Whatever future judgments may be on our contemporary Western culture and education, we cannot be accused of denying a major, even a predominating role, to the life of the artistic imagination (though when one turns from stated aim to present practice, in primary schools and elsewhere, the position may be less satisfactory). In the last forty years philistinism has quietly died after a few rearguard actions and many whimpers; the ultimate success of the opponents of censorship in the cases over Lady Chatterley and Last Exit to Brooklyn was due in the first place to this triumphant antiphilistinism and only secondly to a climate of increasing moral permissiveness: the argument that carried the day with people of all shades of ethical opinion was that the artist could get away with it.

The high claims made for poetry and the imagination by the Romantics and their successors have led us into a position where poets and novelists have been studied in a manner formerly thought suitable for moral teachers. Arnold’s plea for a poetry of the emotions which would provide a substitute for religion was a landmark along the way. Arnold declared that ‘the strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry’: the increase in the authority granted to the insights of the artist has often advanced in a ratio with the declining authority of dogmatic belief.