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than in that of abstract science. But he may learn from Oedipus King the very truths that an awakened public conscience is even now apprehending for the first time in this country, and is seeking to bring home to monopolists and sweat-shop farmers-that private good intentions do not atone for crimes against the social order, that sins of ignorance are punished like those of wilfulness. He may see in Macbeth the inevitableness with which sin begets its own penalty. Most of us, if we could eliminate all we have learned from literature concerning the nature of our moral and social environment, would find the residuum poor indeed.

This knowledge, moreover, is dynamic. Textbooks of philosophy and ethics might bring into neat compass all the truths expressed in literature, and still leave the student cold. We do not live by formulas; 'we live by admiration, hope, and love.' In the vicarious experience which literature affords, the admiration and the love of what is noble, and the scorn of what is base, come home to us with almost the compulsive force of first-hand life, and stripped of all the selfish implications which in an actual situation sometimes obscure the truth. Every one, it is true, finds in literature what he himself brings to it. One. after reading Adam Bede or Romola, will find it impossible to make personal ease the controlling desire of his life; another will learn from Jane Austen the humorous sympathy and insight which is due to the bores, the eccentrics, and the petty-minded of the world. But the man who can be taught no such lesson by literature will hardly learn these things by drastic experience.

So far, we have spoken of the office of literature in general, though it follows from our very conception

of poetry that to it must fall the greater part of this office. There are other functions for which poetry is peculiarly fitted, functions in general of emotional and æsthetic discipline. It is surely not altogether fanciful to find in the fact that poetry is a highly artistic thing, whose very life is conformity to law, a power-however indirect the process may be-of regulating the spirit. Any one who has seriously set himself to be an artist in any task, to make something perfect of its kind, realizes the steadying influence of the effort upon his whole character. In poet and in hearer, feeling, however intense, when expressed in measure and in harmonious fashion, becomes controlled. The realization that even fancy has its law, that pure accident is an impossibility, brings sharply home the fact that power and content are nowhere to be found save in harmony with the laws of life.

Further, by its vicarious expression of feelings that all men may undergo, but not all can put into words, poetry fulfils a function supplemental to its furnishing of vicarious experience. The latter is that of teaching a man to make another's experience his own; the former is that-concerning which we have already said something-of enabling him to look at his own experience from the outside. And it is only as experience is thus objectified that we can give it form, can see it in true relations. Every introspective person knows how speedily subjective pondering may lead to internal chaos. So even Byron, bearing through Europe 'the pageant of his bleeding heart,' may now and then be a wholesome companion for young people already in the Byronic stage. As a means of keeping within healthy bounds more normal but very intense feeling, such as love or grief, the value of poetry is very great.

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These two forms of disinterestedness-the ability to look at one's own experience in an objective way, and the power of identifying oneself with the life of another-are both involved in the Aristotelian doctrine of katharsis. The doctrine, as Aristotle himself intimated, has a wider application than that of the purgation, through the excitement of pity and fear, of those emotions. There seems to be a purgation of the whole nature as a result of any disinterested emotion, so it be not too violent. Life has its dead stretches now and then, when even a painful stimulus may be salutary. More normally, any feeling quite unrelated to one's own private concerns, whether it be enjoyment of a sunset, sympathy in another's joy and pain, or delight in a fine poem, lifts one above himself, seems to purge away earthiness and deadness, and to leave the spirit clear and free. There may be danger, for some natures, of resting in this sense of purification, without allowing it any effect on conduct. But if such a temptation ever ensnares one, it speedily brings about its own annihilation; it is hardly possible to harbor disinterested feelings in an interested way. Poetry provides this sort of katharsis more certainly than does life, because the poet idealizes, clears his material of accidental and discordant elements.

In a narrower sense, the katharsis is the purification of a feeling through excitement of it. In tragedy, pity and fear are stimulated to be allayed. Being felt in relation to the fate of some one outside ourselves, they may be brought into connection with fundamental principles of life, and so purged of all bitterness. Other emotions than pity and fear may likewise be relieved of their oppressiveness, rendered 1 Politics 5 (8). 7; Butcher, p. 248.

impersonal, and idealized. Some such relation explains the value of hymns expressing deep emotion, whether jubilant or sad. Clearly, this office of poetry can be performed in various degrees by poetry of different kinds and ranks. Every poet, so long as he is sincere, may in his measure do this service; but it is primarily the function of the drama, which in the highest degree arouses intense feeling unconnected with personal concern. In all poetry, but particularly in tragedy, our natural emotions are stirred, to be seen in their relation to the laws of cause and effect in character, and to be quieted as the truth of those laws overshadows the case of the individual. The sense of submission to the eternal order, of the merging of the single life in the universal, is for ever tranquilizing and supporting.

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