No More Learning

I do not quite see what you mean, Tychiades; put it a
little clearer.

_Tyc_. I want to know whether you have a profession of any
sort; for instance, are you a musician?

_Si_. Certainly not.

_Tyc_. A doctor?

_Si_. No.

_Tyc_. A mathematician?

_Si_. No.

_Tyc_. Do you teach rhetoric, then? I need not ask about
philosophy; you have about as much to do with that as sin has.

_Si_. Less, if possible. Do not imagine that you are enlightening
me upon my failings. I acknowledge myself a sinner--worse than you
take me for.

_Tyc_. Very well. But possibly you have abstained from these
professions because nothing great is easy. Perhaps a trade is more
in your way; are you a carpenter or cobbler? Your circumstances are
hardly such as to make a trade superfluous.

_Si_. Quite true. Well, I have no skill in any of these.

_Tye_. But in----?

_Si_. An excellent one, in my opinion; if you were acquainted
with it you would agree, I am sure. I can claim to be a practical
master in the art by this time; whether I can give an account of my
faith is another question.

_Tyc_. What is it?

_Si_. No, I do not think I have got up the theory of it
sufficiently. For the present, rest assured that I have a
profession, and cease your strictures on that head. Its nature you
shall know another time.

_Tyc_. No, no; I will not be put off like that.

_Si_. Well, I am afraid my profession would be rather a shock
to you.

_Tyc_. I like shocks.

_Si_. Well, I will tell you some day.

_Tyc_. Now, I say; or else I shall know you are ashamed of it.

_Si_. Well, then, I sponge.

_Tyc_. Why, what sane man would call sponging a profession?

_Si_. I, for one. And if you think I am not sane, put down my
innocence of other professions to insanity, and let that be my
sufficient excuse. My lady Insanity, they say, is unkind to her
votaries in most respects; but at least she excuses their offences,
which she makes herself responsible for, like a schoolmaster or
tutor.

_Tyc_. So sponging is an art, eh?

_Si_. It is; and I profess it.

_Tyc_. So you are a sponger?

_Si_. What an awful reproach!

_Tyc_. What! you do not blush to call yourself a sponger?

_Si_. On the contrary, I should be ashamed of not calling
myself so.

_Tyc_. And when we want to distinguish you for the benefit of
any one who does not know you, but has occasion to find you out, we
must say 'the sponger,' naturally?

_Si_. The name will be more welcome to me than 'statuary' to
Phidias; I am as proud of my profession as Phidias of his Zeus.

_Tyc_. Ha, ha, ha! Excuse me--just a particular that occurred
to me.

_Si_. Namely----?

_Tyc_. Think of the address of your letters--Simon the
Sponger!

_Si_. Simon the Sponger, Dion the Philosopher. I shall like
mine as well as he his.

_Tyc_. Well, well, your taste in titles concerns me very
little. Come now to the next absurdity.

_Si_. Which is----?

_Tyc_. The getting it entered on the list of arts. When any
one asks what the art is, how do we describe it? Letters we know,
Medicine we know; Sponging?

_Si_. My own opinion is, that it has an exceptionally good
right to the name of art. If you care to listen, I will explain,
though I have not got this properly into shape, as I remarked
before.

_Tyc_. Oh, a brief exposition will do, provided it is true.

_Si_. I think, if you agree, we had better examine Art generically
first; that will enable us to go into the question whether the
specific arts really belong under it.

_Tyc_. Well, what is Art? Of course you know that?

_Si_. Quite well.

_Tyc_. Out with it, then, as you know.

_Si_. An art, as I once heard a wise man say, is a body of
perceptions regularly employed for some useful purpose in human
life.

_Tyc_. And he was quite right.

_Si_. So, if sponging has all these marks, it must be an art?

_Tyc_. _If_, yes.

