ation. Our modern
languages are not susceptible of great formal beauty.

_Literary form. The plot._

Sec. 44. The forms of composition in verse and prose which are
practised in each language are further organizations of words, and
have formal values. The most exacting of these forms and that
which has been carried to the greatest perfection is the drama; but
it belongs to rhetoric and poetics to investigate the nature of these
effects, and we have here sufficiently indicated the principle which
underlies them. The plot, which Aristotle makes, and very justly,
the most important element in the effect of a drama, is the formal
element of the drama as such: the ethos and sentiments are the
expression, and the versification, music, and stage settings are the
materials. It is in harmony with the romantic tendency of modern
times that modern dramatists -- Shakespeare as well as Moliere,
Calderon, and the rest -- excel in ethos rather than in plot; for it is
the evident characteristic of modern genius to study and enjoy
expression, -- the suggestion of the not-given, -- rather than form,
the harmony of the given.

Ethos is interesting mainly for the personal observations which it
summarizes and reveals, or for the appeal to one's own actual or
imaginative experience; it is portrait-painting, and enshrines
something we love independently of the charm which at this
moment and in this place it exercises over us. It appeals to our
affections; it does not form them. But the plot is the synthesis of
actions, and is a reproduction of those experiences from which our
notion of men and things is originally derived; for character can
never be observed in the world except as manifested in action.

Indeed, it would be more fundamentally accurate to say that a
character is a symbol and mental abbreviation for a peculiar set of
acts, than to say that acts are a manifestation of character. For the
acts are the data, and the character the inferred principle, and a
principle, in spite of its name, is never more than a description _a
posteriori,_ and a summary of what is subsumed under it. The plot,
moreover, is what gives individuality to the play, and exercises
invention; it is, as Aristotle again says, the most difficult portion of
dramatic art, and that for which practice and training are most
indispensable. And this plot, giving by its nature a certain picture
of human experience, involves and suggests the ethos of its actors.

What