we leave individuality behind, we unite with man in common; so we die to ourselves in order to live in lives not ours.  In literature, sympathy and that imagination by which we enter into and comprehend other lives are most trained and developed, made habitual, instinctive, and quick.  It begins to appear, I trust, that ideal art is not only one with our nature intellectually, but in all ways; it is the path of the spirit in all things.  Moreover, emotion is in itself simple; it does not need generalization, it is the same in all.  It is rather a means of universalizing the refinements of the intellect, the substantive idealities of imagination, by enveloping them in an elementary, primitive feeling which they call forth.  Poetry, therefore, especially deals, as Wordsworth pointed out, in the primary affections, the elementary passions of mankind; and, whatever be its intellectual contents of nature or human events, calls these emotions forth as the master-spirit of all our seeing.  Emotion is more fundamental in us than knowledge; it is more powerful in its working; it underlies more deliberate and conscious life in the mind, and in most of us it rules, as it influences in all.  It is natural, therefore, to find that its operation in art is of graver importance than that of the intellectual faculty so far as the broad power of art over men is concerned.

Another special point arises from the fact that some emotions are painful, and the question is raised how in literature painful emotions become a pleasure.  Aristotle’s doctrine in respect to certain of these emotions, tragic pity and terror, is well known, though variously interpreted.  He regards such emotions as a discharge of energy, an exhaustion and a relief, in consequence of which their disturbing presence is less likely to recur in actual life; it is as if emotional energy accumulated, as vital force is stored up and requires to be loosed in bodily exercise; but this, except in the point that pity and terror, if they do accumulate in their particular forms latently, are specifically such as it is wise to be rid of, does not differentiate emotion from the rest of our powers in all of which there is a similar pleasure in exercising, an exhaustion and a relief, with less liability of immediate recurrence; this belongs to all expenditure of life.  It is not credible to me that painful emotion, under the illusions of art, can become pleasurable in the common sense; what pleasure there is arises only in the climax and issue of the action, as in case of the drama when the restoration of the order that is joyful, beautiful, right, and wise occurs; in other words, in the presence of the final poetic justice or reconciliation of the disturbed elements of life.  But here we come upon darker and mysterious aspects of our general subject, now to be slightly touched.  Tragedy dealing with the discords of life must present painful spectacles; and is saved to art only by its just ending.  Comedy,