, nay, to pay them too much honour. One did not fail
to do so; and prodigious was the success of these audacious imitations
which were offered as original works. The material thus to turn to
account was abundant, and indeed inexhaustible.

Unfortunately for the young writers the ancient poets who had been dead
for centuries, Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, had returned to life, a
hundred times more hale and hearty than at the time of Pericles himself;
and this unexpected competition proved a singular thorn in the side of
the new-comers. It was in fact in vain that original geniuses produced
on the stage such sensational novelties as _Athalias, Hernanias,
Macbethes_; the public often turned its back on them to rush off to
performances of _Oedipus Rex_ or the _Birds_ (of Aristophanes). And
_Nanais_, though a vigorous sketch of a novelist of the new school, was
a complete failure owing to the frenzied success of a popular edition of
the Odyssey. The ears of the people were saturated with Alexandrines
classical, romantic, and the rest. They were bored by the childish
tricks of caesura and rhyme which sometimes attempted a see-saw effect by
producing now a poor and now a full rhyme, or again made a pretence of
hiding away and keeping out of sight in order to induce the hearer to
hunt it out. The splendid, untrammelled, and exuberant hexameters of
Homer, the stanzas of Sappho, the iambics of Sophocles, furnished them
with unspeakable pleasure, which did the greatest harm to the music of a
certain Wagner. Music in general fell to the secondary position to which
it really belongs in the hierarchy of the fine arts. To make up for it,
in the midst of this scholarly renaissance of the human spirit, there
arose an occasion for an unexpected literary outburst which allowed
poetry to regain its legitimate rank, that is to say, the foremost. In
fact it never fails to flower again when language takes a new lease of
life, and all the more so when the latter undergoes a complete
metamorphosis, and the pleasure arises of expressing anew the eternal
truisms.

It was not merely a simple means of diversion for the cultured. The
masses took their share in it with enthusiasm. Certainly they now had
leisure to read and appreciate the masterpieces of art. The transmission
of force at a distance by electricity, and its enlistment under a
thousand forms, for instance, in that of cylinders of compressed air,
which could be easily carried from place t