discover the "one beautiful," [Footnote:
Republic, VI, 507B.]--that is, they are ravished by the beauty of the
senses, rather than by the beauty of the ideal.

Possibly this is true. We have had, in recent verse, a sympathetic
expression of the final step in Plato's ascent to absolute beauty, hence
to absolute virtue. It is significant, however, that this verse is in
the nature of a farewell to verse writing. In _The Symbol Seduces,_
"A. E." exclaims,

I leave
For Beauty, Beauty's rarest flower,
For Truth, the lips that ne'er deceive;
For Love, I leave Love's haunted bower.

But this is exactly what the poet, as poet, cannot do. It may be, as
Plato declared, that he is missing the supreme value of life by clinging
to the "many beautiful," instead of the "one beautiful," but if he does
not do so, all the colour of his poetical garment falls away from him,
and he becomes pure philosopher. There is an infinite promise in the
imperfection of the physical world that fascinates the poet. Life is to
him "a dome of many colored glass" that reveals, yet stains, "the white
radiance of eternity." If it were possible for him to gaze upon beauty
apart from her sensuous embodiment, it is doubtful if he would find her
ravishing.

This is only to say that there is no escaping the fundamental aesthetic
problem. Is the artist the imitator of the physical world, or the
revealer of the spiritual world? He is both, inevitably, if he is a
great poet. Hence there is a duality in his moral life. If one aspect of
his genius causes him to be rapt away from earthly things, in
contemplation of the heavenly vision, the other aspect no less demands
that he live, with however pure a standard, in the turmoil of earthly
passions. In the period which we have under discussion, it is easy to
separate the two types and choose between them. Enthusiasts may,
according to their tastes, laud the poet of Byronic worldliness or of
Shelleyan otherworldliness. But, of course, this is only because this
time boasts of no artist of first rank. When one considers the
preeminent names in the history of poetry, it is not so easy to make the
disjunction. If the gift of even so great a poet as Milton was
compatible with his developing one side of his genius only, we yet feel
that Milton is a great poet with limitations, and cannot quite concede
to him equal rank with Shakespeare, or Dante, in whom the hybrid nature
of the artist