d, brutal, or ridiculous
types of character and disorderly events, to the confusion, ignorance,
and ignominies of mankind; the refinement of both is a mark of progress
in both art and civilization, and foretells their own extinction, unless
indeed the principle of evil be more deeply implanted in the universe
than we fondly hope; pathos and humour, which are the milder and the
kindlier forms of tragedy and comedy, must also cease, for both are
equally near to tears. But before leaving this subject it is interesting
to observe how in the Aristotelian scheme of tragedy, where it was
little thought of, the appeal is made to man's whole nature as here
outlined--the plot replying to reason, the scene to the sense of beauty,
the katharsis to the emotions, and poetic justice to the will, which
thus finds its model and exemplar in the supremacy of the moral law in
all tragic art.

This, then, being the nature of the ideal world in its whole range
commensurate with our being, and these the methods of its intellectual
and emotional appeal, it remains to examine the world of art in itself,
and especially its genesis out of life. The method by which it is built
up has long been recognized to be that of imitation of the actual, as
has been assumed hitherto in the statement that all art is concrete. But
the concrete which art creates is not a copy of the concrete of life;
it is more than this. The mind takes the particulars of the world of
sense into itself, generalizes them, and frames therefrom a new
particular, which does not exist in nature; it is, in fact, nature made
perfect in an imagined instance, and so presented to the mind's eye, or
to the eye of sense. The pleasure which imitation gives has been often
and diversely analyzed; it may be that of recognition, or that of new
knowledge satisfying our curiosity as if the original were present, or
that of delight in the skill of the artist, or that of interest in
seeing how his view differs from our own, or that of the illusion
created for us; but all these modes of pleasure exist when the imitation
is an exact copy of the original, and they do not characterize the
artistic imitation in any way to differentiate its peculiar pleasure. It
is that element which artistic imitation adds to actuality, the
difference between its created concrete and the original out of which
that was developed, which gives the special delight of art to the mind.
It is the perfection of the type, the int