the whole world, and if you, O 
 Zeus, will consent to it, I shall personally preside at 
 my headquarters in Westbourne Park Chapel." 
 
 The speech of Diogenes was received with hearty 
 applause, and even stern Demosthenes congratulated 
 him on his idea of offering a really new shake-up to 
 the tired nerves of the poor human tremolos of May- 
 fair and the East End. 
 
 Several of the ; gods volunteered to send messages 
 for the Elysian Times, and Caesar proposed that he 
 and Alexander the Great, Pericles, and other heroes 
 send messages counterdicting the extant Greek and 
 Roman histories of their exploits, in order to enjoy 
 the huge fun arising from the confusion amongst 
 scholars. 
 
 When the hilarity of the Assembly had reached 
 its maximum, Zeus addressed them as follows : 
 
 " Before, O Friends, we part from here repairing 
 to Olympus, and eventually to Japan and China, I 
 propose that Plato give us his serious impression of 
 
216 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 what turn the next religious phase of the little ones 
 will take. I entitle him even to say, with due mode- 
 ration, what turn it shall take." 
 
 Plato, rising from his seat near Socrates and Aris- 
 totle, first bowed to Zeus, and then to Apollo whom 
 he requested to allow his priests to intone the sacred 
 hymn of Delphi. That hymn, Plato said, had been 
 handed down from hoary antiquity, and was the song 
 best fitted to fill the hearts of men with the sentiment 
 of religion; the Roman Church, he added, still 
 retained it. Apollo nodded consent, and forthwith 
 the archons of Delphi, aided by the great choir of 
 the Parthenon, filled the still night with mighty har- 
 monies. The simple tunes rose into the heights like 
 columns upon which the singers finally laid down 
 capitals, architraves and pediments of serene melodies, 
 until all Rome and the surrounding plains and valleys 
 seemed changed into one vast musical temple, while 
 the echo of the Albanian Mountains handed the 
 rhythms and cadences on to stern Soracte and the 
 Apennines. 
 
 " I will not undertake," Plato said, " to determine 
 what direction the new Religion of the little ones 
 will take. That direction depends upon their whole 
 life in peace and war, which is, and will remain, under 
 your exclusive control, O Zeus. But if I am to out- 
 line what shape and function their Religion is likely 
 to take in the near future, I feel more confident of 
 acquitting myself creditably. This applies more parti- 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 217 
 
 cularly to the negative part of my task. I mean, it 
 is quite possible to criticise the various schemes of 
 new Religions proposed by a number of thinkers, and 
 to say why these schemes will not succeed. 
 
 " The most numerous schemes of this description 
 have been propounded by men of otherwise great 
 abilities and accomplishments, such as Auguste 
 Comte, and his followers in England and elsewhere. 
 They have tried to establish rational Religions, or 
 such in which Dionysus has no share. This is a vain 
 attempt. 
 
 "Diogenes showed with great justice how all such 
 attempts are doomed to failure. 
 
 "The more rational knowledge spreads both in 
 bulk and in number of disciples, the more the little 
 ones will need a Dionysiac religion. 
 
 " If the State or other ruling classes will not pro- 
 vide it properly, eccentrics and faddists will do so im- 
 properly. 
 
 " If the true enthusiasm for Art could really enter 
 the hearts of the masses, then, and then alone, 
 Religion need not be Dionysiac. However, this is 
 impossible in nations consisting each of many millions 
 of people. 
 
 " This is the greatness of your work, O Nietzsche. 
 In your Zarathustra you worship Apollo with piety, 
 but you entreat Dionysus too to enter the temple. 
 However, you restrict your cult to the few, and for 
 this reason you cannot succeed to a greater extent 
 than did Pythagoras, who likewise closed the gates of 
 his sanctuary to the Many. 
 
 "The question in Europe is how to let the Many 
 feel the Light of Apollo and the Might of Dionysus. 
 Unless this is done, nothing is done. Can Pro- 
 
2i 8 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 testantism do that ? Calvin is fast aging, and his 
 hair is quite white. Can Roman Catholicism do 
 it?" 
 
