ay
existence and individuality, and experience delight from uncommon
incidents: if he be of a serious turn of mind, he will acknowledge on
the stage that moral government of the world which he fails to
discover in real life. But he is, at the same time, perfectly aware
that all is an empty show, and that, in a true sense, he is feeding
only on dreams. When he returns from the theatre to the world of
realities, he is again compressed within its narrow bounds; he is its
denizen as before--for it remains what it was, and in him nothing has
been changed. What, then, has he gained beyond a momentary illusive
pleasure which vanished with the occasion?

It is because a passing recreation is alone desired that a mere show
of truth is thought sufficient. I mean that probability or
vraisemblance which is so highly esteemed, but which the commonest
workers are able to substitute for the true.

Art has for its object not merely to afford a transient pleasure, to
excite to a momentary dream of liberty; its aim is to make us
absolutely free; and this it accomplishes by awakening, exercising,
and perfecting in us a power to remove to an objective distance the
sensible world (which otherwise only burdens us as rugged matter and
presses us down with a brute influence); to transform it into the free
working of our spirit, and thus acquire a dominion over the material
by means of ideas. For the very reason also that true Art requires
somewhat of the objective and real, it is not satisfied with a show of
truth. It rears its ideal edifice on Truth itself--on the solid and
deep foundations of Nature.

But how Art can be at once altogether ideal, yet in the strictest
sense real; how it can entirely leave the actual, and yet harmonize
with Nature, is a problem to the multitude; hence the distorted views
which prevail in regard to poetical and plastic works for to ordinary
judgments these two requisites seem to counteract each other.

It is commonly supposed that one may be attained by the sacrifice of
the other--the result is a failure to arrive at either. One to whom
Nature has given a true sensibility, but denied the plastic
imaginative power, will be a faithful painter of the real; he will
adapt casual appearances, but never catch the spirit of Nature. He
will only reproduce to us the matter of the world, which, not being
our own work, the product of our creative spirit, can never have the
beneficent operation of Art, of which the esse