The Libertine

by GEORGE SANTAYANA

1

THE STRANGER. — I see, Alcibiades, how truly Socrates describes you when he tells us that you were the occasion of all his wisdom. “That goodfor-nothing boy,” he says, “is marvelously beautiful, and Beauty remains the one clear revelation which the Good has ever vouchsafed to me of its nature. Moreover, he was given to desperate follies and as fond of himself as he was negligent; and such exasperating unreason in him was of all vices the best fitted to destroy my peace and to make me a beneficent nuisance to mankind.”

ALCIBIADES. — If you know Socrates, you know that he never means what he says.

Had I been the source of his wisdom, he would have continued to run after me, as he did for a month or two at Athens after I had won my first crown at the boys’ games; but ever since, both in the upper world and here, he seemed

rather to avoid me, as if I were a disreputable old friend whom one would not be seen with in public, though willing for old times’ sake to do him a little kindness now and then in the dark.

THE STRANGER. — I assure you that he speaks of you often, and with the most wonderful affection.

ALCIBIADES. — Mere sophistry and rhetoric, which he is full of. If it were affection he would not spend his days in preference with everyone else whom he finds willing to listen to him, especially if it be a young simpleton like Marcellus or a stranger like you.

THE STRANGER. — Marcellus drinks in his words like an oracle and is a fervent neophyte of the new philosophy, while you are an incorrigible scoffer. Besides, as we grow old we have to abandon the people we like for those who like us. The young Marcellus with his Roman stolidity puts before Socrates an eternal dilemma, because here spirits are never able to discover anything that at least virtually they had not already discovered on earth; and it had never occurred to the honest Socrates, while he lived in the flesh, to turn his dialectic into mythology or his myths into revealed oracles and truths; yet this is what Plato began to do in his name after him, and what the good Marcellus, brought up on devout superstitions, spontaneously does too — and Socrates finds his own words taken by his fervent disciples more seriously, as science, than he ever took them himself.

As for me, I have a magical and most undeserved advantage over you all. I am alive and can summon ghosts by a certain familiar incantation to speak to me against, their will: how else should you and I, Alcibiades, ever have talked together? Besides, suppose Socrates had frequented you only, how should he then have come to know that of all possible people Alcibiades was the most worth frequenting and the best foil for his philosophy? A large mind cannot limit itself to what it loves. Remember, too, that here, where you dwell in eternity, Socrates need not take away from you the hours or the attention that he devotes to other things or to other pleasures. ALCIBIADES. — Do not exert yourself to comfort me, you odcl ghost-raiser and distiller of dead herbs. Are you not something like a sophist yourself.'' I was never so wedded to Athens or to philosophy as Socrates was, and the rest of the world had enough in it to entertain me.

THE STRANGER. — Yet Socrates holds a special place in your esteem, unless the account he gives of your first encounter in these regions is inaccurate. For he says you were ashamed to see him again, considering what you had done and had become in the world after his death; as if you saw in him the embodiment of a reproachful conscience.

Alciblxdes.— Has he told you that story? I wonder with what inventions he has embroidered it.

THE STRANGER. — It sounded to me like the truth; but if you will give me your version of what occurred, I will believe it in preference to his, as coming from an innocent youth, incapable ol irony or dissimulation.

ALCIBIADES. — No. How should I remember the twists he chose to give his words? Tell me yourself what he reported, and then when I next see him I shall have something to confound him with and make him blush for in his turn, when I repeat the malicious lies he has been telling strangers about me.

2

THE STRANGER. — It was some years, he said, after he had arrived here that, stalking as is his wont among these knolls, he spied you leaning like Narcissus over the edge of a fountain. Chin in hand, you were intently observing whether death had effaced or rather restored your good looks; for you were secretly troubled by a tale your nurse had told you when a child, that in the realm of shades men do not retain the aspect of their earthly bodies, but become the image of their deeds. — Is my story truthful so far?

ALCIBIADES. — As stories go. Perhaps there is some truth in it. But what then?