 At these words of Plato the first matutinal choir 
 came wafted from the Vatican. Plato made a pause. 
 The Vestal Virgins bowed their heads. On Cassar's 
 expressive face there appeared a strange smile, and 
 leaning over to Cicero, he whispered something into 
 the ear of the great orator-statesman. Zeus remained 
 immobile. 
 
 Plato resumed thus: "The Romans of our time 
 were to us Hellenes as Protestantism is to Catholic- 
 ism. Will the Rome of this day be absorbed by the 
 Protestants of the North as we were absorbed by 
 ancient Rome ? 
 
 " You used to say, O Machiavelli, that this world 
 belongs to the cold hearts. That is probably quite 
 true with regard to material things. But is it true 
 with regard to spiritual ones ? 
 
 "The North of Europe is cold; the South is 
 warm. The former is romantic at its best, and 
 eccentric at its worst ; while the South is classic at 
 its best, and irreverential at its worst. The North 
 therefore will worship Apollo only in a haze, and 
 Dionysus in distorted forms; while the South will- 
 ingly bows to Apollo full of heavenly light, and 
 accepts Dionysus only by means of a strict, hierarchi- 
 cal organisation. 
 
 " Can any Bach write one ' well-tempered ' fugue 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 219 
 
 on both North and South ? Can they in future be 
 united in one belief? 
 
 " We have had so far two kinds of Religion only. 
 One, those of small States, such as we had in Greece 
 or Italy; the other, universal Religions, such as the 
 Religion of Jesus, based on humans as mere abstracts, 
 as mere equal atoms ; Religions that applied to any 
 person irrespective of State, race, class, or occupation. 
 There are, however, now no small States such as we 
 used to found, nor is all European humanity one vast 
 conglomeration of atomic men. 
 
 " There are now new entities : nations. 
 
 " Will each of them develop her own Religion ? 
 
 " Most likely, I think. 
 
 " It is with Religions as with Law and Language : 
 each nation, the more high-strung it becomes, the 
 more it differentiates its Law and its Language. In 
 the Middle Ages, up to the twelfth century, there 
 were not fifty languages in Europe. There are now 
 far over a thousand. 
 
 "Each nation wants its own way of worshipping 
 and representing Apollo and Dionysus. In countries 
 full of musical enthusiasm the religious rdle of 
 Dionysus is different from what it is in countries 
 where music is not an organ of the national soul. 
 Should Europe ever be levelled down to one United 
 States of Europe ( at these words one could see 
 Zeus smile with benignant sarcasm ) then there 
 will arise new Religions in nearly every county of 
 every country. 
 
 " In England we see the process clearly developing. 
 The official Church is neither quite Apollo nor 
 quite Dionysus; it is a product grown somewhere 
 between Rome and Geneva, say at Leghorn. 
 
220 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 "The unofficial Churches accept Dionysus only 
 as enthusiasm for unenthusiastic matters, such as 
 Puritanism; while Apollo with them is a Sunday 
 school teacher. 
 
 "And this cannot be otherwise. An Imperialist 
 nation cannot have an Imperialist Religion too, other- 
 wise the heads of that Religion would run the 
 Empire. The English, in the interest of their 
 Empire, disintegrated their ancient Religion. In 
 other words, they were bound to obscure Apollo 
 and to degrade Dionysus by eccentricities. 
 
 "Take the Unitarians. Unable to find place for 
 Dionysus in their over-rationalised Religion, they 
 rush into moral eccentricities, such as a wholesale 
 condemnation of war, a sickly philanthropy that 
 yet seldom' leaves the precincts of words, and other 
 morbid habits. 
 
 " In England, Religion cannot be allowed its 
 full-fledged growth. Should the English lose their 
 Empire and, which is doubtful, yet survive as a 
 small island-state, they will forthwith change their 
 Religions, and the first of these to be dropped will 
 be Anglicanism; while Methodism, in one of its 
 extremer forms, is the most likely to replace all 
 the others, should Catholicism not supplant it. 
 
