[Footnote: Cf. Lipps: _Der Streit
ber die Tragodie_, and _Aesthetik_, Bd. I, S. 599.]
It is a familiar and generally recognized experience, as Lipps has
observed, that any threat or harm done to a value evokes in us a
heightened appreciation of its worth. Parting is a sweet sorrow because
only then do we fully realize the worth of what we are losing; the
beauty of youth that dies is more beautiful because in death its
radiance shines the brighter in our memory. A good in contemplation
comes to take the place of a lost good in reality. Just as we hold on
the more tightly to things that are slipping away from us in a vain
effort to keep them, so to save ourselves from utter sorrow, we build
up in the imagination a fair image of what we have lost, free of the
dust of the world. This makes the peculiar charm of the delicate and
fragile, of weak things and little things, of the transient and
perishable; they awaken in us the tender, protective impulse while
they last, and when they are gone they suffer at our hands an
idealization which the strong and enduring can never receive. Our pity
for them mediates an increased love of them; we mock at fate which
deprives us of them by keeping them secure and fairer in our memory.
As in life, so in art. Beneath and around the pictured destruction and
ruin there opens up to us a more poignant vision of the loveliness of
what was or might have been. At the end of _The Dram Shop_, when
Gervaise sinks into ruin, we inevitably revert to the beginning and
see again, only more intensely, the gentle girl that she was, or else,
going forward, we imagine what she might have been, if only she had
been given a chance.
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