other hand, we call drama or descriptive poetry interesting
when it represents events and actions of a kind which necessarily
arouse concern or sympathy, like that which we feel in real events
involving our own person. The fate of the person represented in them
is felt in just the same fashion as our own: we await the development
of events with anxiety; we eagerly follow their course; our hearts
quicken when the hero is threatened; our pulse falters as the danger
reaches its acme, and throbs again when he is suddenly rescued. Until
we reach the end of the story we cannot put the book aside; we lie
away far into the night sympathising with our hero's troubles as
though they were our own. Nay, instead of finding pleasure and
recreation in such representations, we should feel all the pain which
real life often inflicts upon us, or at least the kind which pursues
us in our uneasy dreams, if in the act of reading or looking at the
stage we had not the firm ground of reality always beneath our feet.
As it is, in the stress of a too violent feeling, we can find relief
from the illusion of the moment, and then give way to it again at
will. Moreover, we can gain this relief without any such violent
transition as occurs in a dream, when we rid ourselves of its terrors
only by the act of awaking.

It is obvious that what is affected by poetry of this character is our
_will_, and not merely our intellectual powers pure and simple. The
word _interest_ means, therefore, that which arouses the concern of
the individual will, _quod nostra interest_; and here it is that
beauty is clearly distinguished from interest. The one is an affair
of the intellect, and that, too, of the purest and simplest kind. The
other works upon the will. Beauty, then, consists in an apprehension
of ideas; and knowledge of this character is beyond the range of the
principle that nothing happens without a cause. Interest, on the other
hand, has its origin nowhere but in the course of events; that is to
say, in the complexities which are possible only through the action of
this principle in its different forms.

We have now obtained a clear conception of the essential difference
between the beauty and the interest of a work of art. We have
recognised that beauty is the true end of every art, and therefore,
also, of the poetic art. It now remains to raise the question whether
the interest of a work of art is a second end, or a means to the
exhibition of its bea