“Evil, in itself, is stripped of real interest, because nothing but the false can spring from what is false; it produces only misfortune, while art should present to us order and harmony. The great artists, the great poets of antiquity, never give us the spectacle of pure wickedness and perversity.” We cite this passage because it exhibits the character and high moral tone which prevails in the entire work, as we shall have occasion to observe more than once hereafter. If the ideas and interests of human life form the ground of the action, the latter is accomplished by the characters upon whom the interest is fastened. General ideas may, indeed, be personated by beings superior to man, by certain divinities like those which figure in ancient epic poetry and tragedy. But it is to man that action, properly so-called, returns; it is he who occupies the scene. Now, how reconcile divine action and human action, the will of the gods and that of man? Such is the problem which has made shipwreck of so many poets and artists. To maintain a proper equipoise it is necessary that the gods have supreme direction, and that man preserve his freedom and his independence without which he is no more than the passive instrument of the will of the gods; fatality weighs upon all his acts. The true solution consists in maintaining the identity of the two terms, in spite of their difference; in so acting that what is attributed to the gods shall appear at the same time to emanate from the inner nature of the _dramatis personæ_ and from their character. The talent of the artist must reconcile the two aspects. “The heart of man must be revealed in his gods, personifications of the grand motives which allure him and govern him within.” This is the problem resolved by the great poets of antiquity, Homer, Æschylus, and Sophocles. The general principles, those grand motives which are the basis of the action, by the fact that they are living in the soul of the characters, form, also, the very ground of the _passions_; this is the essence of true pathos. Passion, here, in the elevated ideal sense, is, in fact, not an arbitrary, capricious, irregular movement of the soul; it is a noble principle, which blends itself with a great idea, with one of the eternal verities of moral or religious order. Such is the passion of Antigone, the holy love for her brother; such, the vengeance of Orestes. It is an essentially legitimate power of the soul which contains one of the eternal principles of the reason and the will. This is still the ideal, the true ideal, although it appears under the form of a passion. It relieves, ennobles and purifies it; it thus gives to the action a serious and profound interest. It is in this sense that passion constitutes the centre and true domain of art; it is the principle of emotion, the source of true pathos.