The law lying behind this phenomenon is transparent.  The higher poetry is, the more generic it is.  Its universality is a chief constituent of its excellence.  The drama is the most generically human, and, therefore, the highest of the great forms of poetry.  The epic deals with the material, the outward—­humanity concreted into events; the lyric with the inward, when that is so individual and intense as to gush out in ode or song.  The dramatic is the union of the epic and lyric—­the inward moulding the outward, predominant over the outward while co-working with it.  In the dramatic, the action is more made by the personality; in the epic, the personality is more merged in the strong, full stream of events.  The lyric is the utterance of one-sided, partial (however deep and earnest) feeling, the which must be linked to other feelings to give wholeness to the man and his actions.  The dramatic combines several lyrics with the epic.  Out of humanity and human action it extracts the essence.  It presents men in their completest form, in warm activity, impelled thereto by strongest feelings.  Hence, it must be condensed and compact, and must, for its highest display, get rid of local coloring, personal associations, and all prosaic circumscriptions.  The poetic dramatist needs the highest poetic freedom, and only through this can he attain to that breadth and largeness whereof the superiority of his form admits, and which are such in Shakespeare, that in his greatest plays the whole world seems to be present as spectators and listeners.

Observe that the highest dramatic literatures belong to the two freest peoples—­the Greeks and the English.  A people, possessing already a large political freedom, must be capable of, and must be in the act of, vigorous, rich development, through deep inward passion and faculty, in order that its spirit shall issue in the perennial flowers of the poetic drama.  The dramatic especially implies and demands variety and fullness and elevation of personality; and this is only possible through freedom, the attainment of which freedom implies on its side the innate fertility of nature which results in fullness and elevation.

Now in the subjective elevation of the individual, and therewith the unprecedented relative number of individuals thus elevated, herein do we exceed all other peoples.  By subjective elevation I mean, liberation from the outward, downward pressure of dogmatic prescription, of imperious custom, of blindfolded tradition, of irresponsible authority.  The despotic objectivity of Asia—­where religion is submissiveness, and manhood is crushed by obedience—­has been partially withstood in Europe.  The emancipation therefrom of the Indo-Germanic race is completed in Anglo-America.  Through this manifold emancipation we are to be, in all the high departments of human achievement, preeminently creative, because, while equipped with the best of the past, we are at the same time preeminently subjective; and, therefore, high literature will, with us, necessarily take the lyrical, and especially the dramatic, form.