ics (being in
these respects far inferior to the second); while the third of them is
found (though a fancy of the hour) to be framed upon real dialectical
principles. But dialectic is not rhetoric; nothing on that subject is to
be found in the endless treatises of rhetoric, however prolific in hard
names. When Plato has sufficiently put them to the test of ridicule he
touches, as with the point of a needle, the real error, which is the
confusion of preliminary knowledge with creative power. No attainments
will provide the speaker with genius; and the sort of attainments which
can alone be of any value are the higher philosophy and the power of
psychological analysis, which is given by dialectic, but not by the
rules of the rhetoricians.

In this latter portion of the Dialogue there are many texts which may
help us to speak and to think. The names dialectic and rhetoric are
passing out of use; we hardly examine seriously into their nature and
limits, and probably the arts both of speaking and of conversation have
been unduly neglected by us. But the mind of Socrates pierces through
the differences of times and countries into the essential nature of man;
and his words apply equally to the modern world and to the Athenians of
old. Would he not have asked of us, or rather is he not asking of us,
Whether we have ceased to prefer appearances to reality? Let us take
a survey of the professions to which he refers and try them by his
standard. Is not all literature passing into criticism, just as Athenian
literature in the age of Plato was degenerating into sophistry and
rhetoric? We can discourse and write about poems and paintings, but we
seem to have lost the gift of creating them. Can we wonder that few
of them 'come sweetly from nature,' while ten thousand reviewers (mala
murioi) are engaged in dissecting them? Young men, like Phaedrus, are
enamoured of their own literary clique and have but a feeble sympathy
with the master-minds of former ages. They recognize 'a POETICAL
necessity in the writings of their favourite author, even when he boldly
wrote off just what came in his head.' They are beginning to think that
Art is enough, just at the time when Art is about to disappear from the
world. And would not a great painter, such as Michael Angelo, or a great
poet, such as Shakespeare, returning to earth, 'courteously rebuke'
us--would he not say that we are putting 'in the place of Art the
preliminaries of Art,' confusing Ar