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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 Volume X JULY, 1917 Number 3 
 
 CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO ' 
 
 J. LOEWENBERG 
 
 University of California 
 
 The problem of the One and the Many is a problem 
 essentially, Platonic. Characteristically Platonic is the 
 sayin'g of Socrates in tjie Phaedrus: "If I find any man 
 who^is able to. see a 'One and Many' in nature, him I 
 fallow, and 'walk iniiis footsteps as if he were a god.'" ^ 
 The problem of 'th# One and the Many may indeed be 
 said to be the point around which Plato's deepest con- 
 cerns center. It occurs in most of his dialogues. It ap- 
 ^pears in different formulations, and it receives a variety 
 of emphasis. It is certainly at the root of his morals. 
 "Not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued," ^ is 
 Plato's fundamental teaching. And the good life is a 
 life of law, order, justice. The diverse elements of the 
 soul must be set in order; they must submit to one organ- 
 izing principle; they must become a well-ordered unity. 
 "Can there be any greater evil," asks Socrates, "than 
 discord and distraction and plurality where unity ought 
 to reign? or any greater good than the bond of unity.''" * 
 The ethical task of the many is "to grow up in a noble 
 order"; ^ they must constitute "one entirely temperate 
 
 ^An address before the Philosophical Union of the University of California, 
 February 23, 1917. 
 
 » Phaedrus, 266 (Jowett's translation). » Crito, 48. * Republic, 462. 
 
 6 Ibid. 421. 
 
216 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 anci perfectly adjusted nature"; ^ they must, like a work 
 of art, become fashioned into "a regular and systematic 
 whole." ^ The many are to become one, be the many 
 the multiple elements of the individual soul or the plural 
 citizens of the State. For Plato advocates no "double 
 standard" — one for the individual and another for the 
 group. "The just man," insists Socrates, "will be like 
 the just State"; ^ "the same principles which exist in 
 the State exist also in the individual"; ^ and "the States 
 are as the men are." ^° This problem of the One and the 
 Many is no mere ethical problem for Plato. His whole 
 metaphysical quest is a quest for absolute essences 
 behind the multiplicity of appearances. "Philosophers 
 only are able," Socrates informs Glaucon, "to grasp the 
 eternal and unchangeable, and those who wander in the 
 region of the many and variable are not philosophers." " 
 It is the task of philosophy to seek behind "the ipany 
 and variable" for the absolute and Aernal and immutable 
 reality "not varying from generation and corruption." 
 The doctrine of ideas, subject indeed to many and 
 variable interpretations, must be regarded as Plato's 
 metaphysical account of the nature of reality. "This 
 universe," according to his belief, "is . . . Cosmos or 
 order, not disorder or misrule." ^^ That ultimate reality, 
 despite appearances, possesses eternal harmony, absolute 
 permanence, essential unity — this is the Platonic con- 
 viction formulated in the doctrine of ideas. 
 
 The search for unity then may in general be affirmed 
 to be Plato's supreme speculative endeavor. What kind 
 of unity is Plato seeking? Here we come upon a question 
 which admits of no simple answer. I find in Plato two 
 conflicting conceptions of unity. Whether they are 
 with or without consistency maintained by him I 
 am not prepared to discuss. To reconcile them, or to re- 
 
 • Republic, 443. "> Gorgias, 504. « Republic, 435. * Ibid. 441. 
 
 10 Ibid. 544. " Ibid. 484. ^ Gorgias, 508. 
 
CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 217 
 
 duce one to the other, is a task for the speciahst who is 
 committed to defend the unity of Plato's thought. I 
 am no Plato scholar, and I have no ready hypothesis 
 which will explain the differing modes of his doctrine. 
 That the dialogues actually contain two inconsistent 
 notions of unity, however the professional Platonist 
 may interpret them, can be demonstrated by quotations 
 from the text. Their inconsistency may indeed be super- 
 ficial or even specious; nevertheless they seem to me to 
 represent two fundamentally different attitudes toward 
 life and reality. And because I think it important to note 
 the distinction between them, I venture, with all due apol- 
 ogies to Plato and the Platonists, to call attention to these 
 seemingly conflicting views. 
 
 One conception of unity found in Plato is a unity which 
 is antagonistic to the many. Variety, difference, change, 
 complexity are excluded from it. The immortality of the 
 soul, for instance, is argued by Plato from such a notion 
 of unity. "We cannot believe," asserts Socrates in the 
 tenth Book of the Republic " — reason will not allow us — 
 ... the soul, in her truest nature, to be full of variety and 
 difference and dissimilarity. . . . The soul . . . being . . . 
 immortal, must be the fairest of compositions and cannot 
 be compounded of many elements." ^^ In the notion of 
 uncompounded unity lies Plato's chief guarantee for the 
 eternal existence of the soul. In the Phaedo Socrates 
 formulates the argument thus: "The compound or com- 
 posite may be supposed to be naturally capable, as of 
 being compounded, so also of being dissolved; but that 
 which is uncompounded, and that only, must be, if any- 
 thing is, indissoluble. . . . And the uncompounded may 
 be assumed to be the same and unchanging, whereas the 
 compound is always changing and never the same." ^* 
 And it is such argument which leads to the conclusion 
 that "the soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and 
 
