Neither does the quality of interest often attach to masterpieces of descriptive poetry.  Father Homer lays the world and humanity before us in its true nature, but he takes no trouble to attract our sympathy by a complexity of circumstance, or to surprise us by unexpected entanglements.  His pace is lingering; he stops at every scene; he puts one picture after another tranquilly before us, elaborating it with care.  We experience no passionate emotion in reading him; our demeanour is one of pure perceptive intelligence; he does not arouse our will, but sings it to rest; and it costs us no effort to break off in our reading, for we are not in condition of eager curiosity.  This is all still more true of Dante, whose work is not, in the proper sense of the word, an epic, but a descriptive poem.  The same thing may be said of the four immortal romances:  Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Wilhelm Meister.  To arouse our interest is by no means the chief aim of these works; in Tristram Shandy the hero, even at the end of the book, is only eight years of age.

On the other hand, we must not venture to assert that the quality of interest is not to be found in masterpieces of literature.  We have it in Schiller’s dramas in an appreciable degree, and consequently they are popular; also in the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.  Amongst masterpieces of description, we find it in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso; nay, an example of a high degree of interest, bound up with the beautiful, is afforded in an excellent novel by Walter Scott—­The Heart of Midlothian.  This is the most interesting work of fiction that I know, where all the effects due to interest, as I have given them generally in the preceding remarks, may be most clearly observed.  At the same time it is a very beautiful romance throughout; it shows the most varied pictures of life, drawn with striking truth; and it exhibits highly different characters with great justice and fidelity.

Interest, then, is certainly compatible with beauty.  That was our third question.  Nevertheless, a comparatively small admixture of the element of interest may well be found to be most advantageous as far as beauty is concerned; for beauty is and remains the end of art.  Beauty is in twofold opposition with interest; firstly, because it lies in the perception of the idea, and such perception takes its object entirely out of the range of the forms enunciated by the principle of sufficient reason; whereas interest has its sphere mainly in circumstance, and it is out of this principle that the complexity of circumstance arises.  Secondly, interest works by exciting the will; whereas beauty exists only for the pure perceptive intelligence, which has no will.  However, with dramatic and descriptive literature an admixture of interest is necessary, just as a volatile and gaseous substance requires a material basis if it is to be preserved and transferred.  The admixture is necessary,