f political discovery, and the
greatest era of Empire-making. The men who made Athens and the men
who made Rome would have disputed (I fear somewhat contemptuously) the
axiom on which my friend the West Country member builds his case.
They held it for axiomatic that the artist and man of letters ought
not to work in cloistral isolation, removed from public affairs, and
indifferent to them; that on the contrary they are direct servants of
their State, and have a peculiar call to express themselves on matters of
public moment. To convince you that I am not advancing any pet theory of
my own let me present it in the words of a grave and judicious student,
Mr. W. J. Courthope, late Professor of Poetry at Oxford:--

"The idea of the State lay at the root of every Greek conception of
art and morals. For though, in the view of the philosopher, the
virtue of the good citizen was not always necessarily identical with
the virtue of the individual man, and though, in the city of Athens
at all events, a large amount of life was possible to the individual
apart from public interests, yet it is none the less true that the
life of the individual in every Greek city was in reality moulded by
the customary life, tradition and character, in one intranslatable
word, by the _ethos_ of the State. Out of this native soil grew
that recognised, though not necessarily public, system of education
(_politike paideia_ ), consisting of reading and writing, music
and gymnastic, which Plato and Aristotle themselves accepted as the
basis of the constitution of the State. But this preliminary
education was only the threshold to a subsequent system of political
training, of which, in Athens at least, every citizen had an
opportunity of availing himself by his right to participate in public
affairs; so that, in the view of Pericles, politics themselves were
an instrument of individual refinement. 'The magistrates,' said he,
in his great funeral oration, 'who discharge public trusts, fulfil
their domestic duties also; the private citizen, while engaged in
professional business, has competent knowledge of public affairs; for
we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof from these latter
not as harmless, but as useless. Moreover, we always hear and
pronounce on public matters when discussed by our leaders, or perhaps
strik