Then let winged fancy wander,

Though the thought still spread beyond her.

The pleasure is in the chase. The French poet whom I quoted a few pages back, states with unusual distinctness the cause why sorrow is a pleasure. It is the very same cause as we find suggested in the colloquy between King Philip and Lady Constance. Says Philip:

Philip.

You are as fond of grief as of your child.

Constance. Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me ;

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:

Then have I reason to be fond of grief.

The flat prose of all which is that it fills and occupies the mind-it sets the mind going.

CHAPTER
XI.

application

of pleasure.

The other point on which I desire to make a Critical few remarks is foreign to the present inquiry, of this law but bears on the use to which it may hereafter be turned. I have had more than once to inform the reader that, in the chapters which I now lay before him, I profess no more than to elucidate first principles; that these principles are worthy of regard, even if we cannot see their precise bearing on the practical difficulties of criticism; and that all question as to their special applications must for the present be reserved. Yet it may not be amiss to break so far through this reserve as to point out that the form of pleasure we have just now been peering into is that

CHAPTER which rules in dramatic art, and provides its

XI.

The painfulness of the

pleasure produced by the drama.

On tragic pleasure.

canon. It would, of course, be out of place here, to enter into details; and I need point out only so much of the fact as may give the reader of critical tastes a feeling that this inquiry about pleasure, its painfulness and its activity, into which I have dragged him, is not altogether aimless.

Dramatic art has many forms, but is best known to us under two leading types, which may fairly be taken to represent every species of it-Tragedy and Comedy. No one will have a doubt about the fact that the pleasure of tragedy is evolved from pain; but there may be some hesitation as to the acceptance of this other fact, that the pleasure of comedy is also a development of painfulness. My thesis, however, is that all dramatic art, including comedy as well as tragedy, deals in pleasure struck from pain.

I have said that there is no doubt as to the painfulness of tragic pleasure; but yet this point may deserve some little further notice, not to make it clearer, but, in Leibnitzian phrase, to make it more distinct.*

We are told that the

We

The difference between clear
and distinct knowledge has been
determined by Leibnitz.
have a clear knowledge of a face,
for example, if we know enough

of it to distinguish it from other faces. We have a distinct knowledge of it if we are acquainted with its constituent features,can tell, say, the colour of the

XI.

varying passions of life, ambition and jealousy, CHAPTER love, hate and anger, with which, when we see them imitated in the drama, we heartily sympathize-all in tragedy lead up to the two grand emotions of pity and terror. This is a statement as old as Aristotle, which nobody has ever questioned. But though nobody questions it, one may doubt whether at first sight it satisfies every mind, or seems to rest on a rigid analysis. Why are terror and pity selected as, above all others, the tragic emotions? How do we get at these two and shut out the rest? I do not remember to have seen this point explained, and therefore venture on the following

statement.

the tragic

summarised

names of

terror.

There is some disparity between the words And why pity and terror, which goes to veil the true sig- passions are nificance in tragedy of the things they stand under the for. Thus pity is the emotion of a specta- pity and tor at the grief which he sees in another; it is sympathy with grief. Terror, on the other hand, stands equally for terror and sympathy with terror. We have no special term for sympathy with terror, as we have for sympathy

eyes. Such knowledge is often clear, and yet not distinct. The best portrait of Lord Melbourne has been painted by Sir Edwin Landseer, who is very much greater as a painter of men than even of animals. Everybody

who is able to judge recognises
the wonderful likeness.
"Yet
none of you seems to have dis-
covered," says Sir Edwin, "that
I have painted the eyes the
wrong colour."

CHAPTER with grief. Therefore, for the sake of exactXI. ness, and that the words may go perfectly in

On the

painfulness of comedy.

pairs, let us fall back on a circumlocution. It will then appear that, according to Aristotle's famous definition, the object of tragedy is to produce the pleasure of sympathy with grief, and of sympathy with terror. And then also we are in a position to see that this analysis of painful emotion is exhaustive, and to present the definition of tragedy as follows. It is the object of tragedy to excite pleasure through a discipline of pain. But pain is either of the known or of the unknown. As of the known it awakens grief; as of the unknown, fear. The one is a painful feeling, based on experience; the other a painful feeling born of anticipation. And therefore all the painfulness of the passions with which tragedy has to do must work up either to pity or to terror-that is, to sympathy either with the known or with the unknown of pain.

And now for a word or two on the painfulness of comedy. We are little in the habit of associating laughter in our minds with the idea of pain; and in Aristotle's definition of the ridiculous, the contemplation of pain is expressly denied. On the other hand, it is impossible that laughter should be an unmixed pleasure, seeing that it arises from some aspect of imperfection and discordance; and we may set against the

XI.

opinion of Aristotle that of Plato, who expressly CHAPTER defines the pleasure of comedy as mingled with pain. The weight of authority no less than of argument leans to the same side. Malignity is the germ of comedy, says Marmontel. "La malignité, naturelle aux hommes, est le principe de la comédie." Nearly all the French critics take the same view. "La comédie," says M. St. Marc Girardin, one of the latest, "plait à la malignité de l'homme." That is a hard statement, and we need not accept it in its entirety; but we may see in it a manner of recognising the painfulness of comedy. Sir Henry Wotton reminds us that the least touch of a pencil will translate a laughing into a crying face, and Shelley says truly that

We look before and after

And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught.

by Sir

Sidney.

But the most lively indications of the painful- Illustrated ness of laughter are given by Sir Philip Sidney: Philip "Our comedians," he says, "think there is no delight without laughter, which is very wrong; for though laughter may come with delight, yet cometh it not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter; but well may one thing breed both together. Nay, in themselves they have as it were a kind of contrariety; for delight we scarcely do but in things that