Arts and Letters

The name with which one most often associates that of Paul Shorey is Plato's. The first product of Shorey's enthusiasm and study, which won for him his doctorate in the University of Munich and carried him to a "position of world authority" was a thesis under the title De Platonis Idearum Doctrina. His last great contribution to the world's scholarship was his book entitled What Plato Said. In an airplane journey to California nearly two years ago I carried with me this volume and despite the cotton in my ears I could hear Shorey repeating passages of Plato across the continent or making incisive comment upon them. And who would not be a Platonist in heights where earthly things become, as Plato contended, "shadows of ideas laid up in the House of God"?

I assume that Shorey must have been first of all a mathematician or a geometrician, for it is remembered that Plato had this inscription placed upon his door: Ἀγεωμέτρητος μηδεὶς εἰσίτω ("Let no one who is not a geometrician enter"). But if Shorey was not, I am sure that could Plato but have heard his fine voice, speaking his own tongue with marvelous sense of rhythm, reading aloud the hexameters of Homer, the lyrics of the dramatists or the lyric poets, he would not have required of him even the demonstration of the Pythagorean proposition. Dr. Shorey was like Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford in that he loved above all to teach, but the books that Shorey had at his beddes' head were the books not of Aristotle but of Plato. He was himself a Platonist in the definition of Platonism that I recently came upon in a book by an English scholar:

Platonism is a mood of one who has a curious eye for the endless variety of the visible and temporal world and a fine sense of its beauties, yet is haunted by the presence of an invisible and eternal world behind (or, when the mood is most pressing, within) the visible and temporal world, sustaining both it and himself, but inwardly lived by him as that with which in moments of ecstasy, or even habitually, he is become one.

Shorey was born in the Middle West town of Davenport, Iowa, was graduated from Harvard and was admitted to the bar in Chicago. But the practice of law made little appeal to him and he went to Germany to study. He himself said of Gildersleeve (in his address before the Academy eight years ago) what another might say of him: that he "was not dominated by the erudition of Germany."

He was, when he pleased, a scholar of the German type, but he never succumbed to the weakness of its more recent developments, the pyramiding of hypotheses and the suppositing of conjectures by misconstruing Greek. He knew Greek too well for that.

Shorey was one of that group of brilliant scholars whom Harper gathered about him in refounding the University of Chicago. He had spent several years in teaching philosophy and Latin at Bryn Mawr (and he later dedicated an edition of Horace to its alumnae), but to the Greek he gave himself to the end of his days, ranging "sympathetically and exactly," as one of his peers in learning has said, however, over the entire field of humanistic culture (both ancient and modern) which had its first home in Greece, where, as Dean Woodbridge has said, that "peculiar kind of curiosity" which we call "philosophy" began.

President Norlin, himself one of the foremost of Greek scholars and at the same time president of a great State University, the translator of the writings of Isocrates (who was called the "Old Man Eloquent" and the first great publicist of his day), speaking at the university service in tribute to Shorey, said that while he had himself sat under many distinguished scholars and lecturers both in this country and abroad, Shorey was the greatest teacher he had ever known. He had a catholicity of mind, a wealth of incidental allusions of the best thought in the world (he had a prodigious selective memory and a genius in mastery of languages: French, Greek, Latin, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish) and a "sparkling wit." We remember especially his charming words at the Virgilian celebration, when he began his address by saying: "We are met to celebrate the abiding power of poetry." He gave ever a sense of the "great fellowship of the human spirit through the ages." Here is his last will and testament concerning humanism:

The study of the human spirit that creates and dissolves all systems abides. And the study of the human spirit is not planetary or biological evolution or the anthropology of the pre-human man. It is neither the psychology of the laboratory nor the metaphysics of the school; it is neither science nor pseudo-science—it is humanism.

The prayer of Socrates must have daily been his:

Help that I may prosper in the inner man
And grant that what I have or yet may win
Of those the outer things may be akin
And constantly at peace with those within.
May I regard the wise, the rich, and care
Myself for no more gold, as my earth-share,
Than he who's of an honest heart can bear.

Like the scholar in Browning's The Grammarian's Funeral, he was "working against time." Like him who settled Hoti's business, properly based Oun and gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, when death was creeping toward his heart ("Dead from the waist down"), so Shorey worked on even after the warning stroke came. There is a memory of the death of Socrates, as related by Plato, in Norlin's tribute to him:

O heart of gold, grown suddenly cold,
It was not time to go.

His last public address was a lay sermon spoken in the chapel of the University of Chicago, afterward published in the Atlantic. Here is his last look back across the ages and then into the age about him:

There were eloquent immoralists at Athens. There were festivals in which instincts were unleashed and human nature sought relief from the restraint of conventional moralizing. There were comedies which travestied and made a mock of the gods. But literature as a whole was sane, and the greater classical writers were, as a whole, on the side of the angels. But I think any sober observer would be justified in saying that never in any literature has there been such a carnival of unreason and immoralism as that which disports itself in the print that most of us have been reading in the past twenty or thirty years and in the films that children have been looking at.

I can go no farther in this fragment of a tribute to his memory. So we leave him as he did those who bore Browning's grammarian to his high sepulture:

Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects.