of perception into desirous minds, to set love and hope
and yearning to music, to inspire anxious hearts with the sense that
there is something immensely large, tender, and significant behind it
all! That is what we need to be assured of--our own significance, our
own share in the inheritance of joy; and a poet can teach us to wait,
to expect, to arise, to adore, when the circumstances of our lives are
wrapped in mist and soaked with dripping rain. Perhaps that is the
greatest thing which poetry does for us, to reassure us, to enlighten
us, to send us singing on our way, to bid us trust in God even though
He is concealed behind calamity and disaster, behind grief and
heaviness, misinterpreted to us by philosophers and priests, and
horribly belied by the wrongful dealings of men.

VI

ART AND MORALITY

There is a perpetual debate going on--one of those moulting
shuttlecocks that serve to make one's battledore give out a merry
sound--about the relation of art to morals, and whether the artist or
the poet ought to attempt to _teach_ anything. It makes a good kind of
debate, because it is conducted in large terms, to which the
disputants attach private meanings. The answer is a very simple one.
It is that art and morality are only beauty realised in different
regions; and as to whether the artist ought to attempt to teach
anything, that may be summarily answered by the simple dictum that no
artist ought ever to attempt to teach anything, with which must be
combined the fact that no one who is serious about anything can
possibly help teaching, whether he wishes or no!

High art and high morality are closely akin, because they are both but
an eager following of the law of beauty; but the artist follows it in
visible and tangible things, and the moralist follows it in the
conduct and relations of life. Artists and moralists must be for ever
condemned to misunderstand each other, because the votary of any art
cannot help feeling that it is the one thing worth doing in the world;
and the artist whose soul is set upon fine hues and forms thinks that
conduct must take care of itself, and that it is a tiresome business
to analyse and formulate it; while the moralist who loves the beauty
of virtue passionately, will think of the artist as a child who plays
with his toys, and lets the real emotions of life go streaming past.

This is a subject upon which it is as well to hear the Greeks, because
the Greeks were of all p