THE STRANGER. — He made a sound, and you unmistakably caught sight of him through the corner of your eye; but you pretended not to have seen him; you yawned and stretched yourself and would have strolled off listlessly into the wood. But he called after you loudly, “Alcibiades, Alcibiades,” and you were obliged to turn back. “What,” he said, “have you forgotten your old friend Socrates? No: my form and features are not easily mistaken; but you looked away and pretended not to know me because you were ashamed. That is an old absurd trick of yours, that you are not ashamed before the gods nor before yourself nor before other men, whether Greeks or barbarians, but are ashamed before Socrates. And yet you were now doing nothing to be ashamed of, not being drunk nor lolling in the company of flute girls, nor prowling about the chamber of any Spartan queen, nor taking money from the barbarians to fight against your country nor out of pique and effrontery affecting to wear their villainous stuffy clothes or to speak their uncouth language; nor were you in the act of knocking off from the statues of the gods any provocative detail. You were simply standing lost in thought, as I sometimes stood in the streets of Athens, or as we all stand often in this ghostly world where we move as noiselessly and as innocently as we breathe. Why, then, should you attempt to avoid my presence and to hide from me the blessed fact that you, too, are here? For it is by the blessing of the gods that you have been admitted where nothing enters that does not in some way partake of the Good; a blessing to you, because you have somehow deserved it, and a blessing to me, who am your lover, in that my love is thereby divinely approved and declared to be well-grounded. — Why do you not answer me, Alcibiades?”

“To say the truth, Socrates,” you replied, “I did know you perfectly, but I was afraid that I myself was much changed and that if you recognized me it might be with pain.”

“Not with new pain, my friend,” Socrates retorted gravely. “The loves of old men and of philosophers are sadly prophetic. We know from the beginning that they cannot be altogether happy. We discount the illusion which the god sends us and foresee the disappointment of our hopes in our young friends. When we see them slender and blooming, in all the smiling curiosity and playfulness of their age, Eros, who is himself a boy and fond of fooling, whispers in our ear: ‘Here is a youth indeed, worthy to be the child of Theseus or of Solon, and who will surely be virtuous and kind, and will grow up to be a philosopher, and a philosopher of your own sect!’ But we old foxes are not deceived by the artful Eros, though we never tire of listening to his delightful banter. We are well aware that all you darlings will prove faithless to us and to philosophy, and that you will not be blooming and slender forever. Nevertheless we are compelled to love you; for as when the rowers in a galley dip their oars into the sea, though they know well by experience that the oars remain straight, yet they are forced by nature to see them bent, so we are forced by nature to see in you what by experience we know cannot be there; only that in the illusion of love it is the contrary deception that heaven practices upon us, since we are bewitched into seeing as straight and beautiful those bodies and those souls which we know to be crooked. It is no new pain, Alcibiades.

I knew you truly on earth, and my passion never deceived me. Time, or rather eternity, has merely stripped bare that true Alcibiades whom only the eye of Socrates could formerly discern, and has revealed him to all the world now and, strangest of all, to Alcibiades himself. If just now, when you were gazing into the fountain, you had blushed at yourself and tried to hide from your own eyes, I could have understood the reason. Not having ever known yourself before, the revelation might have startled you. But to me your present aspect is no revelation. Even in the upper world, the eye of a philosopher, when he is a lover, penetrates to the truth.”

“You are not serious, Socrates, even now that you are dead,” you said in answer. “Had I looked then as I look now you would never have dreamed of pretending that you were in love with me; for you never really were, only it amused you in your sarcastic way to say in scorn that you found me irresistible. But if anything about me pleased you, it was certainly what I seemed and not what was to turn out to be the truth about me. Therefore you were no philosopher in loving me, but a fool, as all lovers are.”

“Come, come,” he grumbled in his familiar way, “do not talk as if you were addressing an audience that wants to laugh, and never remembers what it applauded the week before. I was saying that although I knew that you were crooked I could not help seeing you straight, for the god compelled me; and do you suppose that Eros showed me a good and beautiful Alcibiades to no purpose instead of the living rascal? The god that works in the lover’s soul is either the same god that works in nature or a greater god; and when he makes in nature a crooked Alcibiades of flesh and blood, who looks beautiful but is base and who from being young and generous becomes in time fat, brutal, and unprincipled — do you suppose that then the Creator is making something more real than when, in the soul of Socrates, he makes an ideal Alcibiades, bright and incorruptible as a god? And when Socrates loves the divine Alcibiades, having no illusions about the human one, is he not a true lover and a true philosopher?”

“So you confess it at last,” you cried, “what I have always perceived, though you denied it, that you never cared for me at all, but gave my name in play to some fond creation of your fancy? You are no better than those other villainous sculptors, men of your own profession, who are too full of themselves to make a good likeness of anybody, but give the name of Pericles or Nicias to some mere replica of their stock dummy, that looks more like a lion than a man, and then impudently deliver the work to Pericles or Nicias as his express portrait, demanding a fabulous price. So you impudently deliver to me your love of your own ideas and call it your prophetic love of Alcibiades, expecting me to be infinitely grateful and to pay you, rogue that you are, with all sorts of good coin.”

