What is the essential thing communicated in art? The question is answered at once if we reflect that as life can have no ulterior object beyond life, and is satisfied when the maximum of living is attained,[175] so life must be the ultimate object of art also. It is the _quality_ of art to communicate feeling; it is the _object_ of art to communicate a feeling for life. _Art is man’s expression of life_; and he delights in art precisely because and in so far as he delights in life. But if this be all, it may be objected, why, with life in full glow and activity all around him, should man turn to this reflection or rendering of it which he calls art? What place does the reality leave for the enjoyment of the shadow? This was substantially Plato’s indictment of art in the last book of The Republic. All things exist, according to his well-known doctrine of ideas, in an ideal or archetypal form, a “pattern laid up in heaven.” There is such a pattern, let us say, of a Bed, and this is the real, the archetypal Bed. Copying some reflection of this in his own mind, the carpenter makes a material, individual bed. Then comes in the painter, who copies the bed of the carpenter, and who is thus at two removes from Reality; art, in Plato’s view, being simply imitation, and therefore somewhat despicable.[176] There are some minor, yet by no means trivial, reasons which might be given in answer to this objection; as, for instance, that art enables one to assemble together in small compass the expressions of a great variety of life not to be directly enjoyed, save at wide intervals of time and place. But the primary and fundamental reasons are our main concern here.