 15 Republic, 611. " Phaedo, 78. 
 
 
218 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 immortal and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble 
 and unchangeable." ^^ Although this notion of the soul 
 affords perhaps the most striking example of Plato's 
 view of an " uncompounded unity," this same view is also 
 at the basis of his doctrine of ideas. "Tell me," Socrates 
 asks of Meno, "tell me what virtue is in the universal; 
 and do not make a singular into a plural, as the facetious 
 say of those who break a thing, but deliver virtue to me 
 whole and sound, and not broken into a number of 
 pieces." ^^ In the Phaedrus, Phaedo, Republic, and else- 
 where the ideas are looked upon as being self-contained 
 and transcending internal multiplicity and variety and 
 change. What relation the ideas have to one another is 
 a different question. But the ideas qua ideas — the ideas 
 of beauty, of justice, of goodness — are absolute and per- 
 manent, possessing a reality and dignity other than that of 
 the flux of particulars. Socrates satirizes "the gentleman 
 who is of opinion that there is no absolute or unchange- 
 able idea of beauty — in whose opinion the beautiful 
 is the manifold — he . . . your lover of beautiful sights, 
 who cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and 
 the just is one, or that anything is one." ^^ The true lover 
 of knowledge, on the contrary, "will not rest in the multi- 
 plicity of individuals which is an appearance only." ^^ 
 But "those who see the many beautiful and . . . [not] ab- 
 solute beauty . . .; who see the many just and not abso- 
 lute justice, and the like — such persons may be said to 
 have opinion but not knowledge." ^^ I fully realize the 
 danger which accrues from citing isolated passages of 
 Plato's dialogues, particularly those which concern the 
 doctrine of ideas. The difiicult questions which this doc- 
 trine raises lie indeed beyond the scope of an untechnical 
 essay; the citations are justified, however, as merely 
 illustrating one view of Platonic unity, a unity which is 
 
 " Phaedo, 80. ^^ Meno, 77. " Republic, 479 (italics mine). 
 
 18 Ibid. 490. 18 Ibid. 479. 
 
CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 219 
 
 uncompoimded and undifferentiated and thus opposed 
 to multiplicity. 
 
 Contrasted with this is the other Platonic view of 
 unity — unity compounded of the many. It is a unity which 
 depends for its very existence and meaning upon multi- 
 plicity. The many bound together into a whole — organ- 
 ized, ordered, and harmonized — present a different sort 
 of unity." It is a union of parts, not only admitting but 
 demanding variety, difference, change, and complexity.* 
 The organization of life into such a well-ordered commun- 
 ion of parts is Plato's chief ethical task. As "the artist 
 disposes all things in order, and compels the one part to 
 harmonize and accord with the other part, until he has 
 constructed a regular and systematic whole," ^° so the 
 just man will "look at the city which is within him, and 
 take heed that no disorder occur in it." ^^ Strangely 
 at variance with Plato's account of the metaphysical 
 soul as " uncompounded " and "uniform" is his view 
 of the soul's multiplicity and variety essential for the 
 moral life. The image of the soul as a triple animal whose 
 different natures are to grow into one is indeed allegor- 
 icaP^; equally allegorical is the description of the soul 
 under the figure of two winged horses and a charioteer ^^ ; 
 but the reference to "the city which is within" man is 
 not metaphorical. For the entire Republic is an exposition 
 of the exact parallelism between the individual and the 
 State. A miniature State is Plato's individual; a magni- 
 fied individual his State. "In each of us," says Socrates, 
 "there are the same principles and habits which there 
 are in the State" ^^; "the just man . . . will be like the 
 just State." 2^ As the State is composed of three classes — 
 justice consisting in their harmonious co-operation — so 
 the individual soul possesses, corresponding to these 
 classes, three principles — desire, passion, and reason, the 
 
 20 Gorgias, 504. 21 RepubliSp 492. ^ Ibid. 588 ff. 
 
 » Phaedrus, 246 ff. ^ Republic, 435. =^ Ibid. 
 
220 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 harmonious condition of which defines the just man.^^ In 
 Socrates' own words: "For the just man does not permit 
 the several elements within him to interfere with one 
 another, or any of them to do the work of others; he 
 sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master 
 and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when 
 he has bound together the three principles within him . . . 
 [he] is no longer many, but has become one entirely tem- 
 perate and perfectly adjusted nature." " The just soul 
 is thus a united soul — an organic whole of differentiated, 
 non-interchangeable, and interdependent parts. The 
 same organic unity — on a larger scale — characterizes the 
 just State. "Each individual," insists Socrates, "should 
 be put to the use for which nature intended him, one to 
 one work, and then every man would do his own business, 
 and he one and not many; and so the whole city would he 
 one and not many'' ^^ In Plato's concept of the well- 
 ordered State made up of various and distinct classes but 
 "bound each to each in mutual piety," we have the har- 
 monization of unity and plurality. The singleness of 
 the State does not destroy, but on the contrary pre- 
 serves, its multiplicity. The two concepts are here 
 correlative. The many by retaining as individuals their 
 distinct characters can become one and whole. "Citi- 
 zens," exclaims Socrates in the parable of the metals, 
 "... you are brothers, yet God has framed you differ- 
 ently." 2^ That the individuals can achieve genuine 
 individuality only by thus being distinct members of a 
 whole is, of course, a much later thought, though implied 
 in Plato's concept of the State. Whether Plato viewed 
 the universe as having the character of a "well-ordered 
 State" cannot here be asserted with confidence. The 
 Parmenides may be quoted in support of this view. And 
 not inimical to such an interpretation is the following 
 
 » Republic, 441 ff. " Ibid. 443. 
 
