 The aim of amusement art is to stimulate an emotion by ‘make believe’ means, and to discharge it. If the emotion is intended to remain undischarged—if the aim is that the audience should leave the theatre indignant at global warming for example—then the work is one of magic; if the emotions it evokes are intended to be ‘earthed’, the work is one of amusement. Most of literature and drama are actually amusement—not only for example Thackeray but most of Shakespeare are included. But remember that amusement and art proper can co-exist, i.e., in the same work (in Shakespeare’s case, the same work is often actually a bundle of works, some magical, some amusement, and some, at least in favourable cases, of art proper). Collingwood stresses—in 1938—the rise of decadent amusement works, especially pornography but also for example the case of literature or film appealing to our love of imaginatively dwelling amongst the upper classes. And he warns of a danger they present to our society (or rather of the danger of the conditions that give rise to an ever growing demand for them); that is what Plato meant to proscribe in his famous banishment of the ‘artist’ from his republic, and Collingwood sees Plato as having foretold the eventual doom of Greco-Roman civilisation. Now all this is by the way; amusement is craft, not art. But the points he raises in this connection are important to his main subject, because a certain tradition wrongly identifies the success-conditions of arts of amusement as the standard of taste for art proper. Hume, for example, wrote as if the criterion for success in a work of art is the excitation of pleasure in suitably refined individuals. But pleasure has a name; the ‘artist’ who busies himself with arousing that particular emotion is merely a craftsman.