ary rule of civic existence,
tormenting itself to disturb others.

[Sidenote: Plato's discriminating view.]

Plato seems to have exaggerated the havoc which these poetic dragons can
work in the world. They are in fact more often absurd than venomous, and
no special legislation is needed to abolish them. They soon die quietly
of universal neglect. The poetry that ordinarily circulates among a
people is poetry of a secondary and conventional sort that propagates
established ideas in trite metaphors. Popular poets are the parish
priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since
converted public. Plato's quarrel was not so much with poetic art as
with ancient myth and emotional laxity: he was preaching a crusade
against the established church. For naturalistic deities he wished to
substitute moral symbols; for the joys of sense, austerity and
abstraction. To proscribe Homer was a marked way of protesting against
the frivolous reigning ideals. The case is much as if we should now
proscribe the book of Genesis, on account of its mythical cosmogony, or
in order to proclaim the philosophic truth that the good, being an
adequate expression to be attained by creation, could not possibly have
preceded it or been its source. We might admit at the same time that
Genesis contains excellent images and that its poetic force is
remarkable; so that if serious misunderstanding could be avoided the
censor might be glad to leave it in everybody's hands. Plato in some
such way recognised that Homer was poetical and referred his works,
mischievous as they might prove incidentally, to divine inspiration.
Poetic madness, like madness in prophecy or love, bursts the body of
things to escape from it into some ideal; and even the Homeric world,
though no model for a rational state, was a cheerful heroic vision,
congenial to many early impulses and dreams of the mind.

[Sidenote: Explosive and pregnant expression.]

Homer, indeed, was no primitive poet; he was a consummate master, the
heir to generations of discipline in both life and art. This appears in
his perfect prosody, in his limpid style, in his sense for proportion,
his abstentions, and the frank pathos of his portraits and principles,
in which there is nothing gross, subjective, or arbitrary. The
inspirations that came to him never carried him into crudeness or
absurdity. Every modern poet, though the world he describes may be more
refined in spots and more elabor