harmony or the contrast of their colours, and the massing of their lights and shadows.  If we reflect for a moment what art is—­literary and poetical art in particular—­we shall at once see how, examined in this way, it will be of use to us.  In the first place, then, what is art? and what is the reason that it pleases us?  It is a reflection, a reproduction of the pleasures of life, and is altogether relative to these, and dependent on them.  We should, for instance, take no interest in portraits unless we took some interest in the human face.  We should take none in statues if we took none in the human form.  We must know something of love as a feeling, or we should never care for love-songs.  Art may send us back to these with intenser appreciation of them, but we must bring to art from life the appreciation we want intensified.  Art is a factor in common human happiness, because by its means common men are made partakers in the vision of uncommon men.

Great art is a speculum reflecting life as the keenest eyes have seen it.  All its forms and imagery are of value only as this.  Taken by themselves, ‘the best in this kind are but shadows.’  We have to ‘piece out their imperfections, with our thoughts;’ ’imagination has to amend them,’ and ’it must be our imagination, not theirs.’[23] In examining a work of art, then, we are examining life itself; or rather, in examining the interest which we take in a work of art, in examining the reasons why we think it beautiful, or great, or interesting, we are examining our own feelings as to the realities represented by it.

And now remembering this, let us turn to certain of the world’s greatest works of art—­I mean its dramas:  for just as poetry is the most articulate of all the arts, so is the drama the most comprehensive form of poetry.  In the drama we have the very thing we are now in want of.  We have life as a whole—­that complex aggregate of details, which forms, as it were, the mental landscape of existence, presented to us in a ‘questionable shape,’ at once concentrated and intensified.  And it is no exaggeration to say that the reasons why men think life worth living, can be all found in the reasons why they think a great drama great.

Let us turn, then, to some of the greatest works of Sophocles, of Shakespeare, and of Goethe, and consider briefly how these present life to us.  Let us take Macbeth, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Faust.  We have here five presentations of life, under what confessedly are its most striking aspects, and with such interests as men have been able to find in it, raised to their greatest intensity.  Such, at least, is the way in which these works are regarded, and it is only in virtue of this estimate that they are called great.  Now, in producing this estimate, what is the chief faculty in us that they appeal to?  It will need but little thought to show us that they appeal primarily