An ideal of the good life, if it is to have the internal coherence and
the organic force of a true ideal, _must inevitably be æsthetic_. There
is no other power than our æsthetic intuition by which we can imagine or
conceive it; we can express it only in æsthetic terms. We say, for
instance, the good life is that in which man has achieved a harmony of
the diverse elements in his soul. For the good life, we know
instinctively, is one of our human absolutes. It is not good with
reference to any end outside itself. A man does not live the good life
because he is a good citizen; but he is a good citizen because he lives
the good life. And here we touch the secret of the most magnificently
human of all books that has ever been written--Plato's _Republic_. In
the _Republic_ the good life and the life of the good citizen are
identified; but the citizenship is not of an earthly but of an ideal
city, whose proportions, like the duties of its citizens, are determined
by the æsthetic intuition. Plato's philosophy is æsthetic through and
through, and because it is æsthetic it is the most human, the most
permanently pregnant of all philosophies. Much labour has been spent on
the examination of the identity which Plato established between the good
and the beautiful. It is labour lost, for that identity is axiomatic,
absolute, irreducible. The Greeks knew by instinct that it is so, and in
their common speech the word for a gentleman was the _kalos kagathos_,
the beautiful-good.

This is why we have to go back to the Greeks for the principles of art
and criticism, and why only those critics who have returned to bathe
themselves in the life-giving source have made enduring contributions to
criticism. They alone are--let us not say philosophic critics
but--critics indeed. Their approach to life and their approach to art
are the same; to them, and to them alone, life and art are one. The