are too pronouncedly
feeble for our intellect to take any genuine interest in the calamity
that befalls her?

14

The truth is that these supernatural interventions to-day satisfy
neither spectator nor reader. Though he know it not, perhaps, and
strive as he may, it is no longer possible for him to regard them
seriously in the depths of his consciousness. His conception of the
universe is other. He no longer detects the working of a narrow,
determined, obstinate, violent will in the multitude of forces that
strive in him and about him. He knows that the criminal whom he may
meet in actual life has been urged into crime by misfortune, education,
atavism, or by movements of passion which he has himself experienced
and subdued, while recognising that there might have been circumstances
under which their repression would have been a matter of exceeding
difficulty. He will not, it is true, always be able to discover the
cause of these misfortunes or movements of passion; and his endeavour
to account for the injustice of education or heredity will probably be
no less unsuccessful. But, for all that, he will no longer incline to
attribute a particular crime to the wrath of a God, the direct
intervention of hell, or to a series of changeless decrees inscribed in
the book of fate. Why ask of him, then, to accept in a poem an
explanation which he refuses in life? Is the poet's duty not rather to
furnish an explanation loftier, clearer, more widely and profoundly
human than any his reader can find for himself? For, indeed, this
wrath of the gods, intervention of hell, and writing in letters of
fire, are to him no more to-day than so many symbols that have long
ceased to content him. It is time that the poet should realise that
the symbol is legitimate only when it stands for accepted truth, or for
truth which as yet we cannot, or will not, accept; but the symbol is
out of place at a time when it is truth itself that we seek. And,
besides, to merit admission into a really living poem, the symbol
should be at least as great and beautiful as the truth for which it
stands, and should, moreover, precede this truth, and not follow a long
way behind.

15

We see, therefore, how surpassingly difficult it must have become to
introduce great crimes, or cruel, unbridled, tragical passions, into a
modern work, above all if that work be destined for stage presentation;
for the poet will seek in vain for the mysterious e