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 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.
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