ires to whatever is most dignified, he labors to realize the ideal in
his own mind--though in the execution of his purpose he must needs
accommodate himself to circumstances.

The assertion so commonly made that the public degrades art is not well
founded. It is the artist that brings the public to the level of his
own conceptions; and, in every age in which art has gone to decay, it has
fallen through its professors. The people need feeling alone, and
feeling they possess. They take their station before the curtain with
an unvoiced longing, with a multifarious capacity. They bring with them
an aptitude for what is highest--they derive the greatest pleasure from
what is judicious and true; and if, with these powers of appreciation,
they deign to be satisfied with inferior productions, still, if they have
once tasted what is excellent, they will in the end insist on having it
supplied to them.

It is sometimes objected that the poet may labor according to an ideal--
that the critic may judge from ideas, but that mere executive art is
subject to contingencies, and depends for effect on the occasion.
Managers will be obstinate; actors are bent on display--the audience is
inattentive and unruly. Their object is relaxation, and they are
disappointed if mental exertion be required, when they expected only
amusement. But if the theatre be made instrumental towards higher
objects, the diversion, of the spectator will not be increased, but
ennobled. It will be a diversion, but a poetical one. All art is
dedicated to pleasure, and there can be no higher and worthier end than
to make men happy. The true art is that which provides 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 everyday 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 a