hhold their belief. They go to see _Othello_, that they
may shudder luxuriously at the sight of so much suffering; for it is the
moral suffering of the Moor that most impresses an intelligent beholder,
but it is doubtful whether Americans or English, who have not lived in
Southern or Eastern lands, are capable of appreciating that the
character is drawn from the life.

The great criticism to which all modern tragedy, and a great deal of
modern drama, are open is the undue and illegitimate use of horror.
Horror is not terror. They are two entirely distinct affections. A man
hurled from a desperate precipice, in the living act to fall, is
properly an object of terror, sudden and quaking. But the same man,
reduced to a mangled mass of lifeless humanity, broken to pieces, and
ghastly with the gaping of dead wounds--the same man, when his last leap
is over and hope is fled, is an object of horror, and as such would not
in early times have been regarded as a legitimate subject for artistic
representation, either on the stage or in the plastic or pictorial arts.

It may be that in earlier ages, when men were personally familiar with
the horrors of a barbarous ethical system, while at the same time they
had the culture and refinement belonging to a high development of
aesthetic civilisation, the presentation of a great terror immediately
suggested the concomitant horror; and suggested it so vividly that the
visible definition of the result--the bloodshed, the agony, and the
death-rattle--would have produced an impression too dreadful to be
associated with any pleasure to the beholder There was no curiosity to
behold violent death among a people accustomed to see it often enough in
the course of their lives, and not yet brutalised into a love of blood
for its own sake. The Romans presented an example of the latter state;
they loved horror so well that they demanded real horror and real
victims. And that is the state of the populations of England and America
at the present day. Were it not for the tremendous power of modern law,
there is not the slightest doubt that the mass of Londoners or New
Yorkers would flock to-day to see a gladiatorial show, or to watch a
pack of lions tearing, limb from limb, a dozen unarmed convicts. Not the
"cultured" classes--some of them would be ashamed, and some would really
feel a moral incapacity for witnessing so much pain--but the masses
would go, and would pay handsomely for the sport; and, mor