eople who ever lived the most absorbingly
interested in the problems of life, and judged everything by a
standard of beauty. The Jews, of course, at least in their early
history, had the same fiery interest in questions of conduct; but it
would be as absurd to deny to Plato an interest in morals as to
withhold the title of artist from Isaiah and the author of the Book
of Job!

Plato, as is well known, took a somewhat whimsical view of the work of
the poet. He said that he must exclude the poets from his ideal State,
because they were the prophets of unreality. But he was thinking of a
kind of man very different from the men whom we call poets. He thought
of the poet as a man who served a patron, and tried to gloze over his
patron's tyranny and baseness, under false terms of glory and majesty;
or else he thought of dramatists, and considered them to be men who
for the sake of credit and money played skilfully upon the sentimental
emotions of ordinary people; and he fought shy of the writers who used
tragic passions for the amusement of a theatre. Aristotle disagreed
with Plato about this, and held that poetry was not exactly moral
teaching, but that it disposed the mind to consider moral problems as
interesting. He said that in looking on at a play, a spectator
suffered, so to speak, by deputy, but all the same learned directly,
if unconsciously, the beauty of virtue. When we come to our own
Elizabethans, there is no evidence that in their plays and poetry they
thought about morals at all. No one has any idea whether Shakespeare
had any religion, or what it was; and he above all great writers that
ever lived seems to have taken an absolutely impersonal view of the
sins and affections of men and women. No one is scouted or censured or
condemned in Shakespeare; one sees and feels the point of view of his
villains and rogues; one feels with them that they somehow could
hardly have done otherwise than they did; and to effect that is
perhaps the crown of art.

But nowadays the poet, with whom one may include some few novelists,
is really a very independent person. I am not now speaking of those
who write basely and crudely, to please a popular taste. They have
their reward; and after all they are little more than mountebanks, the
end of whose show is to gather up pence in the ring.

But the poet in verse is listened to by few people, unless he is very
great indeed; and even so his reward is apt to be intangible and
scanty