he spectator, more poignant. We learn more about God by
watching the annihilation of an individual by Fate; but we learn more about
Man by watching the annihilation of an individual by himself. Greek tragedy
sends our souls through the invisible; but Elizabethan tragedy answers,
"Thou thyself art Heaven and Hell."

The third type of tragedy is represented by the modern social drama. In
this the individual is displayed in conflict with his environment; and the
drama deals with the mighty war between personal character and social
conditions. The Greek hero struggles with the superhuman; the Elizabethan
hero struggles with himself; the modern hero struggles with the world. Dr.
Stockmann, in Ibsen's _An Enemy of the People_, is perhaps the most
definitive example of the type, although the play in which he appears is
not, strictly speaking, a tragedy. He says that he is the strongest man on
earth because he stands most alone. On the one side are the legions of
society; on the other side a man. This is such stuff as modern plays are
made of.

Thus, whereas the Greeks religiously ascribed the source of all inevitable
doom to divine foreordination, and the Elizabethans poetically ascribed it
to the weaknesses the human soul is heir to, the moderns prefer to ascribe
it scientifically to the dissidence between the individual and his social
environment. With the Greeks the catastrophe of man was decreed by Fate;
with the Elizabethans it was decreed by his own soul; with us it is decreed
by Mrs. Grundy. Heaven and Hell were once enthroned high above Olympus;
then, as with Marlowe's Mephistophilis, they were seated deep in every
individual soul; now at last they have been located in the prim parlor of
the conventional dame next door. Obviously the modern type of tragedy is
inherently less religious than the Greek, since science has as yet induced
no dwelling-place for God. It is also inherently less poetic than the
Elizabethan, since sociological discussion demands the mood of prose.

II

Such being in general the theme and the aspect of the modern social drama,
we may next consider briefly how it came into being. Like a great deal else
in contemporary art, it could not possibly have been engendered before that
tumultuous upheaval of human thought which produced in history the French
Revolution and in literature the resurgence of romance. During the
eighteenth century, both in England and in France, society was considered
param