 " Ibid. 423 (italics mine). " Ibid. 415. 
 
CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 221 
 
 passage from the Gorgias: "Philosophers tell us," 
 Socrates mentions to Callicles, '*ihat communion and 
 friendship and orderliness and temperance and justice 
 bind together heaven and earth and gods and men, and 
 the universe is therefore called Cosmos or order, not 
 disorder or misrule.''^^° 
 
 Enough passages have now been quoted, I think, to 
 suggest the nature of Plato's two concepts of unity — one 
 in essential opposition to the many, and the other result- 
 ing from their harmonious co-ordination. I venture to 
 apply the predicate "romantic" to Plato's search after a 
 unity which transcends multiplicity, whereas his view of 
 unity as exemplified in the conception of the "well- 
 ordered State" I regard as "classic." My reason for 
 employing these predicates in connection with Plato is 
 twofold. In the first place, I wish to render the terms 
 "classic" and "romantic" — as far as possible within the 
 limits of this address — philosophically articulate, and 
 thus contribute something toward their rescue from the 
 vagueness and triviality which they have acquired as 
 exclusively literary categories. And in the next place, 
 I find that the romanticists in literature — particularly 
 the German romanticists — share many paradoxical feat- 
 ures with Plato, these features in the case of both re- 
 sulting from an essential clash between the one and the 
 many, between the universal and the particular.'^ 
 
 It is the search for a transcendent unity and harmony 
 which leads the "romantic" Plato to invest the multi- 
 
 '« Gorgias, 508. 
 
 '1 1 refer here mainly to German romanticists because it was they — particularly 
 Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) — who clearly formulated a theory of romanticism 
 which they sought to carry out both in life and in art. The group comprising the 
 "Romantic School" consisted of Friedrich von Hardenberg (called Novalis), the two 
 Schlegels — August and his brother Friedrich — and Ludwig Tieck; but I have in mind 
 their later followers as well, such as Brentano, Amim, von Kleist, Fouque, Hoff- 
 mann, Chamisso, Eichendorff, Heine. I do not think, however, that there is an essen- 
 tial difference between the romanticism in Germany and what is vaguely enough called 
 by the same name in the literatures of other countries. For the romantic tendencies 
 alluded to in this essay it will not be difficult, therefore, to find illustrations in general 
 European literature. 
 
222 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 plicity of the world with a negative character. Speaking 
 broadly, the manifold existences of life when contrasted 
 with the unity of Plato's ideal realm become for him either 
 grotesque or symbolic. By grotesque I mean to denote 
 his notion of the world of particulars as distorted, mean- 
 ingless, unreal; by symbolic his other notion that the 
 same world of particulars may yet be viewed by the phi- 
 losopher as a suggestion or hint or intimation of a tran- 
 scendent realm of universals. In the words of Pindar: 
 *' Things of a day, what are we and what are we not? The 
 dream of a shadow is humankind; yet when a god-given 
 splendor falls, light shines radiant upon men and life is 
 sweet." ^^ Grotesque is the world as portrayed in the par-\ 
 able of the den in the seventh Book of the Republic. Liv- / 
 ing in an underground cave, with their legs and necks! 
 chained so that they cannot move toward the light which is 
 above and behind them and are therefore doomed to mis- 
 take for realities the shadowy images on the screen in 
 front of them — such is the existence of those in the "region 
 of the many and variable." This grotesque world of images 
 or "the shadows of images" ^^ is contrasted by Plato 
 with the "upper world" which is revealed to the "mind's 
 eye" of the philosopher. Equally grotesque is the situa- 
 tion of the soul "fastened and glued to the body," as 
 depicted in the Phaedo.^^ Philosophy, Socrates tells us, 
 consists in "the study of death" — death to all that which 
 is "of the human and mortal and unintellectuai and 
 multiform and dissoluble and changeable." ^^ The dis- 
 ciple of philosophy, however, can, according to Plato, 
 overcome the visible and discordant world in yet another 
 way. It is by viewing it as a sign or symbol of a different 
 
 ^Quoted by J. W. Mackail: Lectures on Greek Poetry, London, 1910, p. 120. 
 
 ^ Republic, 517. »^ Phaedo, 79 ff. 
 
 ^ Ibid. 80. This notion of "death" occurs in Novalis. Indeed he made a "reso- 
 lution" thus to die. And in a letter to Friedrich Schlegel (January 20, 1799) he speaks 
 of the longing of Christianity as "absolute Abstraktion, Annihilation des Jetztigen, 
 Apotheose der Zukunft — dieser eigentlichen bessern Welt." 
 
CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 223 
 
 realm. Appearances, apparitions, shadows, ghosts — the 
 "many" — are when taken by themselves weird, gro- 
 tesque, bizarre; interpreted, however, as suggestions of a 
 reality other and deeper than themselves they become 
 instinct with spiritual significance. It is the particular as 
 particular which is unspiritual, sordid, corrupt; as sign 
 or medium of a universal nature it is raised to a differ- 
 ent level. Thus Plato's doctrine of love may be inter- 
 preted. The ideal of love, revealed by Diotima in the 
 Symposium, is to attain true beauty, "the divine beauty, 
 . . . pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the 
 pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities 
 of human life." ^^ But this is the ideal goal. As aids to 
 its attainment the earthly beauties themselves, though 
 "clogged with the pollutions of mortality," become spirit- 
 ualized. I quote Diotima's words: "The true order of 
 going ... to the things of love is to begin from the beauties 
 of the earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other 
 beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going to 
 two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms 
 to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, 
 until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute 
 beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty 
 is." " The discussion in the Phaedrus whether the non- 
 lover or the lover is to be preferred revolves around the 
 same distinction between false love and true love. Gro- 
 tesque is the notion of love which is not "the love of im- 
 mortality," ^^ "taken from some haunt of sailors," ^^ 
 whereas true love is symbolic, i.e., beauty of bodily form 
 is to be loved as an intimation and expression of divine 
 beauty.^" "Sight is the most piercing of our bodily 
 
 ^ Symposium, 211. " Ibid. 211. '^ Ibid. 207. '» Phaedrus, 243. 
 
 ^"This doctrine of "symbolic love" is one of the cardinal teachings of German 
 romanticism. It has received a variety of expression. The attitude of the lover toward 
 the beloved in Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde is typical. Says Lucinde's lover: "Lass 
 mich's bekennen, ich liebe nicht dich alleiti, ich liebe die Weiblichkeit selbst. Ich 
 hebe sie nicht bloss, ich bete sie an, weil ich die Menschheit anbete." (Edition 1799, 
 p. 70.) 
 
224 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 senses," says Socrates, "though not by that is wisdom 
 seen; her loveUness would have been transporting if 
 there had been a visible image of her, and the other ideas, 
 if they had visible counterparts, would be equally lovely. 
 But this is the privilege of beauty, that being the loveliest 
 she is also the most palpable to sight. . . . He . . . who has 
 been the spectator of many glories in the other world, 
 is amazed when he sees any one having a godlike face or 
 any bodily form which is the expression of divine 
 beauty . . .; looking upon the face of his beloved as of a 
 god he reverences him, and if he were not afraid of being 
 thought a downright madman, he would sacrifice to his 
 beloved as to the image of a god." ^^ In the seventh 
 Book of the Republic a similar contrast is brought out 
 between the objects of sense and the objects of science. 
 The study of astronomy, for instance, when its objects^ 
 are the mere visible and perishable stars, is rebuked by 
 Socrates. Thus: "That knowledge only which is of 
 being and of the unseen can make the soul look upwards, 
 and whether a man gapes at the heavens or blinks on the 
 ground, seeking to learn some particular of sense, I 
 would deny that he can learn, for nothing of that sort 
 is matter of science; his soul is looking downwards, not 
 upwards, whether his way to knowledge is by water or 
 by land, whether he floats or only lies on his back." ^'^ 
 Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and the kindred sci- 
 ences of relations and order have for Plato educational 
 value because they are suggestive or symbolic of the ideal 
 world. They tend "to make more easy the vision of the 
 idea of good." ^^ 
 
 Many more passages could be cited to show that the 
 "region of the many and variable" is viewed by Plato 
 now as grotesque or unreal or impure, now as symbolic or 
 suggestive or representative of the absolute and per- 
 manent "upper world." What I wish to emphasize, how- 
 
 " Phaedrus, 250-251. ^ Republic, 529. « Ibid. 526. 
 
CLASSIC AND ROIVIANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 225 
 
 ever, is this — the clash between unity and multiplicity,! 
 between the ideal and the real, with the consequent trans- I 
 formation of the latter into the grotesque or the symbolic I 
 is the very differentia of romanticism. The pendulari 
 oscillation between the grotesque and the symbolic — 
 between regarding the particulars of the world now as 
 illusory, now as intimations of the infinite — appears to 
 be at the root of most of the romantic paradoxes. It is '^ 
 this oscillation which renders intelligible the union of so 
 many contradictory traits found in both the life and the 
 art of romanticists. Cynicism and reverence; self- 
 parody and self -worship ; self -concentration and self- 
 expansion; individualism and cosmopolitanism; loyalty 
 and infidelity; dreamful ease and prodigious activity; 
 superficiality and profundity — these are but a few ro- 
 mantic tendencies having their source in the Platonic 
 longing for an ideal world opposed to the actual."*^ X 
 
 The romanticists are adept specialists in the art_of ^tjie , 
 ^otescQie. I need but allude to the tales of Novalis, 
 Tieck, Chamisso, Hoffmann, Victor Hugo, Poe. With 
 the German romanticists, however, the cultivation of the 
 grotesque is a conscious design to destroy the common 
 conceptions of things. It is a quasi-Socratic reductio ad 
 absurdum of the generally accepted world.. For the ro- 
 manticists the world is full of w^onder and mystery un- 
 dreamt of by the "many," the philistines. But this 
 wonder and mystery, because so obvious to them, losei 
 their strangeness. Hence the reverse romantic tendency 
 to depict the miraculous and the fabulous as the familiar. 
 The romantic world is veritably verkehrt. The familiar 
 becomes strange, the strange familiar; the near grows 
 far, the far near. It is to this spirit that we owe a wealth 
 
 ** I should not be understood as deriving romanticism historically from Plato. 
 I am well aware, in the case of German romanticism, of the intimate relation between 
 it and the Fichtean philosophy. I am using romanticism here as an elemental attitude 
 possessing philosophic generality, of which the Fichtean doctrine of the world-building 
 and world-destroying Infinite Self, engaged in the restless quest after an unattainable 
 ideal, is itself a notable expression. 
 
