behaved with due conventional propriety, just as every one behaved around the deathbed of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilitch. It was Chidley’s deathbed they were preparing, and he knew it, but he unflinchingly grasped the cup they held out to him and drank it to the dregs. He felt he could do no other. There was no fabled hemlock in it, but it was just as deadly as though it had been accompanied by all the dramatic symbolisation of a formal condemnation to death, such as had really been recorded (Plato well knew) in old Athenian annals. There was no Plato in Sydney. But if there had been, it is hard to conceive any figure more fit for the ends of his transforming art. Through that inspiring medium the plebeian Sophist and Cynic, while yet retaining something of the asperity of his original shape, would have taken on a new glory, his bizarreries would have been spiritualised and his morbidities become the signs of mystic possession, his fate would have appeared as consecrated in form as it genuinely was in substance, he would have been the mouthpiece, not only of the truths he really uttered, but of a divine eloquence on the verge of which he had in real life only trembled, and, like Socrates in the hands of Plato, he would have passed, as all the finest philosophy passes at last, into music.[34] So in the end Chidley would have entered modern history, just as Socrates entered ancient history, the Saint and Martyr of Philosophy.[35] If it should so be that, as we learn to see him truly, the figure of the real Socrates must diminish in magnitude, then—and that is the point which concerns us here—the glory of the artist who made him what he has become for us is immensely enhanced. No longer the merely apt and brilliant disciple of a great master, he becomes himself master and lord, the radiant creator of the chief figure in European philosophy, the most marvellous artist the world has ever known. So that when we look back at the spiritual history of Europe, it may become possible to say that its two supreme figures, the Martyr of Philosophy and the Martyr of Religion, were both—however real the two human persons out of which they were formed—the work of man’s imagination. For there, on the one hand, we see the most accomplished of European thinkers, and on the other a little band of barbarians, awkwardly using just the same Greek language, working with an unconscious skill which even transcends all that conscious skill could have achieved, yet both bearing immortal witness to the truth that the human soul only lives truly in art and can only be ruled through art. So it is that in art lies the solution of the conflicts of philosophy. There we see Realism, or the discovery of things, one with Idealism, or the creation of things. Art is the embodied harmony of their conflict. That could not be more exquisitely symbolised than by these two supreme figures in the spiritual life of Europe, the Platonic Socrates and the Gospel Jesus, both alike presented