o awaken that solemn happy
heartache that we feel in looking upon the tumbled ruins of some ancient
temple. We could never quite forget that the buildings of the Court of
Honor were fabrics of frame and stucco sprayed with whitewash, and that the
statues were kneaded out of plaster: they were set there for a year, not
for all time. But there is at Paestum a crumbled Doric temple to Poseidon,
built in ancient days to remind the reverent of that incalculable vastness
that tosses men we know not whither. It stands forlorn in a malarious
marsh, yet eternally within hearing of the unsubservient surge. Many of its
massive stones have tottered to the earth; and irrelevant little birds sing
in nests among the capitals and mock the solemn silence that the Greeks
ordained. But the sacred Intention of Permanence that filled and thrilled
the souls of those old builders stands triumphant over time; and if only a
single devastated column stood to mark their meaning, it would yet be a
greater thing than the entire Court of Honor, built only to commemorate the
passing of a year.

In all the arts except the acted drama, it is easy even for the layman to
distinguish work which is immediate and momentary from work which is
permanent and real. It was the turbulent untutored crowd that clamored
loudest in demanding that the Dewey Arch should be rendered permanent in
marble: it was only the artists and the art-critics who were satisfied by
the monument in its ephemeral state of frame and plaster. But in the drama,
the layman often finds it difficult to distinguish between a piece intended
merely for immediate entertainment and a piece that incorporates the
Intention of Permanence. In particular he almost always fails to
distinguish between what is really a character and what is merely an acting
part. When a dramatist really creates a character, he imagines and projects
a human being so truly conceived and so clearly presented that any average
man would receive the impression of a living person if he were to read in
manuscript the bare lines of the play. But when a playwright merely devises
an acting part, he does nothing more than indicate to a capable actor the
possibility of so comporting himself upon the stage as to convince his
audience of humanity in his performance. From the standpoint of criticism,
the main difficulty is that the actor's art may frequently obscure the
dramatist's lack of art, and _vice versa_, so that a mere acting part