reinforcement. Thus the porter's scene in "Macbeth" is related to the neighboring scenes, as De Quincey has shown in his famous essay. And just as in music the feeling of "rightness" ensues when the awaited note slips into place, so the feeling of "rightness" comes when the inevitable consequences follow the premise of a plot. The particular separate ideas of such a development partake of beauty, then, in so far as they minister to the movement of the whole, just as the separate lines in a swaying, swirling robe of one of Botticelli's women minister to the whole conception. The catastrophe, in other words, must be as inevitably related to the sequence of ideas as the final chords of a symphony to the sequence of notes. The attitude of mind with which we welcome it is the same, whether on the plane of the responses of the psychological organism or of the ideal understanding. V But before finally relegating the idea to its place in the aesthetic scheme, we must ask whether the specific emotional content can claim independent aesthetic value; for we can scarcely ignore the fact that almost all naive response to literature, and indeed to all forms of art, is, or is believed to be, specifically emotional. Maupassant, in his introduction to "Pierre et Jean," distinguishes thus between the demand of the critic--"Make me something fine according to your temperament," --and the cry of the public--"Move me, terrify me, make we weep!" And yet to the assertion of common sense that the desire of the naive enjoyer of art is definite emotional excitement, we may venture to oppose a negative. The average person who weeps at the theatre, or over a novel, would no doubt repudiate the suggestion that it is not primarily the emotion of terror, or pity, that he feels. But a closer interpretation shows that it is almost impossible to disengage, in such an experience, the particular emotions. What is felt is rather pleasurable excitement, pleasure raised to the pitch of exaltation, with a fringe of emotional association. The notion of specific emotions is illusory in the same sense that our notion of pleasure from specific emotions in listening to music is illusory. The ordinary descriptions of music are all couched in emotional or even ideational terms,--from the musical adventures of "Charles Auchester" down,--and yet we know, as Gurney says, that when, in listening to music, we think we are yearning after the unutterable, we are really yearning after the next note; and when we think it is the yearning that gives us pleasure, it is really the triumphant acceptance of the melodic rightness of that next note. So the much-discussed Katharsis, or emotion of Tragedy, is not the experience of emotions and pleasure in that experience, but rather pleasure in the experience of ideas, tinged with emotion, which belong to each other with precisely that musical rightness. Katharsis is indeed not the mark of Tragedy alone, although in