view, the epistle can only by affectionate
exaggeration be called beautiful.

But the arts, through their beauty of form, may present
pleasingly objects, emotions, ideas, not in themselves beautiful
or pleasing. The clearest case of this kind is tragedy,
where we may enjoy at arm's length and through the medium
of art, experiences which would in the near actualities of life be
only unmitigated horror. Refracted through the medium of
poetry and drama, they may appear beautiful pervasively
and long.

We are enabled through the arts to survey sympathetically
universal emotions, those by which our own lives have been
touched, or to which they are liable; we are enabled to survey
bitterness and frustration calmly because they are set in a
perspective, a beautiful perspective, in which they shine out clear
and persuasive, purified of that bitter personal tang which
makes sorrow in real life so different in tone from the beauty
with which in tragedy it is halved. Any sensation, as Max
Eastman justly remarks in his "Enjoyment of Poetry," may,
if sufficiently mild, become pleasing. And there is hardly any
human action or experience, however terrible, which cannot
in the hands of a master be made appealing and sublime in its
emotional effect.

The beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which,
in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in
life. In the spectacle of death, in the endurance of intolerable pain,
and in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness,
an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the
inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage
of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow. In
these moments of insight we lose all eagerness of temporary desire,
all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little trivial
things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of day
by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft, illumined by the flickering
light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling
waves we toss for a brief hour.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, pp. 67-68.]

But emotions and experiences that in real life are displeasing
can be made pleasing in art chiefly by virtue of the qualities
of material and form already discussed. The disappointment,
disillusion, or terror which tragedy so vividly reveals is
made tolerable chiefly through t