K 
 
 226 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 of modern fairy tales and an appreciative interest in dis- 
 tant languages and literatures. 
 
 His longing for an ideal harmonious world determines 
 the romanticist's strange theory of values. The worth of 
 things resides in the moods they arouse, the dreams they ^ 
 inspire, the hidden realities they suggest. 
 
 " To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," 
 
 says Wordsworth at the close of his Ode on Immortality. 
 Or in the words of another poet, 
 
 "Not the slightest leaf but trembling teems 
 With golden visions and romantic dreams." 
 
 Contrasted with the ideal, all particular things and in- 
 terests are equally nugatory; as suggestions or symbols 
 of the ideal everything is equally relevant. This double 
 standard applied to all things, at once or successively, is 
 typically romantic. It engenders an elasticity of mood 
 and feeling and thought and expression which is consist- 
 ent in its capriciousness. Loyalty to the ideal requires 
 a constant flux of symbols. In order not to become en- 
 meshed in particulars the romanticist must continually 
 transcend them. So it comes about that for him loyalty 
 and infidelity are Siamese twins. Loyalty to the universal 
 is conditioned upon faithlessness to the particulars. The 
 symbolic character of the particular can be demonstrated 
 only by forsaking and exchanging it for another particular. 
 The romanticist may therefore be called an intellectual 
 and emotional "polygamist." In love with the infinite, 
 no finite aim, interest, mood, or person can lay claim to 
 his sustained fidelity. Because his allegiance belongs to 
 the eternal he must perforce repudiate temporary and 
 transient embodiments of it. 
 
 "No more of me ye knew, 
 My Love! 
 No more of me ye knew," 
 
CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 227 
 
 is the ''rover's adieu" to his fugitive attachments. Para- 
 doxical though it may seem, fickleness is the very expres- 
 sion of his constancy. Don Juan is the romanticist's 
 most faithful lover. 
 
 Thus in search for unity and harmony the romanticist 
 becomes a wanderer from particular to particular. 
 Wanderlust — the universal romantic motif — acquires for 
 him the dignity of a philosophic principle. Aimlessness, 
 exemplified, for instance, in Eichendorff's Das Lehen 
 eines Taiigenichts, is his conscious aim, and is extended 
 as a programme to all intellectual, emotional, and imagina- 
 tive pursuits. The acquisition of a definite and particular 
 purpose is accompanied with the ache of self-limitation, 
 and calls therefore for relief through the cultivation of 
 new interests. For particular ends and purposes are but 
 transient means to appease one's yearning after the in- 
 finite. Care must be taken to discover constantly new 
 means. The frequent abandonment of particular in- 
 terests is the romanticist's sincere proof that his goal is 
 the universal, not the particular. Hence his protean 
 activity, his catholicity, his versatility. His is the life 
 of the adventurous wanderer. He roams through field 
 and forest, art and religion, philosophy and science, life 
 and love, with the elan vital of Shelley's West Wind. He 
 heeds not the call, 
 
 "Wild Spirit which art moving everywhere; 
 Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!" 
 
 Of necessity then his nature must be untamed and un- 
 disciplined. Discipline and waywardness do not dwell 
 within the same breast. In this the romanticist glories. 
 The wanderer's life alone is the free life. The freedom 
 romanticism eulogizes is the freedom from particularity. 
 Stoicism too advocates such freedom. But there is a 
 radical difference between the two. Stoicism wins its in- 
 dependence by withdrawing from the particulars; roman- 
 
228 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 ticism by pursuing and appropriating all possible par- 
 ticulars. The stoic turns his back upon the vicissitudes 
 and complexities of life; the romanticist experiments 
 and plays with them. The freedom from particulars, 
 from their ties and responsibilities which the player 
 and the wanderer alone enjoy, is the romantic ideal. 
 Viewing thus all things through the eyes of the passing 
 pilgrim, the romanticist can give you no definite picture 
 of what he sees. He can but give you his fugitive and! 
 sensitive impressions. For this reason all romantic art 
 has a lyrical quality about it. It is an art of suggestion 
 and mood. It is what the Germans call stimmungsvolL 
 And no accident is it that romantic art excels in the epi- 
 gram, the fragment, the lyric, the essay, the tale, the 
 song, and all the other casual forms of expression. Ro- 
 mantic achievement is the achievement which requires 
 no sustained effort, no prolonged attention, being the prod- 
 uct of the moment's mood and inspiration. Thoroughly 
 at home the German romanticists — so protean in their 
 interests and so prodigious in their industry — were in no 
 one field. They paid the price of the rover's life. The 
 pathos of the wanderer's homelessness none felt more 
 keenly than they. In endless pursuit of their ideal, seek- 
 ing and finding no particular object which will embody 
 it, doomed therefore to aimless and restless straying, 
 the romanticists have repeatedly given voice to the 
 thought, 
 
 "We look before and after. 
 And pine for what is not." 
 
