utside was beginning to grey when there
came a knocking at the window shutters. Somebody opened the window, and
a woman in evening dress, who was not a little bewildered to find so
many people, was helped down into the room. She had been at a student's
ball unknown to her husband, who was asleep overhead, and had thought to
have crept home unobserved, but for a confederate at the window. All
those talking or dancing men laughed in a dreamy way; and she,
understanding that there was no judgment in the laughter of men that had
no thought but of the spectacle of the world, blushed, laughed and
darted through the room and so upstairs. Alas that the hangman's rope
should be own brother to that Indian happiness that keeps alone, were it
not for some stray cactus, mother of as many dreams, an immemorial
impartiality and simpleness.

THE SUBJECT MATTER OF DRAMA

I read this sentence a few days ago, or one like it, in an obituary of
Ibsen: 'Let nobody again go back to the old ballad material of
Shakespeare, to murders, and ghosts, for what interests us on the stage
is modern experience and the discussion of our interests;' and in
another part of the article Ibsen was blamed because he had written of
suicides and in other ways made use of 'the morbid terror of death.'
Dramatic literature has for a long time been left to the criticism of
journalists, and all these, the old stupid ones and the new clever ones,
have tried to impress upon it their absorption in the life of the
moment, their delight in obvious originality & in obvious logic, their
shrinking from the ancient and insoluble. The writer I have quoted is
much more than a journalist, but he has lived their hurried life, and
instinctively turns to them for judgement. He is not thinking of the
great poets and painters, of the cloud of witnesses, who are there that
we may become, through our understanding of their minds, spectators of
the ages, but of this age. Drama is a means of expression, not a special
subject matter, and the dramatist is as free to choose, where he has a
mind to, as the poet of 'Endymion' or as the painter of Mary Magdalene
at the door of Simon the Pharisee. So far from the discussion of our
interests and the immediate circumstance of our life being the most
moving to the imagination, it is what is old and far off that stirs us
the most deeply. There is a sentence in 'The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell' that is meaningless until we understand Blake'