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But poetry and art may also be the expression of the highest

truth and the purest sentiment. Plato himself seems to waver

between two opposite views-when, as in the third Book, he insists

that youth should be brought up amid wholesome imagery; and again

in Book X, when he banishes the poets from his Republic.

Admitting that the arts, which some of us almost deify, have

fallen short of their higher aim, we must admit on the other hand

that to banish imagination wholly would be suicidal as well as

impossible. For nature too is a form of art; and a breath of the

fresh air or a single glance at the varying landscape would in an

instant revive and reillumine the extinguished spark of poetry in

the human breast. In the lower stages of civilization imagination

more than reason distinguishes man from the animals; and to

banish art would be to banish thought, to banish language, to

banish the expression of all truth.