EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 153 



remains quiescent, sterile of endeavour, steeped in the lumi- 

 nous atmosphere of reverie. The beautiful, as Kant said, is 

 the object of a disinterested satisfaction. And this is probably 

 what Aristotle had in his mind when he denned the end of 

 tragedy to be a purification of the emotions through pity and 

 terror. 



' To allay the perturbation of the mind and set the affec- 

 tions in right tune,' wrote Milton in his panegyric of the 

 poet's function. Before entering art's Elysium, the life of 

 man drinks Lethe ; we know that sorrows will be tempered 

 there to sadness, acute passions robbed of their sting, memo- 

 ries refined to a faint echo of experience. Yet though the 

 emotions stimulated by art are unfruitful of act, sterile of 

 energy, purged of their selfish element, they are none the less 

 real and serious. They possess a notable power over the 

 formation of character. One effect of art has been too little 

 observed by writers upon ethics. It is the arousing in us of 

 what may be called indefinite illimitable desire. A desire 

 which is tyrannous, precisely because it is vague, because its 

 rhythms, excited by intangibilities, react upon the finest and 

 remotest fibres of our being. The bearing of this remark can 

 best perhaps be illustrated by an example. Hazlitt relates 

 that, when he read the last scene between the lovers in 

 Schiller's Don Carlos, he was left with ' a deep sense of suffer- 

 ing and a strong desire after good, which has haunted me 

 ever since.' Those words sufficiently describe the stirring of 

 the soul effected by great art ; and upon the moral quality of 

 the work of art which stimulates this indefinite desire, will 

 depend much of the moral temper of the man who feels it. 

 The desire haunts him through his life, and is rooted in the 

 recollection of the work which called it forth. It may be 

 the pathos of Cordelia's death in King Lear which evoked 

 the emotion ; it may be Plato's rapturous description of love 

 in the Phcedrus. We may owe its presence in our being to 

 the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, or we may derive it from 



That most perfect of antiques 

 They call the Genius of the Vatican, 

 Which seems too beauteous to endure itself 

 In this mixed world. 



