_Mixture of other expressions, including that of truth._

Sec. 58. To the value of these sensuous and formal elements must be
added the continual suggestion of beautiful and happy things,
which no tragedy is sombre enough to exclude. Even if we do not
go so far as to intersperse comic scenes and phrases into a pathetic
subject, -- a rude device, since the comic passages themselves need
that purifying which they are meant to effect, -- we must at least
relieve our theme with pleasing associations. For this reason we
have palaces for our scene, rank, beauty, and virtue in our heroes,
nobility in their passions and in their fate, and altogether a sort of
glorification of life without which tragedy would lose both in depth
of pathos -- since things so precious are destroyed -- and in
subtlety of charm, since things so precious are manifested.

Indeed, one of the chief charms that tragedies have is the
suggestion of what they might have been if they had not been
tragedies. The happiness which glimmers through them, the hopes,
loves, and ambitions of which it is made, these things fascinate us,
and win our sympathy; so that we are all the more willing to suffer
with our heroes, even if we are at the same time all the more
sensitive to their suffering. Too wicked a character or too
unrelieved a situation revolts us for this reason. We do not find
enough expression of good to make us endure the expression of the
evil.

A curious exception to this rule, which, however, admirably
illustrates the fundamental principle of it, is where by the diversity
of evils represented the mind is relieved from painful absorption in
any of them. There is a scene in _King Lear,_ where the horror of
the storm is made to brood over at least four miseries, that of the
king, of the fool, of Edgar in his real person, and of Edgar in his
assumed character. The vividness of each of these portrayals, with
its different note of pathos, keeps the mind detached and free,
forces it to compare and reflect, and thereby to universalize the
spectacle. Yet even here, the beautiful effect is not secured without
some touches of good. How much is not gained by the dumb
fidelity of the fool, and by the sublime humanity of Lear, when he
says, "Art cold? There is a part of me is sorry for thee yet."

Yet all these compensations would probably be unavailing but for
another which the saddest things often have, -- the compensation
of being true. Our practical and