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 aesthetic intuition.  Plato’s philosophy is aesthetic through and through, and because it is aesthetic 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 interpenetration is complete; the standards by which life and art are judged the same.  If we may use a metaphor, in the Greek view art is the consciousness of life.  Poetry is more philosophic and more highly serious than history, just as the mind of a man is more significant than his outward gestures.  To make those gestures significant the art of the actor must be called into play.  So to make the outward event of history significant the poet’s art is needed.  Therefore a criticism which is based on the Greek view is impelled to assign to art a place, the place of sovereignty in its scheme of values.  That Plato himself did not do this was due to his having misunderstood the nature of that process of ‘imitation’ in which art consists; but only the superficial readers of Plato—­and a good many readers deserve no better name—­will conclude from the fact that he rejected art that his attitude was not fundamentally aesthetic.  Not only is the Republic itself one of the greatest ‘imitations,’ one of the most subtle and profound works of art ever created, but it would also be true to say that Plato cleared the way for a true conception of art.  In reality he rejected not art, but false art; and it only remained for Aristotle to discern the nature of the relation between artistic ‘imitation’ and the ideal for the Platonic system to be complete and four-square, a perpetual inspiration and an everlasting foundation for art and the criticism of art.