ted by the blaze, and still say that what pleases
us is an evil, we are using this word as a conventional appellation,
not as the mark of a felt value. We are not pleased by an evil; we
are pleased by a vivid and exciting sensation, which is a good, but
which has for objective cause an event which may indeed be an
evil to others, but about the consequences of which we are not
thinking at all. There is, in this sense, nothing in all nature, perhaps,
which is not an evil; nothing which is not unfavourable to some
interest, and does not involve some infinitesimal or ultimate
suffering in the universe of life.

But when we are ignorant or thoughtless, this suffering is to us as
if it did not exist. The pleasures of drinking and walking are not
tragic to us, because we may be poisoning some bacillus or
crushing some worm. To an omniscient intelligence such acts may
be tragic by virtue of the insight into their relations to conflicting
impulses; but unless these impulses are present to the same mind,
there is no consciousness of tragedy. The child that, without
understanding of the calamity, should watch a shipwreck from the
shore, would hare a simple emotion of pleasure as from a jumping
jack; what passes for tragic interest is often nothing but this. If he
understood the event, but was entirely without sympathy, he would
have the aesthetic emotion of the careless tyrant, to whom the
notion of suffering is no hindrance to the enjoyment of the lyre. If
the temper of his tyranny were purposely cruel, he might add to
that aesthetic delight the luxury of _Schadenfreude;_ but the
pathos and horror of the sight could only appeal to a man who
realized and shared the sufferings he beheld.

A great deal of brutal tragedy has been endured in the world
because the rudeness of the representation, or of the public, or of
both, did not allow a really sympathetic reaction to arise. We all
smile when Punch beats Judy in the puppet show. The treatment
and not the subject is what makes a tragedy. A parody of _Hamlet_
or of _King Lear_ would not be a tragedy; and these tragedies
themselves are not wholly such, but by the strain of wit and
nonsense they contain are, as it were, occasional parodies on
themselves. By treating a tragic subject bombastically or satirically
we can turn it into an amusement for the public; they will not feel
the griefs which we have been careful to harden them against by
arousing in them contrary emotions. A work,