reality, and following it in our effort, though we come merely to a
stoical idea of the just man on whom the heavens fall, we should yet be
nobler than the power that made us souls betrayed. But there is no such
difference between the world as it is and the world as ideal art
presents it.

What, then, is the difference between art and nature? Art is nature
regenerate, made perfect, suffering the new birth into what ought to be;
an ordered and complete world. But this is the vision of art as the
ultimate of good. Idealism has also another world, of which glimpses
have already appeared in the course of this argument, though in the
background. In the intellectual sphere evil is as subject to general
statement as is good, and there is in the strict sense an idealization
of evil, a universal statement of it, as in Mephistopheles, or in more
partial ways in Iago, Macbeth, Richard III. In the emotional sphere also
there is the throb of evil, felt as diabolic energy and presented as the
element in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphere
of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as
his portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the good
tends to erect man above himself, the same generalizing method in the
world of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; the
extremes of the process are the divine and the devilish; both transcend
life, but are developed out of it. The difference between these two
poles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that of
the other an order of death. Between these two is the special province
of the human will. What literature, what all art, presents is not the
ultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into
account the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be in
its evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress. Hence
tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the other