The obvious prejudice which Plato displays in his attitude towards art and poetry has in fact weakened his case against them and exposed him to the attacks and misinterpretations of modern critics whose prejudices run as strongly in the opposite direction. For instance, to blame Plato for accepting a view of art as "imitation" on the ground that art – according to modern assumptions – is essentially "creative" and not "representational" is at the best a mere anachronism. Art as "creation" is the reply of the atheistic liberal to the atheistic autocrat. It is the reply of Croce to Nietzsche. For both these thinkers in different ways found it necessary to replace humanized divinity with deified humanity, and in art Croce discovered man's claim to the divine faculty of creation. Such views, however, are only possible to atheistic systems, and Plato was not an atheist. Moreover, common sense is unquestionably on his side. Thus we read in the Sophist (264 c) that there are two orders of created things, human and divine. Reflection and shadow bear the same relation to material (divinely created) nature as artistic portrayal (imitation) does to practical crafts and their products. The neatness of the classification is to some extent marred by the recollection that the divine creations may also be objects of artistic portrayal, but the point of the observation need not be lost. Shadows, dreams, pictures, and other representations constitute an inferior grade of truth, in which the evidence of one sense cannot be confirmed by reference to that of another. In point of truth, then, art is inferior. The fact is obvious, so obvious that it was as preposterous for Plato to build an indictment of art upon it as it is for modern critics to deny its pertinence. We should be better enabled to assess Plato's solecisms at their right value if modern commentators instead of denying the essentially representational nature of art would recognize its phantasmagoric character as a drawback indissociable from specific advantages. That is to say, art sacrifices truth to aspiration and purpose. The intellect is drugged and placated

54 GREEK AESTHETIC THEORY with a dream world in order that the will may exert itself with greater freedom than actuality permits. But to Plato's objection that art is less "true", it may be answered that from another point of view art is more true than actuality, in so far as it more truly expresses the will of the artist and, perhaps, his public. On the other hand, the artist presides absolutely over the universe of shadows which he has evoked, and it is of consequence that he should be a just ruler, exhibiting wisdom and integrity in his administration. This does not of course mean that every drama or narrative should be a tale of "virtue rewarded", for it is often preferable, especially in tragic art, that heroes and heroines should die, saint-like, in credit with Heaven; it means, however, that when Plato adopts a moralistic attitude towards art he cannot be lightly dismissed, as modern critics would have us dismiss him, with a sweeping and utterly untrue statement that art is concerned with beauty only, not with morals.