the ideal truth. And in a similar spirit he declares in the Gorgias that
the stately muse of tragedy is a votary of pleasure and not of truth. In
modern times we almost ridicule the idea of poetry admitting of a moral.
The poet and the prophet, or preacher, in primitive antiquity are one and
the same; but in later ages they seem to fall apart. The great art of
novel writing, that peculiar creation of our own and the last century,
which, together with the sister art of review writing, threatens to absorb
all literature, has even less of seriousness in her composition. Do we not
often hear the novel writer censured for attempting to convey a lesson to
the minds of his readers?

Yet the true office of a poet or writer of fiction is not merely to give
amusement, or to be the expression of the feelings of mankind, good or bad,
or even to increase our knowledge of human nature. There have been poets
in modern times, such as Goethe or Wordsworth, who have not forgotten their
high vocation of teachers; and the two greatest of the Greek dramatists owe
their sublimity to their ethical character. The noblest truths, sung of in
the purest and sweetest language, are still the proper material of poetry.
The poet clothes them with beauty, and has a power of making them enter
into the hearts and memories of men. He has not only to speak of themes
above the level of ordinary life, but to speak of them in a deeper and
tenderer way than they are ordinarily felt, so as to awaken the feeling of
them in others. The old he makes young again; the familiar principle he
invests with a new dignity; he finds a noble expression for the common-
places of morality and politics. He uses the things of sense so as to
indicate what is beyond; he raises us through earth to heaven. He
expresses what the better part of us would fain say, and the half-conscious
feeling is strengthened by the expression. He is his own critic, for the
spirit of poetry and of criticism are not divided in him. His mission is
not to disguise men from themselves, but to reveal to them their own