Plato observed with truth, that imitation does not rise to the logical
or conceptual sphere, of which poets and painters, as such, are, in
fact, ignorant. But he _failed to realize_ that there could be any form
of knowledge other than the intellectual.
We now know that Intuition lies on this side or outside the Intellect,
from which it differs as much as it does from passion and sensuality.
Plato, with his fine aesthetic sense, would have been grateful to anyone
who could have shown him how to place art, which he loved and practised
so supremely himself, among the lofty activities of the spirit. But in
his day, no one could give him such assistance. His conscience and his
reason saw that art makes the false seem the true, and therefore he
resolutely banished it to the lower regions of the spirit.
The tendency among those who followed Plato in time was to find some
means of retaining art and of depriving it of the baleful influence
which it was believed to exercise. Life without art was to the
beauty-loving Greek an impossibility, although he was equally conscious
of the demands of reason and of morality. Thus it happened that art,
which, on the purely hedonistic hypothesis, had been treated as a
beautiful courtezan, became in the hands of the moralist, a pedagogue.
Aristophanes and Strabo, and above all Aristotle, dwell upon the
didactic and moralistic possibility of poetry.
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