quarters with life, and to do something positive and substantial.
Self-expression is the prime need of human nature; it must know, act,
and suffer by virtue of its deepest instincts. The greater and richer
that nature, the deeper will be its need of seeing life on many sides,
of sharing in many kinds of experience, of contending with multiform
difficulties. To drink deeply of the cup of life, at whatever cost,
appears to be the insatiable desire of the most richly endowed men and
women; and with such natures the impulse is to seek, not to shun,
experience. And that which to the elect men and women of the race is
necessary and possible is not only comprehensible to those who cannot
possess it: it is powerfully and permanently attractive. There is a
spell in it which the dullest mortal does not wholly escape.[1]

1. Reprinted in part, by permission, from the "Forum."




Chapter XXI.

Culture through Action.


It is an interesting fact that the four men who have been accepted as
the greatest writers who have yet appeared, used either the epic or
the dramatic form. It can hardly have been accidental that Homer and
Dante gave their greatest work the epic form, and that Shakespeare and
Goethe were in their most fortunate moments dramatists. There must
have been some reason in the nature of things for this choice of two
literary forms which, differing widely in other respects, have this in