iirSCELLANEOUS. 



totally to banish from his memory that the scenes are fic- 

 titious and illusive. In real life \ve always advert to 

 futurity, and endeavour to draw inferences of the pro- 

 bable consequences ; but the moment we take off our 

 minds from what is passing on the stage to reasonings 

 thereupon, the illusion is dispelled, and it again recurs 

 that it is all fiction. 



If we compare the degrees of pleasure we derive from 

 the perusal of a novel and the representation of a tragedj^ 

 we shall observe a wonderful disparity. In both we feel 

 an interest, in both sympathy is excited. But in the one, 

 things are merely related to us as having passed, which it 

 is not attempted to persuade us ever did in realitif hap- 

 pen, and from which, therefore, we never can deceive our- 

 selves into the idea that any consequences whatever will 

 result ; in the other, on the contrary, the actions them- 

 selves pass before our eyes ; we are not tempted to ask 

 ourselves whether they did ever happen ; we see them 

 happen, we are the witnesses of them, and were it not 

 for the meliorating circumstances before-mentioned, the 

 sympathy would become so powerful as to be in the high- 

 est degree painful. 



In tragedy, therefore, everything which can strengthen 

 the illusion should be introduced, for there are a thousand 

 drawbacks on the effect wliich it is impossible to remove, 

 and which have always so great a force, as to put it out 

 of the power of the poet to excite sympathy in a too pain- 

 ful degree. Everything that is improbable, everything 

 which is out of the common course of nature should, for 

 tliis reason, be avoided, as nothing will so forcibly re- 

 mind the s] ectator of the unrealness of the illusion. 



It is a mistaken idea that we sympathize sooner with 

 the distresses of kings and illustrious personages than 

 with those of common life. Men are, in fact, more in- 

 clined to commiserate the sufferings of their equals than 

 of those whom they cannot but regard, rather with awe 

 than pity, as superior beings, and to take an interest in in- 

 cidents which might have happened to themselves, sooner 

 than in those remote from their own rank and habits. It 

 is for this reason that -^schylus censures Euripides for in- 



