only too well, and often by sad experience, that the audience of
to-day does not relish certain situations which run counter to its
prejudices and its predilections, however pleasing these same situations
may have been to audiences of the past. The duty of personal vengeance,
for example--which was at the center of the tragedy-of-blood, ever
delightful to Tudor theatergoers--has been disestablished by the advance
of civilization; and it is therefore no longer acceptable as the
dominant motive of a drama of modern life.

There is not a little significance, however, in another of M. Polti's
suggestions--that perhaps a portion of the beauty and power we discern
in the great plays of the Greeks was directly due to the accepted
limitation of the themes which a tragic writer held himself authorized
to treat. The restriction of the number of available legends forced the
successive dramatists of Athens to handle again, each in his turn, the
dark stories already dealt with by his predecessors. The fateful lives
of OEdipus, for example, and of his family, of Agamemnon, and of his
unhappy offspring--these were shown in action in the orchestra of the
theater of Dionysus again and again, by AEschylus, by Sophocles, by
Euripides, and by many another poet-playwright of that splendid epoch
whose works have not descended to us. Of necessity, the dramatist was
nerved to keenest endeavor by the knowledge that his play had to
withstand a comparison with other plays presenting the same characters
in the same situations, and by the certainty that his personal
contribution would stand out sharply. A similar ordeal was undergone by
the great painters of the Italian Renascence, who tried their hands,
almost all of them, on the Madonna with the Holy Child, on the Descent
from the Cross, and on every other of the score of stock subjects then
in favor for the appropriate decoration of altar and alcove and dome.
There is wisdom in M. Brunetiere's assertion that "just as obedience is
the apprenticeship of command, so is imitation the novitiate of
originality."

We may be assured that this narrow limiting of the number of themes
likely to be treated by the painters of Italy and by the playwrights of
Greece at once diminished the demand on them for mere invention and left
them free to put forth the utmost strength of their imagination, so that
the artist could express himself fully and interpret in his own fashion
a subject certain to be handled soo