Undoubtedly such dramatic composition demands of the playwright definiteness of interpretation. His selection, his limiting of time and place, his leading from scene to scene, are only the technical means of realizing his emotional intention. He is trying to show us human life, not in random and interrupted glimpses, not in the jumble and discord of its surface, not in aimless and frustrated movements, but in the animating emotions of its crises. In order to represent crises, he is compelled to show us wherein they are critical; in order to give to emotion full expression, he must make it significant. Rather it is this significance which first caught his attention, which gave him the conception of his play and guided his realization. If his dramatic movement halts or lapses, the reason may lie deeper than technic in uncertainty of intention; and if on the other hand he is able to sustain it and carry it through, the fundamental reason is that his conception of its issue is strong and clear.[57] This presumption has more than once been challenged. Why must the dramatist have an intention, a theme? Why may he not simply represent life? Represent life he not only may, but must, to the extent that he must reflect life, not reflect _on_ it; but what is represented? Life in its multitudinous complexity, its unfulfilled intentions, life as it whirls past and escapes us? That is a task beyond drama. No playwright has ever represented life except as he saw it, or made his representation intelligible without interpretation. And as the dramatist has to interpret in order to compose, so the audience wishes to be led up to some issue. We desire not mere emotional excitement, but emotional release. Else the pity and fear, to use Aristotle’s words, will not bring us purgation. A play shows us life in critical moments, and these are moral moments, moments of the clash of wills. Drama assumes free will, and its movement is by motives. Motivation, on which Aristotle so much insist, is to make the issue convincing. The dramatic representation of life is creative imitation largely in proportion as it thus moves to an end; and the typically dramatic end is not blind fate, but poetic justice. Poetic justice sums up what Aristotle means by saying that “poetry is something more philosophical and more serious than history.” It means the truth revealed beneath facts, the real cause and effect moving beneath the surface. An audience, desiring deeper emotional experience than it achieves through daily observation, desires especially to see how its sharper conflicts issue. It asks of the dramatist not only sight, but insight. It is not satisfied with “mere reversal.” “The mere spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us.” The same criticism is implied in Stevenson’s objection to Meredith’s _Richard Feverel_, that it “began to end well” and then cheated us.