epic poetry asserts what is substantive in its positive reality[8] for the evaluation of those passions and the aims which are directed to the objective conditions and rational laws of the concrete world; and it is, moreover, by this very test of the worth and conditions, under which such individuals continue in their resolve to abide, that their destiny is discovered by implication. This objective presence, which proceeds from the personality itself, no less than this personal experience,[9] which is reproduced in its active realization and all that declares its worth in the world, is Spirit in its own living totality; it is this which, as _action_, supplies both form and content to _dramatic poetry._ Moreover, inasmuch as this concrete whole is itself no less essentially conscious life than it is, under the aspect of its external realization, also a self-manifestation, quite apart from all question of local or other artistic means of realization, we are bound, in respect to this representation of actual facts, to meet the claim of genuine poetry that we should have the _entire personality_ of the individual envisaged; only as such the living man himself is actually that which is expressed. For though, on the one hand, in the drama, as in lyric poetry, a character ought to express the content of its own soul-life as a veritable possession, yet, from another point of view, it asserts itself, when, in its entire personality it is confronted with other personalities, as effective in its practical existence, and comes thereby into active contact with the world around it, by means of which it attaches itself immediately to an active disposition,[10] which, quite as truly as articulate speech, is an expression of the soul-life, and requires its artistic treatment. Already we find in lyrical poetry some close approach to the apportionment of various emotions among different individual speakers, and the distribution of its subject-matter in acts or scenes. In the drama, then, subjective emotion passes on likewise to the expression of action; and, by so doing, renders necessary the manifestation to our senses of the play of gesture which concentrates the universality of language in a closer relation with the expression of personality,[11] and by means of position, demeanour, gesticulation and other ways is individualized and completed. If, however, this aspect of deportment is carried forward by artistic means to a degree of expression, that it can dispense with speech, we have the art of pantomime, which resolves the rhythmical movement of poetry in a harmonious and picturesque motion of limbs, and in this, so to speak, plastic music of bodily position and movement gives animated life in the dance to the tranquil and cold figures of sculpture, that it may essentially unite by such means music and the plastic art. [Footnote 1: _Gleichgültige_, that is, the impressions of sense are received from without, from a manifold indifferent to ourselves.]