 The romantic fate has perhaps been most pointedly stated 
 by the author of the Imitation of Christ. Thus: "Thou 
 hast no dwelling city and wherever thou be thou art as 
 a stranger and a pilgrim." You will also recall the lamen- 
 tation of Schubert's Wanderer: '' Dort wo Du nicht hist, 
 da ist das Gliick" 
 
CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 229 
 
 Consistent with his theory of values is the romanticist's 
 attitude toward himself. As "destroyer" and "pre- 
 server" he ranges and strays among the experiences of 
 his inner life, which can afford him a resting place as 
 little as the world outside him. Here again he is a stranger 
 and a pilgrim. At once "grotesque" and "symbolic," 
 distorted and clear, worthless and profound, ephemeral 
 and infinite his passions and thoughts and moods appear 
 to him.^^ As particular among particulars he is himself 
 something to be estranged from and forsaken. But like 
 all things finite, he also 
 
 "Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 And Cometh from afar." 
 
 He is not only finite; he too is an intimation of the in- 
 finite. Thus the dramatic oscillation between the gro- 
 tesque and the symbolic is projected into the romanticist's 
 inner life. In his exalted moods he regards himself as 
 God's beloved, as the inspired vehicle of the Eternal. 
 Hence his genuine love and reverence for himself. His 
 dreams, his words, his tears, are instinct with universal 
 meaning; he bares them as revelations of a nature 
 deeper and vaster than his own; they have for him the 
 awesome significance of oracular signs. Thus sings 
 Emerson : 
 
 "I am owner of the sphere. 
 Of the seven stars and the solar year. 
 Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain, 
 Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain." 
 
 ^This is a familiar paradox in romantic literature. Goethe's Faust complains: 
 "Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust; 
 
 Die eine will sich von der andern trennen; 
 
 Die eine halt in derber Liebeslust, 
 
 Sich an die Welt, mit klammernden Organen; 
 
 Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust 
 
 Zu den Gefiihlen hoher Ahnen." 
 And Victor Hugo's Mahomet laments : 
 
 "Je suis le lieu vil des sublimes combats: 
 
 Tantot I'homme d'en haut, et tantot I'homme d'en bas; 
 
 Et le mal dans ma bouche avec le bien alterne, 
 
 Comme dans le desert le sable et la citerne." 
 
230 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 But — and here is the romantic paradox — because he is 
 a symbol of the divine, because he worships the ideal 
 within him, he must burst the bonds of his own particu- 
 larity, he must not be smothered in the flux of his inner 
 life. The deep love of the universal of which he is a 
 medium leads him to absolve himself from himself, not 
 indeed in the stoic's or in the mystic's fashion. The 
 romantic way is the cynical way. Self -parody is the 
 romanticist's mode of purging himself of his particularity. 
 Cynical self -contemplation is the *' destroyer" of his 
 ephemeral and the "preserver" of his eternal nature. 
 Cynicism toward himself becomes his sublimest expres- 
 sion of reverence for the universal, just as his deliberate 
 infidelity to definite ends was the very instrumentality 
 by which the romanticist could show his supreme alle- 
 giance and longing for the infinite. Self -parody is thus 
 seen to be a method of solving the Platonic problem of the 
 universal and the particular. 
 
 "^Viewed thus, the principle of "romantic irony," for- 
 mulated by Friedrich Schlegel with especial reference to 
 the artist's attitude toward his work, is simply another 
 aspect of romantic freedom from particularity. It is, 
 to borrow a phrase from Walter Pater, the "fastidious 
 refusal to be or do any limited thing." The romanticist 
 refuses to identify himself with his work because, being 
 particular, it never can be an adequate expression of his 
 infinite ambition. For the romantic ideal is the uni- 
 versal — Schlegel's Uiiiversalpoesie; as such it can achieve 
 no realization in any particular content and form. The 
 artist's love for art is to be measured by his ability to 
 transcend his own product. Freedom and independence 
 of his own particular efforts are demonstrated by his 
 willingness ever to repudiate them. The test of his earnest- 
 ness is self-irony. Irony is his explicit acknowledgment 
 that the ideal is more precious than the actual. Irony 
 toward his work is simply the disavowal of the particular- 
 
CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 231 
 
 ity which attaches to it^in favor of the universal essence 
 of which it is to be an intimation. With the various 
 ways in which this principle of irony has been applied, 
 notably by Tieck and Byron and Heine, and more 
 recently by Shaw, we are here not concerned. 
 
 These are but a few romantic trends and paradoxes 
 which have their logical source in the Platonic longing for 
 an ideal and harmony transcending this world of the 
 "many and variable." In his Lucinde — a book which 
 contains in a nutshell the entire philosophy of romanti- 
 cism, theoretical and applied — Friedrich Schlegel charac- 
 terizes the object of romantic longing as longing itself. 
 And Novalis has supplied the symbol for this notion in 
 his well-known figure of the "blue flower." The con- 
 cept "longing for longing" is typically Platonic. Long- 
 ing as such, by being its own object and devoid of definite 
 content, becomes a sort of "colourless, formless, intangi- 
 ble essence," ^^ which can find embodiment or rest in no 
 particular nature. More than a superficial resemblance 
 has this idea of longing to Schopenhauer's notion of the 
 "will," but what interests us here is the Platonic duajigpi | 
 of the imiversal and the particular implied in it. Infinite 
 longingiand the many and the particular objects of long- 
 ing cannot coalesce; for ever sundered they must re- 
 main, since the only definite thing which longing seeks is 
 indefinite longing itself. It is this yearning after itself — a 
 transcendent thing — which sends the romanticist a-rov- 
 ing. It is this which constitutes the romantic career — 
 
 "To burst all links of habit — there to wander far away, 
 On from island unto island at the gateways of the day." 
 