_Si_. Well, now we will bring to bear on sponging each of
these essential elements of Art, and see whether its character
rings true, or returns a cracked note like bad pottery when it is
tapped. It has got to be, like all art, a body of perceptions.
Well, we find at once that our artist has to distinguish critically
the man who will entertain him satisfactorily and not give him
reason to wish that he had sponged elsewhere. Now, in as much as
assaying--which is no more than the power of distinguishing between
false and true coin--is a recognized profession, you will hardly
refuse the same status to that which distinguishes between false
and true _men_; the genuineness of men is more obscure than
that of coins; this indeed is the gist of the wise Euripides's
complaint:

But among men how tell the base apart?
Virtue and vice stamp not the outward flesh.

So much the greater the sponger's art, which beats prophecy in the
certainty of its conclusions upon problems so difficult.

Next, there is the faculty of so directing your words and actions
as to effect intimacy and convince your patron of your devotion: is
that consistent with weak understanding or perception?

_Tyc_. Certainly not.

_Si_. Then at table one has to outshine other people, and show
the difference between amateur and professional: is that to be done
without thought and ingenuity?

_Tyc_. No, indeed.

_Si_. Or perhaps you fancy that any outsider who will take the
trouble can tell a good dinner from a bad one. Well, the mighty
Plato says, if the guest is not versed in cookery, the dressing of
the banquet will be but unworthily judged.

The next point to be established is, that sponging depends not
merely on perceptions, but on perceptions regularly employed.
Nothing simpler. The perceptions on which other arts are based
frequently remain unemployed by their owner for days, nights,
months, or years, without his art's perishing; whereas, if those of
the sponger were to miss their daily exercise, not merely his art
would perish, but he with it.

There remains the 'useful purpose in human life'; it would take a
madman to question that here. I find nothing that serves a more
useful purpose in human life than eating and drinking; without them
you cannot live.

_Tyc_. That is true.

_Si_. Moreover, sponging is not to be classed with beauty and
strength, and so called a quality instead of an art?

_Tyc_. No.

_Si_. And, in the sphere of art, it does not denote the
negative condition, of unskilfulness. That never brings its owner
prosperity. Take an instance: if a man who did not understand
navigation took charge of a ship in a stormy sea, would he be safe?

_Tyc_. Not he.

_Si_. Why, now? Because he wants the art which would enable
him to save his life?

_Tyc_. Exactly.

_Si_. It follows that, if sponging was the negative of art,
the sponger would not save his life by its means?

_Tyc_. Yes.

_Si_. A man is saved by art, not by the absence of it?

_Tyc_. Quite so.

_Si_. So sponging is an art?

_Tyc_. Apparently.

_Si_. Let me add that I have often known even good navigators
and skilful drivers come to grief, resulting with the latter in
bruises and with the former in death but no one will tell you of a
sponger who ever made shipwreck. Very well, then, sponging is
neither the negative of art, nor is it a quality; but it is a body
of perceptions regularly employed. So it emerges from the present
discussion an art.

_Tyc_. That seems to be the upshot. But now proceed to give us
a good definition of your art.

_Si_. Well thought of. And I fancy this will about do: Sponging is
the art of eating and drinking, and of the talk by which these may
be secured; its end is Pleasure.

_Tyc_. A very good definition, I think. But I warn you that
your end will bring you into conflict with some of the philosophers.

_St_. Ah well, if sponging agrees with Happiness about the
end, we may be content.

And that it does I will soon show you. The wise Homer, admiring the
sponger's life as the only blissful enviable one, has this:

I say no fairer end may be attained
Than when the people is attuned to mirth,
. . . . . and groans the festal board
With meat and bread, and the cup-bearer's ladle
From flowing bowl to cup the sweet wine dips.

As if this had not made his admiration quite clear enough, he lays
a little more emphasis, good man, on his personal opinion:

This in my heart I count the highest bliss.

