Secondly, that confrontation of forces has revealed itself as indeed essential. This is not the time-honored view of tragedy as collision, which has been arrived at simply by observing that great tragic dramas are mostly collisions, making the drama a picture thereof, but not explaining why it must be such. I have tried, on the contrary, to show that confrontation is a necessary product of the bare form of dramatic representation,--two people face to face. But if this bare form or scheme of confrontation is understood and interpreted as profoundly as possible, then all the other characteristics of the tragic drama are seen to flow from it; and thus for the first time to be really explained by being accounted for. The tragic drama not only is, but must be, collision, because confrontation, understood as richly as possible, must be collision. It must be "inevitable," and it must have movement, because only so is the confrontation reinforced. In brief, others have said that the drama, or tragedy, is conflict, the perfect opposition of two forces. We should rather say that the drama is first of all picture, living representation of colloquy; as such, it is balance, confrontation; and confrontation to its ideal degree of intensity is conflict. No drama can dispense with picture; and so no drama is free from the obligation to add unto itself these other qualities also. The acting play is the play of confrontations. VIII THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS VIII THE BEAUTY OF IDEAS I THE Idea of Beauty has been greatly widened since the age of Plato. Then, it was only in order, proportion, unity in variety, that beauty was admitted to consist; to-day we hold that the moderns have caught a profounder beauty, the beauty of meanings, and we make it matter for rejoicing that nothing is too small, too strange, or too ugly to enter, through its power of suggestion, the realm of the aesthetically valuable; and that the definition of beauty should have been extended to include, under the name of Romantic, Symbolic, Expressive, or Ideal Beauty, all of the elements of aesthetic experience, all that emotionally stirs us in representation. But while this view is a natural development, it is not of necessity unassailable; and it is open to question whether the addition of an independent element of expression to the older definition of beauty can be justified by its consequences for art.