re engrossing
and overpowering to the mind than formerly. The illusion of the feelings
commonly called love, has hitherto been the inspiring influence of
modern poetry and romance, and has exercised a humanizing if not a
strengthening influence on the world. But may not the stimulus which
love has given to fancy be some day exhausted? The modern English novel
which is the most popular of all forms of reading is not more than a
century or two old: will the tale of love a hundred years hence, after
so many thousand variations of the same theme, be still received with
unabated interest?

Art cannot claim to be on a level with philosophy or religion, and may
often corrupt them. It is possible to conceive a mental state in which
all artistic representations are regarded as a false and imperfect
expression, either of the religious ideal or of the philosophical ideal.
The fairest forms may be revolting in certain moods of mind, as is
proved by the fact that the Mahometans, and many sects of Christians,
have renounced the use of pictures and images. The beginning of a great
religion, whether Christian or Gentile, has not been 'wood or stone,'
but a spirit moving in the hearts of men. The disciples have met in a
large upper room or in 'holes and caves of the earth'; in the second or
third generation, they have had mosques, temples, churches, monasteries.
And the revival or reform of religions, like the first revelation
of them, has come from within and has generally disregarded external
ceremonies and accompaniments.

But poetry and art may also be the expression of the highest truth and
the purest sentiment. Plato himself seems to waver between two opposite
views--when, as in the third Book, he insists that youth should be
brought up amid wholesome imagery; and again in Book X, when he banishes
the poets from his Republic. Admitting that the arts, which some of us
almost deify, have fallen short of their higher aim, we must admit on
the other hand that to banish imagination wholly would be suicidal as
well as impossible. For nature too is a form of art; and a breath of
the fresh air or a single glance at the varying landscape would in an
instant revive and reillumine the extinguished spark of poetry in the
human breast. In the lower stages of civilization imagination more than
reason distinguishes man from the animals; and to banish art would be
to banish thought, to banish language, to banish the expression of
all truth. No