t of the Celtic poet who wrote:

"One man with a dream at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown,
And three with a new song's measure,
Can trample an empire down.

"We, in the ages lying,
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
We o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth,
For each age is a dream that, is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth."[1]

[Footnote 1: O'Shaughnessy: _Ode to the Music-Makers_.]

Many, therefore, who have reflected upon art--Plato first
and chiefly--have insisted that art must be used to express
only those ideas and emotions which when acted upon would
have beneficent social consequences. Only those stories are
to be told, those pictures to be painted, those songs to be sung,
which contribute to the welfare of the state. Many artists
have similarly felt a Puritanical responsibility; they have told
only those tales which could be pointed with a moral. The
supreme example of this dedication of art to a moral purpose
is found in the Middle Ages, when all beauty of architecture,
painting, and much of literature and drama, was pervaded, as
it was inspired, with the Christian message. Later Milton
writes at the beginning of _Paradise Lost_:

"... What in me is dark,
Illumine, what is low--raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."[2]

[Footnote 2: Milton: _Paradise Lost_, book I, lines 22-26.]

In a sense, the supreme achievements of creative genius
have been notable instances of the expression of great moral
or religious or social ideals. Lucretius's _On the Nature of
Things_ is the noblest and most passionate extant rendering
of the materialistic conception of life. Goethe's _Faust_
expresses in epic magnificence a whole romantic philosophy
of endless exploration and infinite desire. Dante's _Divine
Comedy_ sums up in a single magnificent epic the spirit and
meaning of the mediaeval point of view. As Henry Osborn
Taylor writes of it:

Yet even the poem itself was a climax long led up to. The power
of its feeling had been preparing in the conceptions, even in the
reasonings, which through the centuries had been gaining ardour as
they became part of the entire natures of men and women. Thus
had mediaeval thought become emotionalized and plastic and l