Novelists and story-tellers of all ages seem to have intuited this truth in their portrayal of human emotions. They speak of “pent-up anger,” of “stifled sorrow,” and they describe often in minute detail the course of a passion that in seeking to get adequate expression causes the face to flush, the hand to clench, or the body as a whole to be violently agitated. The Iliad and the Odyssey abound in descriptions of this sort, and every novelist since the days of Homer has felt the need of such portrayals in order to make his characters understood. Indeed, the cultivation of this technique is the essence of dramatic art. But mark, that such emotions are aroused not only when a person is confronted by the physical facts of battle, murder, or sudden death, for example, but also _by the bare mention of the words or phrases_ which appropriately describe such catastrophes. The more carefully such a person is observed, the plainer will it become that the agitation which his body is covertly manifesting would, if it were unhindered in its free expression, result in an elaborate pantomine appropriate to the events described by the story-teller. In other words, the emotions which a thrilling narrative arouses are substitutes for the overt activity which the auditor might be expected to manifest were he actually a participant in the scene described. When, then, we say that a dramatic situation _moves_ us, the description is absolutely accurate. Indeed, from the most credible scientific evidence we possess, the emotions which are thus aroused are characterized by all the organic stresses and strains which are present in the most violent overt activity of which we are capable. We inwardly writhe and tussle, we half-start one kind of positive behavior, only to find it checked by the initiation of its opposite,—in a word, we display on a small scale all the conduct appropriate to the situation. And this elaborate arousal to activity is, we undertake to say, precisely what gives every dramatic scene or narrative its meaning.