I took my example from a short poem of extreme simplicity, and, as I have again and again in this essay spoken of “moments” of conscious life, a scrupulous reader might well conclude that I concerned myself only with what is commonly known as lyrical art, or that I should presently offer a proof of Croce’s theory that all art is essentially lyrical. I agree with Croce, and perhaps go further than he in believing, for reasons with which I will not burden this discussion, that all lyricism in art is dramatic, in that it involves a dramatic conception of himself by the author. His care is, that his creation shall be wholly determined by one moment, not by a series, and for this reason, he is compelled as he works to refer continually to himself as he was at that moment. For if a work of art were to be representative of more than one moment, it would be representative of more than one man. It would not be homogeneous, and could not be beautiful. This applies not only to a song or a picture, but to those works of art which are in appearance the most elaborate, the least uniform, the least determined by a single moment. A play, whose reading or performance may occupy hours, during which a number of characters whom we accept provisionally as human, as separate entities, live imaginary lives before us, is, no less than a song, the result of becoming completely conscious of a single moment. The duration of the reading is in no way affected by the duration of the moment of life that set the author playing with his marionettes. A moment of life such as would, for a poet, become articulate in a song, may require from a playwright that he represent it to himself in persons talking, a clash of personalities, a breaking of personalities by destiny, a series of events explicable within itself, not resembling any one moment of his life, but in their totality representing his means of _knowing_ a moment, and the means he offers us whereby, as nearly as we may, we shall share that knowing. When a play is not the artist’s learning a moment of his own life, it is mere scaffolding, resembling a building at dusk, or at a sudden first sight, but presently found out to be empty and fraudulent, when with contempt we leave it to oblivion. Passage of time, intricacy of construction, apparent multiplicity of imagined lives do not affect the question.