r, _I_ have already given
years, not a few, to each of them; and what I try to tell _you_ now will
be only so much as is absolutely necessary to set our work on a clear
foundation. You may not, at present, see the necessity for _any_
foundation, and may think that I ought to put pencil and paper in your
hands at once. On that point I must simply answer, "Trust me a little
while," asking you however also to remember, that--irrespectively of any
consideration of last or first--my true function here is not that of
your master in painting, or sculpture, or pottery; but to show you what
it is that makes any of these arts _fine_, or the contrary of _fine_:
essentially _good_, or essentially _base_. You need not fear my not
being practical enough for you; all the industry you choose to give me,
I will take; but far the better part of what you may gain by such
industry would be lost, if I did not first lead you to see what every
form of art-industry intends, and why some of it is justly called right,
and some wrong.

35. It would be well if you were to look over, with respect to this
matter, the end of the second, and what interests you of the third, book
of Plato's Republic; noting therein these two principal things, of which
I have to speak in this and my next lecture: first, the power which
Plato so frankly, and quite justly, attributes to art, of _falsifying_
our conceptions of Deity: which power he by fatal error partly implies
may be used wisely for good, and that the feigning is only wrong when it
is of evil, "+ean tis me kalos pseudetai+;" and you may trace
through all that follows the beginning of the change of Greek ideal art
into a beautiful expediency, instead of what it was in the days of
Pindar, the statement of what "could not be otherwise than so." But, in
the second place, you will find in those books of the Polity, stated
with far greater accuracy of expression than our English language
admits, the essential relations of art to morality; the sum of these
being given in one lovely sentence, which, considering that we have
to-day grace done us by fair companionship,[3] you will pardon me for
translating. "_Must it be then only with our poets that we insist they
shall either create for us the image of a noble morality, or among us
create none? or shall we not also keep guard over all other workers for
the people, and forbid them to make what is ill-customed, and
unrestrained, and ungentle, and without order or