f British brutality, destined further
to demoralise the nation; and yet the scandal may pass. That black
tragedy reflects not very pretty manners, but puppets exercise no
suasion over men.

[Sidenote: His deeper moral objections.]

To his supersensitive censure of myths Plato added strictures upon music
and the drama: to excite passions idly was to enervate the soul. Only
martial or religious strains should be heard in the ideal republic.
Furthermore, art put before us a mere phantom of the good. True
excellence was the function things had in use; the horseman knew the
bridle's value and essence better than the artisan did who put it
together; but a painted bridle would lack even this relation to utility.
It would rein in no horse, and was an impertinent sensuous reduplication
of what, even when it had material being, was only an instrument and a
means.

This reasoning has been little understood, because Platonists so soon
lost sight of their master's Socratic habit and moral intent. They
turned the good into an existence, making it thereby unmeaning. Plato's
dialectic, if we do not thus abolish the force of its terms, is
perfectly cogent: representative art has indeed no utility, and, if the
good has been identified with efficiency in a military state, it can
have no justification. Plato's Republic was avowedly a fallen state, a
church militant, coming sadly short of perfection; and the joy which
Plato as much as any one could feel in sensuous art he postponed, as a
man in mourning might, until life should be redeemed from baseness.

[Sidenote: Their rightness.]

Never have art and beauty received a more glowing eulogy than is implied
in Plato's censure. To him nothing was beautiful that was not beautiful
to the core, and he would have thought to insult art--the remodelling of
nature by reason--if he had given it a narrower field than all practice.
As an architect who had fondly designed something impossible, or which
might not please in execution, would at once erase it from the plan and
abandon it for the love of perfect beauty and perfect art, so Plato
wished to erase from pleasing appearance all that, when its operation
was completed, would bring discord into the world. This was done in the
ultimate interest of art and beauty, which in a cultivated mind are
inseparable from the vitally good. It is mere barbarism to feel that a
thing is aesthetically good but morally evil, or morally good but hateful
to percep