to ask ourselves what constitutes the change. How is
it that the epic poet, while "holding up the mirror to nature," yet
shows us in the glass a glory which belongs not to nature as we see it,
in its material limitations? The answer is, that though he follows the
essential laws of the human spirit, his scene is not the earth we live
in. He fills it with actors other than the men who "hoard and sleep and
feed" around us. He places the action either in heroic ages--in the
"past which was never present," when gods were more human and men more
divine--or in heavenly places, and among the powers of the air. The
action is simple in proportion to its remoteness from the reality of
life, and rapid in proportion to its simplicity. It arises from the
operation of the most elementary passions, the wrath of Achilles or the
pride of Satan, in collision with an overruling power. For the animal
wants and tricks of fortune, which entangle the web of man's affairs, it
has no place. The animal element, if not banished from view altogether,
becomes merely the organ of the ruling motions of the spirit; and
fortune is lost in destiny or providence. Thus the incidents of the
narrative cease to be mere incidents. They are held together by passion;
they are themselves, so to speak, manifestations of passion working with
more and more intensity to the final consummation. Not the laws which
regulate curiosity, but those which regulate hope and awe, are the laws
which they have to satisfy.

H. TRAGEDY AS PURIFIER OF THE PASSIONS

8. In tragedy, as the product of a more cultivated age, these
characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The
Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives
unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary,
has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit,
made for its own sake, to re-create human life according to spiritual
laws; to transport itself from a world, where chance and appetite seem
hourly to give the lie to its self-assertion, into one where it may work
unimpeded by anything but the antagonism inherent in itself and the
presence of an overruling law. This result is attained simply by the
action of the proper instruments of thought, abstraction and synthesis.
The tragedian presents to us scenes of life, not its continuous flow of
incident. In "Macbeth," for instance, there is an hiatus of some years
between the earlier