nce is freedom. Serious,
indeed, but unpleasing, is the cast of thought with which such an
artist and poet dismisses us; we feel ourselves painfully thrust back
into the narrow sphere of reality by means of the very art which ought
to have emancipated us. On the other hand, a writer, endowed with a
lively fancy, but destitute of warmth and individuality of feeling,
will not concern himself in the least about truth; 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 true only 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 illusion, which,
if it could be accomplished by means of the actual, would be, at best,
a paltry deception. All the ex