our mind, is
essential on the comic stage.

What is the object of art? Could reality come into direct contact with
sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with
things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless, or rather we
should all be artists, for then our soul would continually vibrate in
perfect accord with nature. Our eyes, aided by memory, would carve out
in space and fix in time the most inimitable of pictures. Hewn in the
living marble of the human form, fragments of statues, beautiful as the
relics of antique statuary, would strike the passing glance. Deep in
our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life's unbroken
melody,--a music that is ofttimes gay, but more frequently plaintive
and always original. All this is around and within us, and yet no whit
of it do we distinctly perceive. Between nature and ourselves, nay,
between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a
veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,--thin, almost
transparent, for the artist and the poet. What fairy wove that veil?
Was it done in malice or in friendliness? We had to live, and life
demands that we grasp things in their relations to our own needs. Life
is action. Life implies the acceptance only of the UTILITARIAN side of
things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions: all other
impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and blurred. I look
and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine myself and I
think I am reading the very depths of my heart. But what I see and hear
of the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my senses
to serve as a light to my conduct; what I know of myself is what comes
to the surface, what participates in my actions. My senses and my
consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a practical
simplification of reality. In the vision they furnish me of myself and
of things, the differences that are useless to man are obliterated, the
resemblances that are useful to him are emphasised; ways are traced out
for me in advance, along which my activity is to travel. These ways are
the ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things have been
classified with a view to the use I can derive from them. And it is
this classification I perceive, far more clearly than the colour and
the shape of things. Doubtless man is vastly superior to the lower
animals in this respect. It is not very likely that the eye of a