The course of events again, so far as they stand in direct connection
with human life, may be thought of as the expression of the individual's
own will, or of that of his environment. The will of the environment may
be divided into three varieties, the will of nature, the will of other
men, and the will of God. In each case it is will embodied in events. If
these ideas be all merged in the conception of the world as a totality
whose course is the unfolding of one Divine will operant throughout it
and called Fate or Providence, then the individual will, through which,
as through nature also, the Divine will works, is only its servant.
Action so conceived, the march of events under some heavenly power
working through the mass of human will which it overrules in conjunction
with its own more comprehensive purposes, is epic action; in it
characters are subordinate to the main progress of the action, they are
only terms in the action; however free they may be apparently,
considered by themselves, that freedom is within such limits as to allow
entire certainty of result, its mutations are included in the
calculation of the Divine will. The action of the Aeneid is of this
nature: a grand series of destined events worked out through human
agency to fulfil the plan of the ruler of all things in heaven and
earth. On the other hand, if the course of events be more narrowly
attended to within the limits of the individual's own activity, as the
expression primarily and significantly of his personal will, then the
successive acts are subordinate to the character; they are terms of the
character which is thereby exhibited; they externalize the soul. Action,
so conceived, is dramatic action. If in the course of events there
arises a conflict between the will of the individual and that of his
environment, whether nature, man, or God, then the seed of tragedy,
specifically, is present; this conflict is the essential idea of
tragedy. In all these varieties of action, the scene is the external
world; plot lies in that world, and sets forth the order, the causal