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A further objection which Plato makes to poetry and the imitative

arts is that they excite the emotions. Here the modern reader

will be disposed to introduce a distinction which appears to have

escaped him. For the emotions are neither bad nor good in

themselves, and are not most likely to be controlled by the

attempt to eradicate them, but by the moderate indulgence of

them. And the vocation of art is to present thought in the form

of feeling, to enlist the feelings on the side of reason, to

inspire even for a moment courage or resignation; perhaps to

suggest a sense of infinity and eternity in a way which mere

language is incapable of attaining. True, the same power which in

the purer age of art embodies gods and heroes only, may be made

to express the voluptuous image of a Corinthian courtezan. But

this only shows that art, like other outward things, may be

turned to good and also to evil, and is not more closely

connected with the higher than with the lower part of the soul.