 It is this which explains his eternal Wanderlust among all \ 
 experience, among all the objects of nature and life, of ) 
 love and art. 
 
 While the romanticist's longing can never come to 
 rest, it seems to find a momentary haven of refuge in the 
 
 « Phaedrus, 247. 
 
232 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 contemplation of the past. The modern historic spirit, 
 inaugurated by the German romanticists, is intimately 
 bound up with romantic longing. Their interest in the 
 past springs from the feeling that the harmony and unity 
 longed for had once been realized, had had embodiment 
 in epochs remote from the present. The historic spirit of 
 romanticism consists in a conscious reconstruction of the 
 past in terms of an ideal vainl^^ sought for herejjidjii^.^^ 
 Thus the past becomes idealized. And thus commences 
 the romantic regressive pilgrimage. The Middle Ages, 
 Hellas, or perchance a more antique Golden Age, are en- 
 dowed with the heaven of beauty and harmony and per- 
 fection. The isles of Greece become romantic Arcadia; 
 and the unmatched glories and splendors of mediaeval 
 life, art, and religion were not seen until discovered, loved, 
 and cherished by romantic poets. This idealization of the 
 remote past, and the motives for it, the romanticists 
 share with Plato. In Plato also may be found the pro- 
 jection into antiquity — a very remote antiquity in his 
 case — of an ideal and perfection "not varying from gen- 
 eration and corruption." The Platonic theory of "recol- 
 lection" is based upon the assumption of a previous 
 existence more perfect than the present. All knowing, 
 all learning is but recalling what the soul beheld in that 
 perfect state. "The Soul," Socrates states in the Meno, 
 ". . . being immortal, and having seen all things that 
 exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has 
 knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should 
 be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew . . . ; 
 the soul has learned all things, there is no difficulty in 
 her eliciting, or as men say learning, out of a single recol- 
 lection all the rest . . .; for all enquiry and all learning is 
 
 *' The historic spirit of romanticism should not be confused with that of Hegel. 
 In general, the romanticists emphasize the discontinuity of past and present, exempli- 
 fied in Die Christenheit oder Europa by Novalis, in Atala by Chateaubriand, in 
 Rousseau's works; whereas Hegel insists upon their coijtinuity. The romanticists 
 look backward for an ideal in contrast with the actual; Hegel looks to the past for 
 the seeds of the full-grown present. 
 
CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 233 
 
 but recollection." "^^ The Phaedrus likewise goes back to 
 a former state of existence, in which the gods and men 
 have once seen the divine forms of "justice, and temper- 
 ance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of genera- 
 tion or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge 
 absolute in existence absolute." ^^ Plato's "golden age" 
 is depicted more vividly and more poetically in the fol- 
 lowing passage: "There was a time when . . . we beheld 
 the beatific vision and were initiated into a mystery 
 which may be truly called most blessed, celebrated by us 
 in our state of innocence, before we had any experience 
 of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight of 
 apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, 
 which we beheld shining in pure light, pure ourselves and 
 not yet enshrined in that living tomb which we carry \ 
 about, now that we are imprisoned in the body, like an 
 oyster in his shell." ^^ This "historic" spirit of Plato, 
 this looking "backward" to a blessed "state of innocence" 
 is born of the same yearning as that of the romanticists, 
 the yearning to find in a "previous" existence unity, 
 harmony, perfection, and an escape from the present 
 strife of the one and the many, the universal and the 
 particular. 
 
 The " classiq " trend of Plato remains now to be briefly k 
 suggested. Whereas his romanticism lies in the clash 
 between unity and multiplicity and in the consequent 
 transformation of the latter into the grotesque or the 
 symbolic, the ideal which dominates his classicism con- 
 sists in the reconciliation of the one and the many, the 
 universal and the particular. In his " w^ell-ordered State" 
 Plato has defined for us a novel concept of unity — a unity I 
 which logically requires multiplicity. It is the unity of a 
 whole which results from the organization and co-ordina- 
 tion of the many. Here diverse elements are welded to- 
 gether into an harmonious structure. Here we have a 
 
 " Meno, 81. « Phaedrus, 247. ^ Ibid. 250. 
 
234 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 unity which is compounded of the many. Here the par- 
 ticulars constitute a universal. These particulars — the 
 many elements of the State — are not ephemeral shadows 
 or faint copies of a transcendent universal; they are real 
 and necessary and constitutive parts of a whole. Thus, 
 universal and particular, whole and part, unity and mul- 
 tiplicity are interdependent and mutually inclusive. The 
 problem of monism and pluralism — to use metaphysical 
 concepts — receives here perhaps its only adequate solu- 
 tion. Unity without multiplicity is "empty"; multi- 
 plicity without unity "blind." Plato's State illustrates 
 a multiplicity which is an organic unity, a unity which is 
 a well-ordered multiplicity. 
 
 The parts which constitute such an organic union, how- 
 ever, cannot be equal. The State is a whole which is no 
 mere sum of external parts; its wholeness is achieved 
 through differentiation. That is, the particulars which 
 enter into such union must be different particulars ; other- 
 wise we should have a blurred and not a well-ordered 
 whole. One particular member of the State, for instance, 
 cannot be allowed to usurp the function of another par- 
 ticular. Each has in the structure of the whole a unique 
 and distinct place. "In all well-ordered States," says 
 Socrates in the Republic, "every individual has an occu- 
 pation to which he must attend." ^^ Also, "Each indi- 
 vidual should be put to the use for which nature intended 
 him." ^^ Justice of the State as well as of the individual 
 resides for Plato in the harmonious co-operation of dis- 
 tinct interests and activities. The just soul is the well- 
 ordered soul; the just State is the well-ordered State. 
 Well-ordered organizations then are unities which are 
 composed of a plurality of distinct parts. The wholeness 
 of any organism is secured, preserved, and rendered 
 effective by the very particularization and specialization 
 of its members. Thus not escape from particularity, as 
 
 " Republic, 406. ^ Ibid. 423. 
 
CLASSIC AND ROIMANTIC TRENDS IN PLATO 235 
 
 • 
 demanded by romanticism, but loyalty to the special role 
 which the whole assigns to each of its members is the 
 classic ideal. Not freedom from particularity — the ro- 
 mantic ambition — but freedom to be a particular, to have 
 a definite place in the organic composition of the whole 
 is the classic aim. 
 
 To exhibit in detail that the Platonic notion of "organic 
 unity" or "organic w^holeness" is at the basis of the classic^ 
 theory_of^art, lies beyond the province of this paper. I 
 hope I shall be pardoned, however, for citing in this con- 
 nection a lengthy but significant passage from S. H. 
 Butcher. 
 
 "It may be noticed," says he, commenting on Aristotle's Poetics, 
 "that the opposition between the poet and the historian in the 
 Poetics is incidentally introduced to illustrate the sense in which a J 
 tragedy is on£, and a whole. These two notions as understood by 
 Aristotle are not identical. A unity is composed of a plurality of 
 parts which cohere together and fall unde^ a common idea but are 
 not necessarily combined in a definite order. The notion of a wliole 
 imphes something more. The parts which constitute it must be in- 
 wardly connected, arranged in a certain order, structurally related, 
 and combined into a system. A whole is not a mere mass or sum of 
 external parts which may be transposed at will, any one of which 
 may be omitted without perceptibly affecting the rest. It is a unity 
 which is unfolded and expanded according to the law of its own nature, 
 an organism which develops from within. By the rule, again, of 
 beauty, which is a first requirement of art, a poetic creation must \ 
 exhibit at once unity and pluraUty. . . . The idea of an o rganis m evi- 
 dently underlies all Aristotle's rules about unity; it is tacitly as- 
 sumed as a first principle of art, and in one passage is expressly 
 mentioned as that from which the rule of epicusJty is deduced. ' The 
 plot must, as in a tragedy, be dramatically con^structed ;^ it must 
 have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a 
 beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a^single and 
 coherent organism, and produce the pleasure proper to it.' 
 
 "Plato in the Phaedrus had insisted that every artistic composition, 
 whether in prose or verse, should have an organic unity. 'You will 
 allow that every discourse ought to be constructed hke a living organ- 
 ism, having its ownTody and head and feet; it must have middle and 
 extremities, drawn in a manner agreeable to one another and to the 
 
236 HARVARD THEOLOGI^^AL REVIEW 
 
 • 
 whole.' Aristotle took up the hint; the passage above quoted from 
 the Poetics is a remarkable echo of the words of the Phaedrus; and 
 indeed the idea may be said to be at the basis of his whole poetic 
 criticism." ^^ 
 
 There is no need to show in this essay how the Platonic 
 ideal of a well-ordered whole dominates the practice of 
 Greek art as well as its theory. This ideal it is which fur- 
 nishes a standard of character and life associated with 
 *'the glory that was Greece." A criterion of conduct as 
 well as of taste is supplied by it. The harmony and co- 
 herence and repose of classic art, the felicity and beauty 
 and restraint of classic life, are grounded in the Platonic 
 conception of "organic unity." And this conception, 
 in both its aesthetic and moral excellence, is the 
 model of modern classicism. French literature in the 
 seventeenth century is classic in this sense. And the 
 same classic ideal inspires the mature poetry of Goethe 
 and of Schiller. It i^ the Platonic view of a well-ordered 
 and harmonious whole which defines, for instance, in 
 Wilhelm Meister and in Iphigenie Goethe's standard of 
 conduct and of art. 
 
 I am convificed that an analysis more exhaustive than 
 here attempted of Plato's two concepts of unity would 
 yield a logical basis for defining most of the problems con- 
 nected with classicism and romanticism both in art and 
 in philosophy. Here I could do no more than suggest 
 that the distinction between the classic and the romantic 
 ideals is funoamental and intimttlely related to the Pla- 
 tonic teachings. Whether Plato was essentially a classi- 
 cist or essentially a romanticist, or both in strange 
 union, I do not know. I must reiterate, as I close, that 
 I venture upon no interpretation of Plato himself. How- 
 ever the classic and the romantic trends in his writings 
 be exj^ained, the distinction between them is important. 
 For here, to speak with Socrates, "no light matter is at 
 stake, nothing less than the rule of human life." 
 
 " Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts, Fourth Edition, Macmillan Co. 
 London, 1911, pp. 186-189. 
 
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