poet dismisses us; we feel ourselves painfully thrust back into the narrow sphere of reality by means of the very art which ought to have emancipated us.  On the other hand, a writer, endowed with a lively fancy, but destitute of warmth and individuality of feeling, will not concern himself in the least about truth; he will sport with the stuff of the world, and endeavor to surprise by whimsical combinations; and as his whole performance is nothing but foam and glitter, he will, it is true, engage the attention for a time, but build up and confirm nothing in the understanding.  His playfulness is, like the gravity of the other, thoroughly unpoetical.  To string together at will fantastical images, is not to travel into the realm of the ideal; and the imitative reproduction of the actual cannot be called the representation of nature.  Both requisites stand so little in contradiction to each other that they are rather one and the same thing; that Art is true only as it altogether forsakes the actual and becomes purely ideal.  Nature herself is an idea of the mind, and is never presented to the senses.  She lies under the veil of appearances, but is herself never apparent.  To the art of the ideal alone is lent, or rather, absolutely given, the privilege to grasp the spirit of the All and bind it in a corporeal form.

Yet, in truth, even Art cannot present it to the senses, but by means of her creative power to the imaginative faculty alone; and it is thus that she becomes more true than all reality, and more real than all experience.  It follows from these premises that the artist can use no single element taken from reality as he finds it—­that his work must be ideal in all its parts, if it be designed to have, as it were, an intrinsic reality and to harmonize with nature.

What is true of Art and Poetry, in the abstract, holds good as to their various kinds; and we may apply what has been advanced to the subject of tragedy.  In this department, it is still necessary to controvert the ordinary notion of the natural, with which poetry is altogether incompatible.  A certain ideality has been allowed in painting, though, I fear, on grounds rather conventional than intrinsic; but in dramatic works what is desired is illusion, which, if it could be accomplished by means of the actual, would be, at best, a paltry deception.  All the externals of a theatrical representation are opposed to this notion; all is merely a symbol of the real.  The day itself in a theatre is an artificial one; the metrical dialogue is itself ideal; yet the conduct of the play must forsooth be real, and the general effect sacrificed to a part.  Thus the French, who have utterly misconceived the spirit of the ancients, adopted on their stage the unities of time and place in the most common and empirical sense; as though there were any place but the bare ideal one, or any other time than the mere sequence of the incidents.