. Such is the ideal of a tragedy.

A good number of tragedies, though fine as poems are bad as dramas,
because they do not seek their end by the best use of tragic form.
Others, because they use the form to attain an end different from
tragedy. Some very popular ones only touch us on account of the subject,
and we are blind enough to make this a merit in the poet. There are
others in which we seem to have quite forgotten the object of the poet,
and, contented with pretty plays of fancy and wit, we issue with our
hearts cold from the theatre. Must art, so holy and venerable, defend
its cause by such champions before such judges? The indulgence of the
public only emboldens mediocrity: it causes genius to blush, and
discourages it.

OF THE CAUSE OF THE PLEASURE WE DERIVE FROM TRAGIC OBJECTS.

Whatever pains some modern aesthetics give themselves to establish,
contrary to general belief, that the arts of imagination and of feeling
have not pleasure for their object, and to defend them against this
degrading accusation, this belief will not cease: it reposes upon a solid
foundation, and the fine arts would renounce with a bad grace the
beneficent mission which has in all times been assigned to them, to
accept the new employment to which it is generously proposed to raise
them. Without troubling themselves whether they lower themselves in
proposing our pleasure as object, they become rather proud of the
advantages of reaching immediately an aim never attained except mediately
in other routes followed by the activity of the human mind. That the aim
of nature, with relation to man, is the happiness of man,--although he
ought of himself, in his moral conduct, to take no notice of this aim,--
is what, I think, cannot be doubted in general by any one who admits that
nature has an aim. Thus the fine arts have the same aim as nature, or
rather as the Author of nature, namely, to spread pleasure and render
people happy. It procures for us in play what at other more austere
sources of good to man we extract only with difficulty. It lavishes as a
pure gift that which elsewhere is the price of many hard efforts. With
what labor, what application, do we not pay for the pleasures of the
understanding; with what painful sacrifices the approbation of reason;
with what hard privations the joys of sense! And if we abuse these
pleasures, with what a succession of evils do we expiate excess! Art
alone supplies an enjoyment which requi