trials, and breaking under them, cannot be anything but
painful. The correctness of the portrait he defends;
and the fault, as he thinks, is not in the treatment, but
in the subject itself. Now it is true that as a rule poetry
is better employed in exhibiting the conquest over
temptations than the fall under them, and some escape
of this kind for the feelings must be provided in
tragedies, by the introduction of some powerful cause,
either of temptation acting on the will or of an external
force controlling the action, in order to explain and
reconcile us to the catastrophe. A mere picture of
imbecility is revolting simply; we cannot conceive ourselves
acting in the same way under the same circumstances,
and we can therefore feel neither sympathy with
the actor nor interest in his fate. But we must be
careful how we narrow our theories in such matters.
In Werther we have an instance of the same trial, with
the same issue as Mr. Arnold has described in Empedocles,
and to say that Werther was a mistake, is to
circumscribe the sphere of art by a definition which the
public taste will refuse to recognize. Nor is it true, in
spite of Schiller's authority, that "all art is dedicated to
enjoyment." Tragedy has other objects, the katharsis
or purifying of the emotions for instance, which, if we
are to continue to use words in their ordinary sense, is
something distinct from enjoyment, and not always reconcilable
with it. Whatever will excite interest in a
healthy, vigorous mind, that is a fair object of poetry,
and there is a painful as well as a pleasant interest; it
is an abuse of language to describe the sensations which