world, and the relation of fiction to fact. He first perhaps
stirred in the soul of man that desire that we have not yet
satisfied, the desire to know the connection between Beauty and
Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order
of the Kosmos. The problems of idealism and realism, as he sets
them forth, may seem to many to be somewhat barren of result in the
metaphysical sphere of abstract being in which he places them, but
transfer them to the sphere of art, and you will find that they are
still vital and full of meaning. It may be that it is as a critic
of Beauty that Plato is destined to live, and that by altering the
name of the sphere of his speculation we shall find a new
philosophy. But Aristotle, like Goethe, deals with art primarily
in its concrete manifestations, taking Tragedy, for instance, and
investigating the material it uses, which is language, its subject-
matter, which is life, the method by which it works, which is
action, the conditions under which it reveals itself, which are
those of theatric presentation, its logical structure, which is
plot, and its final aesthetic appeal, which is to the sense of
beauty realised through the passions of pity and awe. That
purification and spiritualising of the nature which he calls [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced] is, as Goethe saw, essentially
aesthetic, and is not moral, as Lessing fancied. Concerning
himself primarily with the impression that the work of art
produces, Aristotle sets himself to analyse that impression, to
investigate its source, to see how it is engendered. As a
physiologist and psychologist, he knows that the health of a
function resides in energy. To have a capacity for a passion and
not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and limited. The
mimic spectacle of life that Tragedy affords cleanses the bosom of
much 'perilous stuff,' and by presenting high and worthy objects