e 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, immemorial
impartiality.

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 and 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 judgment. 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's system of
correspondences. 'The best wine is the oldest, the best water the
newest.'

Water is experience, immediate sensation, and wine is emotion, and it is
with the intellect, as distinguished from imagination, that we enlarge
the bounds of experience and separate it from all but itself, from
illusion, from memory, and create among other things science and good
journalism. Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and
delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions,