on is transparent. The higher poetry
is, the more generic it is. Its universality is a chief constituent of
its excellence. The drama is the most generically human, and,
therefore, the highest of the great forms of poetry. The epic deals
with the material, the outward--humanity concreted into events; the
lyric with the inward, when that is so individual and intense as to
gush out in ode or song. The dramatic is the union of the epic and
lyric--the inward moulding the outward, predominant over the outward
while co-working with it. In the dramatic, the action is more made by
the personality; in the epic, the personality is more merged in the
strong, full stream of events. The lyric is the utterance of
one-sided, partial (however deep and earnest) feeling, the which must
be linked to other feelings to give wholeness to the man and his
actions. The dramatic combines several lyrics with the epic. Out of
humanity and human action it extracts the essence. It presents men in
their completest form, in warm activity, impelled thereto by strongest
feelings. Hence, it must be condensed and compact, and must, for its
highest display, get rid of local coloring, personal associations, and
all prosaic circumscriptions. The poetic dramatist needs the highest
poetic freedom, and only through this can he attain to that breadth
and largeness whereof the superiority of his form admits, and which
are such in Shakespeare, that in his greatest plays the whole world
seems to be present as spectators and listeners.

Observe that the highest dramatic literatures belong to the two freest
peoples--the Greeks and the English. A people, possessing already a
large political freedom, must be capable of, and must be in the act
of, vigorous, rich development, through deep inward passion and
faculty, in order that its spirit shall issue in the perennial flowers
of the poetic drama. The dramatic especially implies and
demands variety and fullness and elevation of _personality_; and
this is only possible through freedom, the attainment of which freedom
implies on its side the innate fertility of nature which results in
fullness and elevation.

Now in the subjective elevation of the individual, and therewith the
unprecedented relative number of individuals thus elevated, herein do
we exceed all other peoples. By subjective elevation I mean,
liberation from the outward, downward pressure of dogmatic
prescription, of imperious custom, of blindfolded traditio