led to the common mistake that literature, being mere fiction, a mere "imitation" or representation of reality, cannot possess the quality of truth. It has led even Plato, in spite of his own poetic nature and in spite of his idealistic interpretation of reality, to condemn the poets, with the exception of a small minority, to exile from his ideal State, as liars, who substitute appearance for reality, and keep men away from truth. The poet's world is three removes from reality, he tells us it is the copy of a copy, the shadow of the shadow of the real world. Yet the poet makes us believe his lie, makes us take the picture for the thing itself. Now it is obvious that the world of art and of creative literature is a world of imagination, while the world of science and of descriptive literature is the world of actual experience. It is also obvious that the element of illusion is essential. Yet it is no less true, if not so obvious, that the element of fiction and illusion in literature is but the means by which the artist leads us away from the particular and accidental to the universal and essential aspects of human experience, but the finger-post which points the way from appearance and illusion to reality and truth. If we fail to see this, we make literature a mere amusement, a species of witchery and legerdemain whose only service is to beguile a weary hour or to relax and restore our tired intellectual energies by treating us as children with the child's passion for a story and the child's inexhaustible credulity. Nor can it be denied that this childish state of mind is wonderfully long-lived, and that there is a great deal of so-called "literature" which appeals only to this childish taste; but surely true literature always makes a higher appeal and has a higher value-is always marked by that "high seriousness" of which Matthew Arnold speaks, which leads it to use its illusions in the interests of truth. It was because the poets seemed to Plato to interpret their function as mere amusement, because their only end seemed to be to please-no matter by what devices-that he condemned them as not only a useless but a pernicious element in the State.

This Platonic criticism of poetry, or rather of the poets,

raises the large and difficult question of the relation of the ethical to the æsthetic element in literature-the large and difficult question of the true interpretation of the principle, "Art for art's sake." In the light of what has been already said regarding the essential idealism, and therefore ethical truth, of literature, it is clear that the principle in question cannot mean that literature is non-ethical or indifferent to moral distinctions. Poetic truth and ethical truth cannot conflict; on the contrary, they must be identical. What the principle does mean can only be that the aim of literature, as of all art, is not to inculcate moral truth, or to influence conduct and character, not to teach or preach, but to please; and accordingly that to estimate its value in terms of its moral influence is to apply to it an irrelevant standard of value. Plato's criticism of the poets on account of the demoralising influence of their representations of moral badness, and his demand that they shall be allowed to represent only the good, would mean not merely the limitation, but the annihilation of literature. To restrain the poet or the novelist from the representation of evil as well as good, would be to make impossible his representation of goodness itself. But although the freedom of the literary artist must not be restrained by any intrusion of the thought of the moral influence of his work, although he may not compose his work with a moral purpose, it does not follow that the interests of morality are not safe in his hands. If ethical and literary truth are identical, then, even though evil must be represented as well as good, the influence of good literature cannot be demoralising; and a work that represents only evil is no more entitled to be called good literature than a work that represents only good. It is in the interplay of good and evil that the only meaning of good as well as of evil is discovered. To take a recent illustration, it is surely no less a literary or æsthetic than an ethical defect that, in "The House with the Green Shutters," there is one long monotone of sordid wickedness; as it is at once an æsthetic and an ethical defect in certain recent delineations of the same or similar types of Scottish life and character that they consist of one long

drawn monotone of insipid and untried goodness. "We are not so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab." Yet the objection recurs, the aim of literature being merely to please, its influence must be counter to the interests of morality, unless it is restrained by moral considerations. As Plato puts it, if the poets are allowed to pursue their vocation without let or hindrance, "pleasure and pain will have sovereign power in your State, instead of law and those principles which, by the general consent of all time, are most conformable to reason." But does not this insistence upon the inevitable hedonism of literature, as of art generally, overlook the all-important consideration that its function is not merely the production of pleasure or delight, but of æsthetic pleasure or delight? Aristotle, with fine insight, emphasises this essential objectivity of æsthetic satisfaction. As Professor Butcher expresses his view, "the subjective emotion is deeply grounded in human nature, and thence acquires a kind of objective validity. As in ethics Aristotle assumes a man of moral insight (ó póvipos) to whose trained judgment the appreciation of ethical questions is submitted, and who, in the last resort, becomes 'the standard and the law' of right, so, too, in fine art a man of sound æsthetic instincts (ó Xapieis) is assumed, who is the standard of taste, and to him the final appeal is made. . . . The pleasure that any given work of art affords to him is the end of the art. . . . The state of pleasurable feeling is not an accidental result, but is inherently related to the object which calls it forth." The pleasure in question is, in truth, the appreciation of the beautiful, the satisfaction which the beautiful object yields to the æsthetic sensibility; and the morally beautiful is the good.

