Note * — Chapter IX · Actual and Possible Misapprehensions

No doubt the literary celebrities, with their applause, were to blame, in part, for this. Our relic of the Age of Good Sense made a just reaction. He accurately registered the effect to which bad acting and inept production* gave rise. But it is with his argument not with his reaction that we are concerned. The celebrities, if they had not been too busy giving vent (though in a mistaken form) to their loyalty to the memory of Shelley, and to their sense of triumph over the Censor, might have told him that neither amusement nor instruction is what the judicious seek from Tragedy, and referred him to Aristotle. Neither term, unless we wrench it right out of its usual setting, is appropriate to the greater forms of art. The experiences which they occasion are too full, too varied, too whole, too subtly balanced upon opposing impulses, whether of pity and terror or of joy and despair, to be so easily described. Tragedy—