intellectual nature is deeply
interested in truth. What describes fact appeals to us for that reason;
it has an inalienable interest. However unpleasant truth may prove,
we long to know it, partly perhaps because experience has shown
us the prudence of this kind of intellectual courage, and chiefly
because the consciousness of ignorance and the dread of the
unknown is more tormenting than any possible discovery. A
primitive instinct makes us turn the eyes full on any object that
appears in the dim borderland of our field of vision -- and this all
the more quickly, the more terrible that object threatens to be.

This physical thirst for seeing has its intellectual extension. We
covet truth, and to attain it, amid all accidents, is a supreme
satisfaction. Now this satisfaction the representation of evil can
also afford. Whether we hear the account of some personal
accident, or listen to the symbolic representation of the inherent
tragedy of life, we crave the same knowledge; the desire for truth
makes us welcome eagerly whatever comes in its name. To be sure,
the relief of such instruction does not of itself constitute an
aesthetic pleasure: the other conditions of beauty remain to be
fulfilled. But the satisfaction of so imperious an intellectual instinct
insures our willing attention to the tragic object, and strengthens
the hold which any beauties it may possess will take upon us. An
intellectual value stands ready to be transmuted into an aesthetic
one, if once its discursiveness is lost, and it is left hanging about
the object as a vague sense of dignity and meaning.

To this must be added the specific pleasure of recognition, one of
the keenest we have, and the sentimental one of nursing our own
griefs and dignifying them by assimilation to a less inglorious
representation of them. Here we have truth on a small scale;
conformity in the fiction to incidents of our personal experience.
Such correspondences are the basis of much popular appreciation
of trivial and undigested works that appeal to some momentary
phase of life or feeling, and disappear with it. They have the value
of personal stimulants only; they never achieve beauty. Like the
souvenirs of last season's gayeties, or the diary of an early love,
they are often hideous in themselves in proportion as they are
redolent with personal associations. But however hopelessly mere
history or confession may fail to constitute a work of art, a work of
art that has