for the
pleasures they give, they have no place among the fine arts. Nor
have they, in such a case, any place in human life at all; unless they
are instruments of some practical purpose and serve to preach a
moral, or achieve a bad notoriety. For ugly things can attract
attention, although they cannot keep it; and the scandal of a new
horror may secure a certain vulgar admiration which follows
whatever is momentarily conspicuous, and which is attained even
by crime. Such admiration, however, has nothing aesthetic about it,
and is only made possible by the bluntness of our sense of beauty.

The effect of the pathetic and comic is therefore never pure; since
the expression of some evil is mixed up with those elements by
which the whole appeals to us. These elements we have seen to be
the truth of the presentation, which involves the pleasures of
recognition and comprehension, the beauty of the medium, and the
concomitant expression of things intrinsically good. To these
sources all the aesthetic value of comic and tragic is due; and the
sympathetic emotion which arises from the spectacle of evil must
never be allowed to overpower these pleasures of contemplation,
else the entire object becomes distasteful and loses its excuse for
being. Too exclusive a relish for the comic and pathetic is
accordingly a sign of bad taste and of comparative insensibility to
beauty.

This situation has generally been appreciated in the practice of the
arts, where effect is perpetually studied; but the greatest care has
not always succeeded in avoiding the dangers of the pathetic, and
history is full of failures due to bombast, caricature, and
unmitigated horror. In all these the effort to be expressive has
transgressed the conditions of pleasing effect. For the creative and
imitative impulse is indiscriminate. It does not consider the
eventual beauty of the effect, but only the blind instinct of
self-expression. Hence an untrained and not naturally sensitive mind
cannot distinguish or produce anything good. This critical
incapacity has always been a cause of failure and a just ground for
ridicule; but it remained for some thinkers of our time -- a time of
little art and much undisciplined production -- to erect this abuse
into a principle and declare that the essence of beauty is to express
the artist and not to delight the world. But the conditions of effect,
and the possibility of pleasing, are the only criterion of what is
capable an