e been the reveries of the common
heart, ennobled into some raving Lear or unabashed Don Quixote. One must
not forget that the death of language, the substitution of phrases as
nearly impersonal as algebra for words and rhythms varying from man to
man, is but a part of the tyranny of impersonal things. I have been
reading through a bundle of German plays, and have found everywhere a
desire not to express hopes and alarms common to every man that ever
came into the world, but politics or social passion, a veiled or open
propaganda. Now it is duelling that has need of reproof; now it is the
ideas of an actress, returning from the free life of the stage, that
must be contrasted with the prejudice of an old-fashioned town; now it
is the hostility of Christianity and Paganism in our own day that is to
find an obscure symbol in a bell thrown from its tower by spirits of the
wood. I compare the work of these dramatists with the greater plays of
their Scandinavian master, and remember that even he, who has made so
many clear-drawn characters, has made us no abundant character, no man
of genius in whom we could believe, and that in him also, even when it
is Emperor and Galilean that are face to face, even the most momentous
figures are subordinate to some tendency, to some movement, to some
inanimate energy, or to some process of thought whose very logic has
changed it into mechanism--always to something other than human life.

We must not measure a young talent, whether we praise or blame, with
that of men who are among the greatest of our time, but we may say of
any talent, following out a definition, that it takes up the tradition
of great drama as it came from the hands of the masters who are
acknowledged by all time, and turns away from a dramatic movement,
which, though it has been served by fine talent, has been imposed upon
us by science, by artificial life, by a passing order.

When the individual life no longer delights in its own energy, when the
body is not made strong and beautiful by the activities of daily life,
when men have no delight in decorating the body, one may be certain that
one lives in a passing order, amid the inventions of a fading vitality.
If Homer were alive to-day, he would only resist, after a deliberate
struggle, the temptation to find his subject not in Helen's beauty,
that every man has desired, nor in the wisdom and endurance of Odysseus
that has been the desire of every woman that has come i