2. To represent the ideal in personages or in an action, there is necessary not only a favorable world from which the subject is to be borrowed, but a situation. This situation can be either indeterminate, like that of many of the immobile personages of antique or religious sculpture, or determinate, but yet of little earnestness. Such are also the greater number of the situations of the personages of antique sculpture. Finally, it may be earnest, and furnish material for a veritable action. It supposes, then, an opposition, an action and a reaction, a conflict, a collision. The beauty of the ideal consists in absolute serenity and perfection. Now, collision destroys this harmony. The problem of art consists, then, in so managing that the harmony reappears in the denouement. Poetry alone is capable of developing this opposition upon which the interest, particularly, of tragic art turns. Without examining here the nature of the different _collisions_, the study of which belongs to the theory of dramatic art, we must already have remarked that the collisions of the highest order are those in which the conflict takes place between moral forces, as in the ancient tragedies. This is the subject of true classic tragedy, moral as well as religious, as will be seen from what follows. Thus the ideal, in this superior degree, is the manifestation of moral powers and of the ideas of spirit, of the grand movements of the soul, and of the characters which appear and are revealed in the development of the representation. 3. In _action_, properly so-called, three things are to be considered which constitute its ideal object: 1. The general interests, the ideas, the universal principles, whose opposition forms the very foundation of the action; 2. The personages; 3. Their character and their passions, or the motives which impel them to act. In the first place, the eternal principles of religion, of morality, of the family, of the state—the grand sentiments of the soul, love, honor, etc.—these constitute the basis, the true interest of the action. These are the grand and true motives of art, the eternal theme of exalted poetry. To these legitimate and true powers others are, without doubt, added; the powers of evil; but they ought not to be represented as forming the real foundation and end of the action. “If the idea, the end and aim, be something false in itself, the hideousness of the ground will allow still less beauty of form. The sophistry of the passions may, indeed, by a true picture, attempt to represent the false under the colors of the true, but it places under our eyes only a whited sepulchre. Cruelty and the violent employment of force can be endured in representation, but only when they are relieved by the grandeur of the character and ennobled by the aim which is pursued by the _dramatis personæ_. Perversity, envy, cowardice, baseness, are only repulsive.