Art is a factor in common human happiness, because by its means common men are made partakers in the vision of uncommon men.
Great art is a speculum reflecting life as the keenest eyes have seen it.

All its forms and imagery are of value only as this.

Taken by themselves, '_the best in this kind are but shadows_.' We have to '_piece out their imperfections, with our thoughts_;' '_imagination has to amend them_,' and '_it must be our imagination, not theirs_.'[23] In examining a work of art, then, we are examining life itself; or rather, in examining the interest which we take in a work of art, in examining the reasons why we think it beautiful, or great, or interesting, we are examining our own feelings as to the realities represented by it.
And now remembering this, let us turn to certain of the world's greatest works of art--I mean its dramas: for just as poetry is the most articulate of all the arts, so is the drama the most comprehensive form of poetry.

In the drama we have the very thing we are now in want of.

We have life as a whole--that complex aggregate of details, which forms, as it were, the mental landscape of existence, presented to us in a '_questionable shape_,' at once concentrated and intensified.