Moreover, the character to whom he entrusts these words is not just
any one; it is the wisest of the Greeks. Well now, if Odysseus had
cared to say a word for the end approved by the Stoics, he had
plenty of chances--when he brought back Philoctetes from Lemnos,
when he sacked Troy, when he stopped the Greeks from giving up, or
when he made his way into Troy by scourging himself and putting on
rags bad enough for any Stoic. But no; he never said theirs was a
fairer end. And again, when he was living an Epicurean life with
Calypso, when he could spend idle luxurious days, enjoying the
daughter of Atlas and giving the rein to every soft emotion, even
then he had not his fairer end; that was still the life of the
sponger. Banqueter was the word used for sponger in his day; what
does he say? I must quote the lines again; nothing like repetition:
'The banqueters in order set'; and 'groans the festal board With
meat and bread. '

It was a remarkable piece of impudence on Epicurus's part to
appropriate the end that belongs to sponging for his system of
Happiness. That it _was_ a bit of larceny--Epicurus having
nothing, and the sponger much, to do with Pleasure--I will
soon show you. I take it that Pleasure means, first, bodily
tranquillity, and secondly, an untroubled soul. Well, the sponger
attains both, Epicurus neither. A man who is busy inquiring into
the earth's shape, the infinity of worlds, the sun's size,
astronomic distances, the elements, the existence or non-existence
of Gods, and who is engaged in incessant controversies about the
end--he is a prey not merely to human, but to cosmic perturbations.
Whereas the sponger, convinced that all is for the best in the best
of all possible worlds, living secure and calm with no such
perplexities to trouble him, eats and sleeps and lies on his back,
letting his hands and feet look after themselves, like Odysseus on
his passage home from Scheria.

But here is an independent refutation of Epicurus's pretensions to
Pleasure. Our Epicurus, whoever his Wisdom may be, either is, or is
not, supplied with victuals. If he is not, so far from having a
pleasurable life, he will have no life at all. If he is, does he
get them out of his own means, or from some one else? If the
latter, he is a sponger, and not what he says he is; if the former,
he will not have a pleasurable life.

_Tyc_. How so?

_Si_. Why, if his food is provided out of his own means, that
way of life has many consequences; reckon them up. You will admit
that, if the principle of your life is to be pleasure, all your
appetites have to be satisfied?

_Tyc_. I agree.

_Si_. Well, a large income may possibly meet that requirement,
a scanty one certainly not; consequently, a poor man cannot be a
philosopher, or in other words attain the end, which is Pleasure.
But neither will the rich, who lavishes his substance on his
desires, attain it. And why? Because spending has many worries
inseparably attached to it; your cook disappoints you, and you must
either have strained relations with him, or else purchase peace and
quiet by feeding badly and missing your pleasure. Then similar
difficulties attend your steward's management of the house. You
must admit all this.

_Tyc_. Oh, certainly, I agree.

_Si_. In fact, something or other is sure to happen and cut
off Epicurus from his end. Now the sponger has no cook to be angry
with, no farm, steward or money to be annoyed at the loss of; at
the same time he lives on the fat of the land, and is the one
person who can eat and drink without the worries from which others
cannot escape.

That sponging is an art, has now been abundantly proved; it remains
to show its superiority; and this I shall take in two divisions:
first, it has a general superiority to all the arts; and, secondly,
it is superior to each of them separately. The general superiority
is this: the arts have to be instilled by dint of toil, threats and
blows--regrettable necessities, all of them; my own art, of which
the acquisition costs no toil, is perhaps the only exception. Who
ever came away from dinner in tears? with the schoolroom it is
different; or who ever went out to dinner with the dismal
expression characteristic of going to school? No, the sponger needs
no pressing to get him to table; he is devoted to his profession;
it is the other apprentices who hate theirs, to the point of
running away, sometimes. And it is worth your notice that a
parent's usual reward for a child who makes progress in the
ordinary arts is just the thing that the sponger gets regularly.
The lad has done his writing well, they say; let him have something
nice: what vile writing! let him go without. Oh, the mouth is very
useful for reward and punishment.

Again, with the other arts the result comes only after the learning
is done; their fruits alone are agreeable; 'long and steep the road
thereto. ' Sponging is once more an exception, in that profit and
learning here go hand in hand; you grasp your end as soon as you
begin. And whereas all other arts are practised solely for the
sustenance they will ultimately bring, the sponger has his
sustenance from the day he starts. You realize, of course, that the
farmer's object in farming is something else than farming, the
carpenter's something different from abstract carpentering; but the
sponger has no ulterior object; occupation and pre-occupation are
for him one and the same.

