stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.
[Footnote: _Prologue to the Earthly Paradise_.]

Would Plato scoff at such a formulation of the artist's mission? He
would rather condemn it, as fostering illusion and falsehood in men's
minds. But we moderns are perhaps more world-weary, less sanguine about
ideal truth than the ancients. With one of our war poets, we often plead
for "song that turneth toil to rest," [Footnote: Madison Cawein,
_Preludes_.] and agree with Keats that, whether art has any other
justification or not, it has one "great end, to soothe the cares of
man." [Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.]

We are not to imagine that many of our poets are content with the idea
that poetry has so minor a function as this. They play with the thought
of life's possible insignificance and leave it, for idealism is the
breath of life to poets, and their adherence to realism amounts to
suicide. Poetry may be comforting without being illusive. Emerson says,

'Tis the privilege of art
Thus to play its cheerful part
Man on earth to acclimate
And bend the exile to his fate.
[Footnote: _Art_.]

It is not, obviously, Emerson's conception that the poetry which brings
this about falsifies. Like most poets, he indicates that art
accomplishes its end, not merely by obscuring the hideous accidents of
life, but by enabling us to glimpse an ideal element which abides in it,
and is its essence.

Is the essence of things really a spiritual meaning? If so, it seems
strange that Plato should have so belittled the poet's capacity to
render the spiritual meaning in verse. But it is possible that the
artist's view as to the relation of the ideal to the physical does not
precisely square with Plato's. Though poets are so constitutionally
Platonic, in this one respect they are perhaps more truly Aristotelians.
Plato seems to say that ideality is not, as a matter of fact, the
essence of objects. It is a light reflected upon them, as the sun's
light is reflected upon the moon. So he claims that the artist who
portrays life is like one who, drawing a picture of the moon, gives
usonly a map of her craters, and misses entirely the only thing that
gives the moon any meaning, that is, moonlight. But the poet, that lover
of the sensuous, cannot quite accept such a view as this. Ideality is
truly the essence of objects, he avers, though it is overlaid with a
mass of meaningless material. Hence the poet who gives us a
representation of th