employed and is thrown into bolder relief, our deepest interest
centres in the actors; the action is no longer the matter of first
importance; it is significant mainly because it involves men and women
not only in the chain of external consequences, but also in the order
of spiritual sequences. We are deeply stirred by our perception of the
intimate connection between the possibilities which lie sleeping in
the individual life, and the tragic events which are set in motion
when those possibilities are realised in action. In both epic and
drama men are seen, not in their subjective moods, but in their
objective struggles; not in the detachment of the life of speculation
and imagination, but in vital association and relation with society in
its order and institutions. With many differences, both of spirit and
form, the epic and the drama are at one in portraying men in that
ultimate and decisive stage which determines individual character and
gives history its direction and significance.

And it is from men in action that much of the deepest truth concerning
life and character has come; indeed, it is not until we pass out of
the region of the speculative, the merely potential, that the word
"character" takes on that tremendous meaning with which thousands of
years of actual happenings have invested it. A purely ideal world--a
world fashioned wholly apart from the realities which convey definite,
concrete revelations of what is in us and in our world--would
necessarily be an unmoral world. The relationships which bind men
together and give human intercourse such depth and richness spring
into being only when they are actually entered upon; they could never
be understood or foreseen in a world of pure thought; nor would it be
possible, in such a world, to realise that reaction of the deed upon
the doer which creates character, nor that far-reaching influence of
the deed upon society, and the sequence of events which so often