Then it is no news to any one that other professions slave
habitually, and get just one or two holidays a month; States keep
some monthly and some yearly festivals; these are their times of
enjoyment. But the sponger has thirty festivals a month; every day
is a red-letter day with him.

Once more, success in the other arts presupposes a diet as
abstemious as any invalid's; eat and drink to your heart's content,
and you make no progress in your studies.

Other arts, again, are useless to their professor unless he has his
plant; you cannot play the flute if you have not one to play;
lyrical music requires a lyre, horsemanship a horse. But of ours
one of the excellences and conveniences is that no instrument is
required for its exercise.

Other arts we pay, this we are paid, to learn.

Further, while the rest have their teachers, no one teaches
sponging; it is a gift from Heaven, as Socrates said of poetry.

Then do not forget that, while the others have to be suspended
during a journey or a voyage, this may be in full swing under those
circumstances too.

_Tyc_. No doubt about that.

_Si_. Another point that strikes me is that other arts feel
the need of this one, but not vice versa.

_Tyc_. Well, but is the appropriation of what belongs to
others no offence?

_Si_. Of course it is.

_Tyc_. Well, the sponger does that; why is he privileged to
offend?

_Si_. Ah, I know nothing about that. But now look here: you
know how common and mean are the beginnings of the other arts; that
of sponging, on the contrary, is noble. Friendship, that theme of
the encomiast, is neither more nor less, you will find, than the
beginning of sponging.

_Tyc_. How do you make that out?

_Si_. Well, no one asks an enemy, a stranger, or even a mere
acquaintance, to dinner; the man must be his friend before he will
share bit and sup with him, and admit him to initiation in these
sacred mysteries. I know I have often heard people say, Friend,
indeed! by what right? he has never eaten or drunk with us. You
see; only the man who has done that is a friend to be trusted.

Next take a sound proof, though not the only one, that it is the
most royal of the arts: at the rest of them men have to work (not
to mention toil and sweat) in the sitting or standing posture,
which marks them for the absolute slaves of their art, whereas the
sponger is free to recline like a king.

As to his happy condition, I need no more than allude to the wise
Homer's words; he it is, and he alone, that 'planteth not, nor
ploughs'; he 'reapeth where he hath not ploughed nor sown. '

Again, while knavery and folly are no bar to rhetoric, mathematics,
or copper-working, no knave or fool can get on as a sponger.

_Tyc_. Dear, dear, what an amazing profession! I am almost
tempted to exchange my own for it.

_Si_. I consider I have now established its superiority to art
in general; let us next show how it excels individual arts. And it
would be silly to compare it with the trades; I leave that to its
detractors, and undertake to prove it superior to the greatest and
most honourable professions. Such by universal acknowledgement are
Rhetoric and Philosophy; indeed, some people insist that no name
but science is grand enough for them; so if I prove sponging to be
far above even these, _a fortiori_ it will excel the others as
Nausicaa her maids.

Now, its first superiority it enjoys over Philosophy and Rhetoric
alike, and this is in the matter of real existence; it can claim
that, they cannot. Instead of our having a single consistent notion
of Rhetoric, some of us consider it an art, some the negation of
art, some a mere artfulness, and so on. Similarly there is no unity
in Philosophy's subject, or in its relation to it; Epicurus takes
one view, the Stoics another, the Academy, the Peripatetics,
others; in fact Philosophy has as many definitions as definers. So
far at least victory wavers between them, and their profession
cannot be called _one. _ The conclusion is obvious; I utterly
deny that what has no real existence can be an art. To illustrate:
there is one and only one Arithmetic; twice two is four whether
here or in Persia; Greeks and barbarians have no quarrel over that;
but philosophies are many and various, agreed neither upon their
beginnings nor their ends.

_Tyc_. Perfectly true; they call Philosophy one, but they make
it many.

_Si_. Well, such a want of harmony might be excused in other
arts, they being of a contingent nature, and the perceptions
on which they are based not being immutable. But that _Philosophy_
should lack unity, and even conflict with itself like instruments
out of tune--how can that be tolerated? Philosophy, then, is not
one, for I find its diversity infinite. And it cannot be many, because
it is Philosophy, not philosophies.

