and this natural expression of unpolished peculiarities we have the true universal, which is throughout neither formal nor destitute of individuality, but finds its concrete realization in a twofold way from the defined content of character and the objective presence of opinions and aims. Genuine poetry will therefore consist in the assertion of what belongs to immediate and actual life as characteristic and individual in the purifying medium of universality,[14] both aspects being permitted to mediate each other. In this case we are conscious, even in respect to diction, that without being wholly banished from the basis of reality and its actual traits of truth, we are nevertheless carried into another sphere, that is to say the ideal realm of art. Of this latter character is the diction of Greek dramatic poetry, the later diction of Goethe, and in part, too, that of Schiller, and in his own way Shakespeare's also, although the Englishman, owing to the peculiar conditions of the contemporary stage, is forced in part now and again to accommodate his verbal language to the actual ability of the actor.[15] (_ββ_) We may _further_ classify the mode of dramatic expression as that of choral interlude, monologue, and dialogue. It is the ancient drama which has pre-eminently elaborated the distinction between chorus and dialogue. In our modern drama this falls away. What, in the classical composition, was presented by the _chorus_, is now rather placed in the mouths of the leading characters. The choric song expresses, among the ancients, by way of contrast to the particular characters and their more personal or more reciprocal conflict, the general or more impersonal view of the situation, and the emotions it excites, in a manner which at one time inclines to the objective style of epic narrative, at another to the impulsive movement of the Lyric. In the _monologue_, on the other hand, it is the isolated individual who, in a given situation of the action, becomes objective on his own account. Monologues are, therefore, dramatically in their right place at those moments chiefly when the emotional life is entirely self-concentrated as the result of previous events; when it sums up, as it were, the nature of the cleft between itself and others, or its own spiritual division; or when it arrives at some sudden decision, or comes to the final point of resolve on matters already long debated.