eem to be
developing into reflection, research, and analysis, the theatre
might stand on the verge of being abandoned as a decaying form, for
the enjoyment of which we lack the requisite conditions. The
prolonged theatrical crisis now prevailing throughout Europe speaks
in favour of such a supposition, as well as the fact that, in the
civilised countries producing the greatest thinkers of the age,
namely, England and Germany, the drama is as dead as are most of
the other fine arts.

In some other countries it has, however, been thought possible to
create a new drama by filling the old forms with the contents of a
new time. But, for one thing, there has not been time for the new
thoughts to become so popularized that the public might grasp the
questions raised; secondly, minds have been so inflamed by party
conflicts that pure and disinterested enjoyment has been excluded
from places where one's innermost feelings are violated and the
tyranny of an applauding or hissing majority is exercised with the
openness for which the theatre gives a chance; and, finally, there
has been no new form devised for the new contents, and the new wine
has burst the old bottles.

In the following drama I have not tried to do anything new--for
that cannot be done--but I have tried to modernize the form in
accordance with the demands which I thought the new men of a new
time might be likely to make on this art. And with such a purpose
in view, I have chosen, or surrendered myself to, a theme that
might well be said to lie outside the partisan strife of the day:
for the problem of social ascendancy or decline, of higher or
lower, of better or worse, of men or women, is, has been, and will
be of lasting interest. In selecting this theme from real life, as
it was related to me a number of years ago, when the incident
impressed me very deeply, I found it suited to a tragedy, because
it can only make us sad to see a fortunately placed individual
perish, and this must be the case in still higher degree when we
see an entire family die out. But perhaps a time will arrive when
we have become so developed, so enlightened, that we can remain
indifferent before the spectacle of life, which now seems so
brutal, so cynical, so heartless; when we have closed up those
lower, unreliable instruments of thought which we call feelings,
and which have been rendered not only superfluous but harmful by
the final growth of our reflective organs.

The fact tha