The real existence of Rhetoric must incur the same criticism. That
with the same subject-matter all professors should not agree, but
maintain conflicting opinions, amounts to a demonstration: that
which is differently apprehended cannot exist. The inquiry whether
a thing is this or that, in place of agreement that it is one, is
tantamount to a negation of its existence.

How different is the case of Sponging! for Greeks or barbarians,
_one_ in nature and subject and method. No one will tell you
that these sponge this way, and those that; there are no spongers
with peculiar principles, to match those of Stoics and Epicureans,
that I know of; they are all agreed; their conduct and their end
alike harmonious. Sponging, I take it on this showing, is just
Wisdom itself.

_Tyc_. Yes, I think you have dealt with that point sufficiently;
apart from that, how do you show the inferiority of Philosophy to
your art?

_Si_. I must first mention that no sponger was ever in love
with Philosophy; but many philosophers are recorded to have set
their hearts on Sponging, to which they still remain constant.

_Tyc_. Philosophers caring to sponge? Names, please.

_Si_. Names? You know them well enough; you only play at not
knowing because you regard it as a slur on their characters,
instead of as the credit it is.

_Tyc_. Simon, I solemnly assure you I cannot think where you
will find your instances.

_Si_. Honour bright? Then I conclude you never patronize their
biographers, or you could not hesitate about my reference.

_Tyc_. Seriously, I long to hear their names.

_Si_. Oh, I will give you a list; not bad names either; the
_elite_, if I am correctly informed; they will rather surprise
you. Aeschines the Socratic, now, author of dialogues as witty as
they are long, brought them with him to Sicily in the hope that
they would gain him the royal notice of Dionysius; having given a
reading of the _Miltiades_, and found himself famous, he settled
down in Sicily to sponge on Dionysius and forget Socratic
composition.

Again, I suppose you will pass Aristippus of Cyrene as a
distinguished philosopher?

_Tyc_. Assuredly.

_Si_. Well, he was living there too at the same time and on
the same terms. Dionysius reckoned him the best of all spongers; he
had indeed a special gift that way; the prince used to send his
cooks to him daily for instruction. He, I think, was really an
ornament to the profession.

Well then, Plato, the noblest of you all, came to Sicily with the
same view; he did a few days' sponging, but found himself
incompetent and had to leave. He went back to Athens, took
considerable pains with himself, and then had another try, with
exactly the same result, however. Plato's Sicilian disaster seems
to me to bear comparison with that of Nicias.

_Tyc_. Your authority for all this, pray?

_Si_. Oh, there are plenty of authorities; but I will specify
Aristoxenus the musician, a weighty one enough, and himself
attached as a sponger to Neleus. Then you of course know that
Euripides held this relation to Archelaus till the day of his
death, and Anaxarchus to Alexander.

As for Aristotle, that tiro in all arts was a tiro here too.

I have shown you, then, and without exaggeration, the philosophic
passion for sponging. On the other hand, no one can point to a
sponger who ever cared to philosophize.

But of course, if never to be hungry, thirsty, or cold, is to be
happy, the sponger is the man who is in that position. Cold hungry
philosophers you may see any day, but never a cold hungry sponger;
the man would not be a sponger, that is all, but a wretched pauper,
no better than a philosopher.

_Tyc_. Well, let that pass. And now what about those many
points in which your art is superior to Rhetoric and Philosophy?

_Si_. Human life, my dear sir, has its times and seasons;
there is peace time and there is war time. These provide unfailing
tests for the character of arts and their professors. Shall we take
war time first, and see who will do best for himself and for his
city under those conditions?

_Tyc_. Ah, now comes the tug of war. It tickles me, this queer
match between sponger and philosopher.

_Si_. Well, to make the thing more natural, and enable you to
take it seriously, let us picture the circumstances. Sudden news
has come of a hostile invasion; it has to be met; we are not going
to sit still while our outlying territory is laid waste; the
commander-in-chief issues orders for a general muster of all liable
to serve; the troops gather, including philosophers, rhetoricians,
and spongers. We had better strip them first, as the proper
preliminary to arming. Now, my dear sir, have a look at them
individually and see how they shape. Some of them you will find
thin and white with underfeeding--all goose-flesh, as if they were
lying wounded already. Now, when you think of a hard day, a stand-
up fight with press and dust and wounds, what is it but a sorry
jest to talk of such starvelings' being able to stand it?

