olitics as a "moral equivalent" for evil, a medium by which
barbarous lusts find civilized expression. It is, too, an ideal for
labor. But my purpose here is not to attempt any adequate description of
the services of art. It is enough to note that literature in particular
elaborates our insight into human life, and, therefore, enables us to
center our institutions more truly.

Ibsen discovers a soul in Nora: the discovery is absorbed into the common
knowledge of the age. Other Noras discover their own souls; the Helmers
all about us begin to see the person in the doll. Plays and novels have
indeed an overwhelming political importance, as the "moderns" have
maintained. But it lies not in the preaching of a doctrine or the
insistence on some particular change in conduct. That is a shallow and
wasteful use of the resources of art. For art can open up the springs
from which conduct flows. Its genuine influence is on what Wells calls
the "hinterland," in a quickening of the sense of life.

Art can really penetrate where most of us can only observe. "I look and I
think I see," writes Bergson, "I listen and I think I hear, I examine
myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart.... (But) my
senses and my consciousness ... give me no more than a practical
simplification of reality ... in short, we do not see the actual things
themselves; in most cases we confine ourselves to reading the labels
affixed to them." Who has not known this in thinking of politics? We talk
of poverty and forget poor people; we make rules for vagrancy--we forget
the vagrant. Some of our best-intentioned political schemes, like reform
colonies and scientific jails, turn out to be inhuman tyrannies just
because our imagination does not penetrate the sociological label. "We
move amidst generalities and symbols ... we live in a zone midway between
things and ourselves, external to things, external also to ourselves."
This is what works of art help to correct: "Behind the commonplace,
conventional expression that both reveals and conceals an individual
mental state, it is the emotion, the original mood, to which they attain
in its undefiled essence."

This directness of vision fertilizes thought. Without a strong artistic
tradition, the life and so the politics of a nation sink into a barren
routine. A country populated by pure logicians and mathematical
scientists would, I believe, produce few inventions. For creation, even
of scientific tr