ind of a man is more significant than
his outward gestures. To make those gestures significant the art of the
actor must be called into play. So to make the outward event of history
significant the poet's art is needed. Therefore a criticism which is
based on the Greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the place
of sovereignty in its scheme of values. That Plato himself did not do
this was due to his having misunderstood the nature of that process of
'imitation' in which art consists; but only the superficial readers of
Plato--and a good many readers deserve no better name--will conclude
from the fact that he rejected art that his attitude was not
fundamentally aesthetic. Not only is the _Republic_ itself one of the
greatest 'imitations,' one of the most subtle and profound works of art
ever created, but it would also be true to say that Plato cleared the
way for a true conception of art. In reality he rejected not art, but
false art; and it only remained for Aristotle to discern the nature of
the relation between artistic 'imitation' and the ideal for the Platonic
system to be complete and four-square, a perpetual inspiration and an
everlasting foundation for art and the criticism of art.

Art, then, is the revelation of the ideal in human life. As the ideal is
active and organic so must art itself be. The ideal is never achieved,
therefore the process of revealing it is creative in the truest sense of
the word. More than that, only by virtue of the artist in him can man
appreciate or imagine the ideal at all. To discern it is essentially the
work of divination or intuition. The artist divines the end at which
human life is aiming; he makes men who are his characters completely
expressive of themselves, which no actual man ever has been. If he works
on a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive of
himself. That, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresses
himself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation.
He needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may be
tolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, which
are so various that the attempt to express them through the _persona_ of
himself would inevitably end in confusion. That is why the great poetic
genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as often
as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical.

Moreover, every act of intuition or divination o