asing
the disorder and instability of life. Or it may serve to exaggerate
the appeal of the present interest, until it becomes ungovernable and
obscures ulterior interests. This tendency to promote dissoluteness is
the most serious charge which Plato brings against the arts. After
referring to the unseemly hilarity to which men are incited by the
comic stage, he adds:

And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other
affections, of desire and pain and pleasure which are held to be
inseparable from every action--in all of them poetry feeds and waters
the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule instead of
ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the happiness and
virtue of mankind.[15]

In an earlier passage Plato discusses types of music in relation to
action, the Lydian which is sorrowful, and the Ionian which is
indolent; showing that selection must be made if men are not to be at
the mercy of random influences. It is not necessary, as Plato would
have it, to banish Lydian and Ionian harmonies from society; but within
one's personal economy, within the republic of one's own soul, one must
prefer with Plato those stirrings of the emotions which support and
re-enforce one's moral purpose:

Of the harmonies I know nothing, but I want to have one warlike, which
will sound the word or note {203} which a brave man utters in the hour
of danger and stem resolve, or when his cause is failing, and he is
going to wounds or death or is overtaken by some other evil, and at
every such crisis meets fortune with calmness and endurance; and
another to be used by him in times of peace and freedom of action, when
there is no pressure of necessity, and he is seeking to persuade God by
prayer, or man by instruction and advice. . . . These two harmonies I
ask you to leave: the strain of necessity and the strain of freedom,
the strain of the unfortunate and the strain of the fortunate, the
strain of courage and the strain of temperance; these, I say, leave.[16]

VII

Where art is not employed directly to incite action, it may still be
indirectly conducive to action through _fixing_ ideas and inclining the
sentiments towards them. This is probably its most important moral
function. The ideas which are of the greatest significance for conduct
are ideas which receive no adequate embodiment in the objects of
nature. Every broad purpose and developed ideal requires the exercise
of the