Literature, therefore, does teach, although its aim is not to teach, but to delight. While it is true that, in the words of Dryden, "poesy only instructs as it delights," Bacon's words are also true, that "poesy serveth to magnanimity, morality and to delectation," and Sidney's, that its aim is "to teach and to delight" or "delightful teaching." And I fancy it was this view of the poet's mission that Plato had in his

mind as the possible “defense of poesy" when he guarded his sentence of exile with the condition that it was not necessarily final. It was not poetry, after all, but the poets-the false representatives of poetry-that he banished; there was another and a truer conception of poetry which his criticism of the actual poets was intended to call forth. "The sentence of exile is to remain in force against poetry until she has made her defense, either in lyrical or in some other measure;" and "I suppose," he adds, "we shall also allow those of her patrons who are lovers of poetry without being poets, to advocate her cause in prose by maintaining that poetry is not only pleasurable, but also profitable in its bearings upon governments, and upon human life: and we shall listen favorably. For we shall be gainers, I presume, if poetry can be proved to be profitable as well as pleasurable."

There is one other criticism which Plato makes on poetry, a criticism which is often made on literature in general, and especially on the novel, from the ethical point of view: namely, that its appeal being to emotion rather than to reason and will, its influence is inevitably subversive of the true relation of reason to emotion, and that, habituating as it does. both the author and his readers to life in the world of imagination, and cultivating in them a bad habit of emotionalism which never finds expression in action, it unfits them for action in the real world. Aristotle's answer is that literature educates the emotions by purifying and ennobling them, by idealising or spiritualising them. The criticism rests in part upon the false or absolute antithesis, already discussed, between idealism and realism, and in part upon a mistaken and puritanic distrust of emotion. The criticism may be in large measure true of the average novel or play; it may be true also of that excessive interest in art itself which implies deficiency of interest in the practical life and failure in ordinary duty; it is not true of any novel or play which is entitled to the name of literature, or of that sane interest in literature which recognises that, while it ministers to the highest ethical ends, it is only one among other elements of the true life of man, and ought to stand in organic and harmonious relation to all the rest.

The antithesis between literature or art, on the one hand, and life or action, on the other, is no less superficial than the antithesis between action and thought. Even Sir Walter Scott was haunted by this idea, and was in the habit of contrasting the greatness of action with the triviality of literature, or the mere representation of action. And Plato, with all his appreciation of the life of thought and depreciation of the merely practical life, argues with keen humor that if the poets had been fit for any kind of practical service they would never have been allowed to idle away their lives in writing poems, if they had been of any use to their fellows, they would never have been allowed to practice the useless art of poetry. "Is it conceivable that, if Homer and Hesiod had been really capable of improving men in virtue, they should have been suffered by their contemporaries to travel about reciting?" But surely if we believe in the practical power of ideals, and still more if we believe in the superior value of spiritual to merely material ends, we must admit that, though the sphere of literature is not any more than that of science and philosophy, itself the sphere of action, yet the man of letters, like the man of science, is far from useless, even from the point of view of action, and that the distinction between the useful arts and those which are not useful does not hold when we take into the account those higher uses which have reference to the higher ends of human life. To the best life of the nation and of the individual literature is an indispensable minister; it is a shallow utilitarianism which discovers no utility in it. We may confidently share the conviction of Matthew Arnold that "good literature”—the literature which is characterised by "high seriousness" and a true idealism-"never will lose currency with the world, in spite of momentary appearances; it never will lose supremacy. Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not, indeed, by the world's deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper, by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity." JAMES SETH.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH.