the highest degree of pleasure; and this consists in the abandonment of the spirit to the free play of all its faculties.  Every one expects from the imaginative arts a certain emancipation from the bounds of reality:  we are willing to give a scope to Fancy, and recreate ourselves with the possible.  The man who expects it the least will nevertheless forget his ordinary pursuits, his every-day existence and individuality, and experience delight from uncommon incidents:  if he be of a serious turn of mind, he will acknowledge on the stage that moral government of the world which he fails to discover in real life.  But he is, at the same time, perfectly aware that all is an empty show, and that, in a true sense, he is feeding only on dreams.  When he returns from the theatre to the world of realities, he is again compressed within its narrow bounds; he is its denizen as before—­for it remains what it was, and in him nothing has been changed.  What, then, has he gained beyond a momentary illusive pleasure which vanished with the occasion?

It is because a passing recreation is alone desired that a mere show of truth is thought sufficient.  I mean that probability or vraisemblance which is so highly esteemed, but which the commonest workers are able to substitute for the true.

Art has for its object not merely to afford a transient pleasure, to excite to a momentary dream of liberty; its aim is to make us absolutely free; and this it accomplishes by awakening, exercising, and perfecting in us a power to remove to an objective distance the sensible world (which otherwise only burdens us as rugged matter and presses us down with a brute influence); to transform it into the free working of our spirit, and thus acquire a dominion over the material by means of ideas.  For the very reason also that true Art requires somewhat of the objective and real, it is not satisfied with a show of truth.  It rears its ideal edifice on Truth itself—­on the solid and deep foundations of Nature.

But how Art can be at once altogether ideal, yet in the strictest sense real; how it can entirely leave the actual, and yet harmonize with Nature, is a problem to the multitude; hence the distorted views which prevail in regard to poetical and plastic works for to ordinary judgments these two requisites seem to counteract each other.

It is commonly supposed that one may be attained by the sacrifice of the other—­the result is a failure to arrive at either.  One to whom Nature has given a true sensibility, but denied the plastic imaginative power, will be a faithful painter of the real; he will adapt casual appearances, but never catch the spirit of Nature.  He will only reproduce to us the matter of the world, which, not being our own work, the product of our creative spirit, can never have the beneficent operation of Art, of which the essence is freedom.  Serious, indeed, but unpleasing, is the cast of thought with which such an artist and