Now go and inspect the sponger. Full-bodied, flesh a nice colour,
neither white like a woman's nor tanned like a slave's; you can see
his spirit; he has a keen look, as a gentleman should, and a high,
full-blooded one to boot; none of your shrinking feminine glances
when you are going to war! A noble pike-man that, and a noble
corpse, for that matter, if a noble death is his fate.

But why deal in conjecture when there are facts to hand? I make the
simple statement that in war, of all the rhetoricians and
philosophers who ever lived, most never ventured outside the city
walls, and the few who did, under compulsion, take their places in
the ranks left their posts and went home.

_Tyc_. A bold extravagant assertion. Well, prove it.

_Si_. Rhetoricians, then. Of these, Isocrates, so far from serving
in war, never even ventured into a law-court; he was afraid,
because his voice was weak, I understand. Well, then Demades,
Aeschines, and Philocrates, directly the Macedonian war broke out,
were frightened into betraying their country and themselves to
Philip. They simply espoused his interests in Athenian politics;
and any other Athenian who took the same side was their friend. As
for Hyperides, Demosthenes, and Lycurgus, supposed to be bolder
spirits, and always raising scenes in the assembly with their abuse
of Philip, how did they ever show their prowess in the war?
Hyperides and Lycurgus never went out, did not so much as dare show
their noses beyond the gates; they sat snug inside in a domestic
state of siege, composing poor little decrees and resolutions. And
their great chieftain, who had no gentler words for Philip in the
assembly than 'the brute from Macedon, which cannot produce even a
slave worth buying'--well, he did take heart of grace and go to
Boeotia the day before; but battle had not been joined when he
threw away his shield and made off. You must have heard this
before; it was common talk not only at Athens, but in Thrace and
Scythia, whence the creature was derived.

_Tyc_. Yes, I know all that. But then these are orators,
trained to speak, not to fight. But the philosophers; you cannot
say the same of them.

_Si_. Oh, yes; they discuss manliness every day, and do a
great deal more towards wearing out the word Virtue than the
orators; but you will find them still greater cowards and
shirkers. --How do I know? --In the first place, can any one name a
philosopher killed in battle? No, they either do not serve, or else
run away. Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, Zeno, Plato, Aeschines,
Aristotle, and all their company, never set eyes on a battle array.
Their wise Socrates was the solitary one who dared to go out; and
in the battle of Delium he ran away from Mount Parnes and got safe
to the gymnasium of Taureas. It was a far more civilized
proceeding, according to his ideas, to sit there talking soft
nonsense to handsome striplings and posing the company with
quibbles, than to cross spears with a grown Spartan.

_Tyc_. Well, I have heard these stories before, and from
people who had no satirical intent. So I acquit you of slandering
them by way of magnifying your own profession.

But come now, if you don't mind, to the sponger's military
behaviour; and also tell me whether there is any sponging recorded
of the ancients.

_Si_. My dear fellow, the most uneducated of us has surely
heard enough of Homer to know that he makes the best of his heroes
spongers. The great Nestor, whose tongue distilled honeyed speech,
sponged on the King; Achilles was, and was known for, the most
upright of the Greeks in form and in mind; but neither for him, for
Ajax, nor for Diomede, has Agamemnon such admiring praise as for
Nestor. It is not for ten Ajaxes or Achilleses that he prays; no,
Troy would have been taken long ago, if he had had in his host ten
men like--that old sponger. Idomeneus, of Zeus's own kindred, is
also represented in the same relation to Agamemnon.

_Tyc_. I know the passages; but I do not feel sure of the
sense in which they were spongers.

_Si_. Well, recall the lines in which Agamemnon addresses
Idomeneus.

_Tyc_. How do they go?

_Si_.

For thee the cup stands ever full,
Even as for me, whene'er it lists thee drink.