A too narrow view of values, or a too simple conception of morality is usually the cause of these misunderstandings of the arts. The agelong controversy as to whether the business of poetry is to please or to instruct shows this well. “Poets wish either to instruct or to delight or to combine solid and useful with the agreeable.” “It is only for the purpose of being useful that Poetry ought to be agreeable; pleasure is only a means which she uses for the end of profit.” So thought Boileau and Rapin. Dryden, modest and penetrating in his fashion, was “satisfied if it cause delight: for delight is the chief, if not the only, end of poetry: instruction can be admitted but in the second place; for poesy only instructs as it delights.” But he does not further specify the nature of the delight or the instruction, an omission in which most critics except Shelley agree. Our view on the point entirely depends upon this. If we set the sugarcoated-pill view aside as beneath serious consideration, there still remains a problem. A reviewer of the recent performance of the _Cenci_ will state it excellently for us. “It had been better had Shelley’s _Cenci_ remained for ever banned. It represents three hours of unrelieved, agonising misery. . . . What excuse is there for the depicting of horrors such as these? There must be some, for a house packed with literary celebrities fiercely applauded. If the function of the theatre is to amuse, then in the presentation of the _Cenci_ it has missed its aim. If it is to instruct, what moral can be pointed for the better conduct of our lives by a tragedy such as this? If Art be the answer, then Art may well be sacrificed.” 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[28] 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— beneath whose sable roof Of boughs as if for festal purpose decked With unrejoicing berries—ghostly shapes May meet at noontide; Fear and Trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight, Death the Skeleton And Time the Shadow,