 "The only new Christian Religion likely to arise 
 in the British Empire is one in India, which will 
 stand to British Christianity as the Greek Church 
 stands to the Roman. I wonder why one or another 
 of the British missionaries has not developed it 
 long ago. 
 
 " In Great Britain herself a powerful new Religion 
 cannot be devised as yet. 
 
 "It is quite different on the Continent; and 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 221 
 
 it is devoutly to be hoped that France will shake 
 off her torpor and pour new religious enthusiasm 
 into the soul of her nation. 
 
 " It is also to be hoped that the Japanese will 
 at last adopt a Religion fitting their new status as a 
 great nation. They will never accept Protestantism. 
 They may accept some new form of Romanism, in that 
 the great distance of Rome from Tokio guarantees 
 them from too much interference, and because their 
 next objective, the thousands of islands called the 
 Philippines, have long been converted to Romanism. 
 
 " I have, in my travels on earth, frequently been 
 asked whether our own beautiful Religion could 
 not be revived again. 
 
 " To this the answer can hardly be doubtful. 
 Our Religion was so intimately connected with our 
 peculiar polity that unless such polities should be 
 revived, our Religion cannot be reintroduced into 
 the life of nations. 
 
 "In my Republic I have anticipated most of 
 the political communities that have arisen after 
 my death ; and the Roman Church has fully con- 
 firmed my prediction, that the polity in which 
 philosophers will be kings will be the most abiding 
 of all. The restrictions which I placed on the 
 various classes of my ideal Republic have not been 
 literally observed by the Roman Church; she has 
 laid upon them other restrictions. 
 
 "But then as now I say, that the greater the 
 Ideal, the heavier price we have to pay for it. 
 
 "The little ones, listening to arm-chair experts, 
 multi-millionaires and faddists, indulge in the childish 
 belief that they will be able to bring Elysium down 
 into their Assemblies, Market-places, and their Social 
 
122 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 Life, by removing all severe conflicts, all cruelty, all 
 relentless punishments, and similar necessities which 
 are only the inevitable price paid for some great 
 good. They think they will make the world more 
 humane, by giving up any attempt at weeding out 
 all the bad herbs among the human grass. 
 
 " They will never do it. If they want to have a 
 Religion better than the one they have, they will 
 have to pay an exceedingly heavy price for it. 
 
 "First is Calvary, and then comes the Resur- 
 rection. 
 
 " Religion is an Ideal, and hence very costly. If 
 ever the general brotherhood of men should be 
 realised, just for one year, the sacrifices to be paid 
 for such a sublime ideal would be so immense 
 that people would at once relapse into the other 
 extreme. 
 
 " Nothing wiser ever fell from your lips, O Goethe, 
 than your saying that c nothing is more hard to en- 
 dure than a series of three beautiful days.' 
 
 " We Greeks know it. We realised many an ideal ; 
 more than has been realised by any other people. 
 Accordingly, we did not last very long. Do not 
 covet the stars ! Be satisfied with a little cottage in 
 the midst of a small garden. 
 
 "But you were right, O Spinoza, that the whole 
 essence of Man is concupiscence. He will desire 
 and aspire after an endless array of things, all of 
 which he wants to have for nothing. 
 
 "It is in vain that we tell him that there is no 
 more expensive shop than that where gratification of 
 desires is sold. 
 
 " In vain have all the Religions essayed to inculcate 
 the lesson of resignation, one by threatening dire 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 223 
 
 punishments on earth, the other by menacing eternal 
 pains in yonder world. 
 
 " Resignation is the last thing a human thinks of. 
 He thinks he is so clever, so intelligent, so inventive 
 and especially so * progressive,' that he will bend 
 Ideals to his will, as he has done with a few of the 
 physical forces of Nature. He does not know that 
 while other goods require only the abnegation of one 
 or a few individuals, Ideals exact the privation of 
 multitudes. 
 
