ld.

A further objection which Plato makes to poetry and the imitative
arts is that they excite the emotions. Here the modern reader will be
disposed to introduce a distinction which appears to have escaped him.
For the emotions are neither bad nor good in themselves, and are not
most likely to be controlled by the attempt to eradicate them, but by
the moderate indulgence of them. And the vocation of art is to present
thought in the form of feeling, to enlist the feelings on the side of
reason, to inspire even for a moment courage or resignation; perhaps to
suggest a sense of infinity and eternity in a way which mere language is
incapable of attaining. True, the same power which in the purer age of
art embodies gods and heroes only, may be made to express the voluptuous
image of a Corinthian courtezan. But this only shows that art, like
other outward things, may be turned to good and also to evil, and is not
more closely connected with the higher than with the lower part of the
soul. All imitative art is subject to certain limitations, and therefore
necessarily partakes of the nature of a compromise. Something of ideal
truth is sacrificed for the sake of the representation, and something in
the exactness of the representation is sacrificed to the ideal. Still,
works of art have a permanent element; they idealize and detain the
passing thought, and are the intermediates between sense and ideas.

In the present stage of the human mind, poetry and other forms of
fiction may certainly be regarded as a good. But we can also imagine the
existence of an age in which a severer conception of truth has either
banished or transformed them. At any rate we must admit that they hold
a different place at different periods of the world's history. In the
infancy of mankind, poetry, with the exception of proverbs, is the
whole of literature, and the only instrument of intellectual culture; in
modern times she is the shadow or echo of her former self, and appears
to have a precarious existence. Milton in his day doubted whether an
epic poem was any longer possible. At the same time we must remember,
that what Plato would have called the charms of poetry have been partly
transferred to prose; he himself (Statesman) admits rhetoric to be the
handmaiden of Politics, and proposes to find in the strain of law (Laws)
a substitute for the old poets. Among ourselves the creative power seems
often to be growing weaker, and scientific fact to be mo