constructive imagination. But the immediate images of the
imagination are fluctuating and transient, and need to be supported
through being embodied in some enduring medium. Thus monuments serve
as emblems of nationality; or, as in the thirteenth century, all the
arts may unite to represent and suggest the objects of religious {204}
faith. Poetry and song have always served as means of incarnating the
more delicate shadings of a racial ideal; and every man would be a poet
if he could, and trace the outline of that hope which stirs him and
which is not the hope of any other man.

But it must be made clear that art does more than make ideas definite
and permanent. It inclines the sentiments towards them. The great
power of art lies in its function of making ideas alluring. Now
whatever is loved or admired is, in the long run, sought out, imitated,
and served. Understanding this, the ancient Athenians sought to
educate the passions, and employed music to that end. This is
Aristotle's justification of such a course:

Since then music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and
loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much
concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right
judgments, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble
actions. Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness,
and also of courage and temperance and of virtues and vices in general,
which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know from our
own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a
change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representations
is not far removed from the same feeling about realities.[17]

The simple and incontestable truth of these statements is a standing
condemnation of the {205} usual environment of youth. Virtue consists,
as much as it ever did, "in rejoicing and loving and hating aright";
but the guidance of these sentiments to their proper objects is left
almost wholly to chance. It is by making the good also beautiful, by
illuminating the modes of virtue with jewels, and endearing them to the
imagination, that the moral reason may be re-enforced from early days
by high spirits. It should be a task of education, using this means
either in the home or the school or the city at large, to inculcate a
right habit of admiration.

If art is to serve a moral end in fixing and embellishing ideas, it
mu