 " Could we free Greeks have been what we were, 
 had we not stood on the bodies of degraded slaves 
 who relieved us of the drudgery of life? One 
 cannot be free and a slave at the same time. * 
 
 " In my deep conviction of the heavy sacrifices 
 demanded for Ideals, I frequently think that we 
 Greeks, and more particularly myself, who intro- 
 duced this thirst for Ideals into the world, have 
 thereby done Europe more harm than good. 
 
 " How many a time has the fate of Prometheus 
 been re-enacted in millions of ideal-smitten Europeans ! 
 There he is, bound to a rock, while an eagle eats his 
 liver, because he wanted to bring down Olympus to 
 earth. 
 
 " The Religion that will teach man serene resigna- 
 tion; that will imbue him with the sense of the 
 magnitude of Ideals; that will make him feel that 
 Ideals are not for man, but for gods ; that Religion 
 will save him. 
 
 " None other. 
 
 " The priests of that Religion must be the first to 
 exemplify that Resignation to the full. They must 
 not preach Resignation while themselves dressed in 
 purple and clothed in the amplest rights of Pre- 
 
224 NIGHTS WITH THE GODS 
 
 cedence, Authority, and Splendour. Will there ever 
 be such priests ? 
 
 " I doubt it. What priests want and what they 
 have always wanted, is nothing but authority. 
 
 " They have founded and brought to its most con- 
 summate expression the science of authority-seeking. 
 They know how to impress people. I do not hope 
 that they will ever give up such a profitable ac- 
 complishment ; and consequently no Religion of the 
 future will have a remarkable success unless it en- 
 ables its founders to invest many persons with great 
 authority. 
 
 "The scant authority it gives to its incumbents is 
 the chief weakness of Protestantism as compared 
 with Roman Catholicism. This world is ruled by 
 Authority ; and so far, the other world too has been 
 governed by the same means. And so at the end, 
 as well as at the outset of our reflections on Life 
 we start and come back to the same eternal truth, 
 that practical life wants not truth as such, but only 
 effectology, 
 
 " Truth proper, and independent of any practical 
 effects, has its place only at the foot of Your Mighty 
 Throne in Olympus, O Zeus. 
 
 "We Hellenes having been on a plane altogether 
 higher than is that of the little ones, we dared to 
 introduce some truths proper into our life. We 
 sincerely called a spade a spade. We knew that 
 some women and men must suffer, in order that 
 others may fully develop their humanity; and so 
 we instituted slavery, scorning, as we did, the half- 
 measures of quarter, third, or three quarters liberty 
 in men or women. We openly talked of the ' Envy 
 of the gods,' which is one of the deepest truths of 
 
SOCRATES, DIOGENES, AND PLATO 225 
 
 life. And thus in many a custom, law, or measure 
 of ours we had the courage to enshrine truth proper 
 in the prose-frame of ordinary life. 
 
 " This emboldened me to think that there might 
 one day be a State, a Republic, wholly built on eternal 
 truths. And so I wrote my book hoping it would 
 serve as a beacon-fire for all times and all humans. 
 
 " At present I know better. What people want, 
 in Religion or Science, is effectologlcal truth, and not 
 truth proper. My book, as the rest of my work, 
 has procured me a place in Olympus, but has not 
 enabled me to conquer a single town of the nether- 
 world. 
 
 " I too have learnt to resign myself. 
 
 "Truth, like Beauty, and Goodness, is not meant 
 for the little ones. And yet they will in all times 
 go on their pilgrimage to our shrines ; through all 
 ages they will worship Athens and mighty Rome as 
 the true home of humanity ; as the age and the men 
 who had the divine courage of truthfulness, and the 
 saving grace of Beauty." 
 
 Zeus and Juno rose from their chryselephantine 
 seats. The shades of the night became lighter, and 
 at a sign from Mercury, the whole divine Assembly 
 left their places and moved through the air towards 
 Olympus. 
 
 THE END 
 
A Catalogue of the 
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T. Werner Laurie's Catalogue. 
 
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T. Werner Laurie's Catalogue. 
 
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T. Werner Laurie's Catalogue. 
 
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T. Werner Laurie's Catalogue. 
 
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T. Werner Laurie's Catalogue. 
 
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