; he will sport with the stuff of the world, and endeavor to
surprise by whimsical combinations; and as his whole performance is
nothing but foam and glitter, he will, it is true, engage the attention
for a time, but build up and confirm nothing in the understanding. His
playfulness is, like the gravity of the other, thoroughly unpoetical. To
string together at will fantastical images is not to travel into the
realm of the ideal; and the imitative reproduction of the actual cannot
be called the representation of nature. Both requisites stand so little
in contradiction to each other that they are rather one and the same
thing; that art is only true insomuch as it altogether forsakes the
actual, and becomes purely ideal. Nature herself is an idea of the mind,
and is never presented to the senses. She lies under the veil of
appearances, but is herself never apparent. To the art of the ideal
alone is lent, or rather absolutely given, the privilege to grasp the
spirit of the all and bind it in a corporeal form.

Yet, in truth, even art cannot present it to the senses, but by means of
her creative power to the imaginative faculty alone; and it is thus that
she becomes more true than all reality, and more real than all
experience. It follows from these premises that the artist can use no
single element taken from reality as he finds it--that his work must be
ideal in all its parts, if it be designed to have, as it were, an
intrinsic reality, and to harmonize with nature.

What is true of art and poetry, in the abstract, holds good as to their
various kinds; and we may apply what has been advanced to the subject of
tragedy. In this department it is still necessary to controvert the
ordinary notion of the natural, with which poetry is altogether
incompatible. A certain ideality has been allowed in painting, though, I
fear, on grounds rather conventional than intrinsic; but in dramatic
works what is desired is allusion, which, if it could be accomplished by
means of the actual, would be, at best, a paltry deception. All the
externals of a theatrical representation are opposed to this notion; all
is merely a symbol of the real. The day itself in a theatre is an
artificial one; the metrical dialogue is itself ideal; yet the conduct of
the play must forsooth be real, and the general effect sacrificed to a
part. Thus the French, who have utterly misconceived the spirit of the
ancients, adopted on their stage the unities of tine and p