3

ALCIBIADES. — There, I allow, Socrates reported our conversation faithfully, and you too have a good memory, for that is exactly what I said and what I think, and what I shall say again upon occasion when Socrates vexes me with his humbug.

THE STRANGER. — Very well, but if the rest of your conversation was reported no less accurately, it was not long before you took back your words.

ALCIBIADES. — Cornered and cheated by some sophistical trick, perhaps; but I warn you that I now take back and recant my recantations, past and future; for very likely he will browbeat and corner me again, the old charlatan!

THE STRANGER. — Yes, and this is the way he proceeded to do it. “It is easy to slander a philosopher, Alcibiades,” he said, “but it is not easy to be one. However, I wish to admit the truth, and if you can show me that what I love is not the true Alcibiades, I will gladly admit it, and say it is Hermes or Dionysius or some other young god that has appeared to me in a dream. But answer me this question: You have had lovers who were not philosophers?”

“Yes, many,” you replied, “both men and women. Greeks and Persians.”

“You do not accuse them,” he went on, “especially not the Persians and the women, of not loving the real Alcibiades?”

“It would be odd to accuse them of that.”

“You mean that their actions left no room for doubt, in that they embraced you, feasted you, and gave you magnificent presents?”

“Exactly; and if they had said they loved me to distraction, but had turned their backs on me rudely if by chance I got too near, and had given me nothing but sarcastic words and sharp admonitions, forcing me to listen to long verbal disputes and hollow praises of beauty in general, I should certainly have said they were mocking me and were sophists in practice, even if in name they were kings or queens, or generals, or sculptors.”

“Very good,” said Socrates slyly, “and now will you please answer this other question: When a boy becomes a man does he cease to be the same person?”

“Of course not,” you replied, “and what of that?”

“Be patient, you will see in a moment. If a man has an illness or is wounded and has a hand or a foot amputated by the surgeon, does he too remain the same man?”

“He does.”

“And those who truly love him, his father and mother or his faithful slaves, will they cease to love him when he becomes a man or when he loses a hand or a foot in the service of his country?”

“No,” you replied; “in that case I think perhaps they might love him more, or at least they would be more tender and considerate in the expression of their affection.”

“Precisely,” he continued; “that is what I should have answered if the question had been addressed to me. But let us see if we agree also on this further point. If those fine Athenians who courted you when you were a demure lad had seen you many years later advance smiling towards them with a long dyed beard, do you think their love would have remained unaltered?”

“How absurd!”

“Do you think those Persians and those women who so unmistakably loved you would still have taken you hunting with them or danced and sung for you in their delicious gardens, or locked you closely in their scented chambers and in their soft white arms, if in consequence of some accident in war, or of some disease, the surgeons had amputated your leg or some other part of your body?”

“How low-minded you are, Socrates,” you protested; “yet I must confess that if I had lost so much as one ear, every one of my adorers would have fled from me with a shudder.”

ALCIBIADES. — Yes, and when I made that admission Socrates imagined that he had scored a point, and by his swagger induced the bystanders and even me to believe that he had really done so. In fact those people would have been perfectly right. Their taste was exquisite and exacting, and in my mutilated state I should have offended it. I myself could never bear to see a lame horse, and a dog with fleas might fawn and wag his tail as much as he chose; he was the nastier and the more annoying for his devotion; and before I had time to be sorry for him I would order the lame horse to be killed and the dirty dog to be given away to lead a blind beggar. There are plagues and horrors enough inevitable; at least in what we freely choose and place before us intentionally all should be perfect and beautiful. Time and the barbarians have taught me that. It is not possible for any man to be happy. It is not possible for any city to be perfectly well governed, unanimous and always victorious. But it is possible for some of us to put a jeweled dagger in our belt, and to forget many evils always and all evils sometimes. It is possible to cull many an absolute delight, and to taste before we die some moments of utter enchantment. I have snatched them repeatedly from the chase, from music, from wine, and from love. The rest is slavery. I have been the occasion of pleasures to others as pure as those I have enjoyed. I am content to have transported and redeemed for a moment from vulgarity those who have loved me in my day.

THE STRANGER. — Is not that what you have done for Socrates also, and in a much more radical and lasting way than for the others? His philosophy has separated the charm from the enchanter. The passion and illusion that you aroused have gone to make the god he worships; and to the unvarnished earthly Alcibiades he has remained a rough honest friend both in peace and war.